Dear Mikhail Sergeyevich,
I know you must be feeling very sad and hope that my heartfelt letter may help just a little with the burden you bear.
There was a time at the very beginning of Perestroika when it seemed to me that you were loved by the entire Soviet people. I was so pleased and excited when you were in France. I rejoiced together with the people of the United States, thousands of whom wanted to shake your hand. I was so proud of you!
There were, though, other times when I was hurt and ashamed. More than that, I was outraged when that massacre took place in Baku, when unarmed people were killed in Tbilisi, Vilnius, and so on.
You bore part of the blame for all those disasters.
I was baffled when you vacillated to the right, then to the left. After 10 years I have come to understand what you were afraid of. From your position up there you could see more than I could.
When you were taken captive in Foros, I was so worried for you. I think today that if it had not been for that accursed ‘State Emergency Committee’ we would have moved, even if only very slowly, towards democracy, and there might never have been the slaughter in Chechnya or the tragedy in Tajikistan, but history cannot be written in the subjunctive mood.
What happened, happened.
I felt sorry for you, but you were eclipsed by a new hero, Yeltsin. Standing on that tank outside the White House, he was the personification of the victory of democracy over totalitarianism. Again the people (and I with them) exulted.
Reproaches rained down on you, both from the democrats and the communists. Everything was Gorbachev’s fault.
I never forgot, though, that it was you who made a speech at the United Nations that ended the Cold War and prevented a third, nuclear, world war. I am certain that a grateful mankind will never forget that.
I follow closely what you are doing now, and know you are doing it not for yourself but for the sake of Russia, for democracy, for all mankind. You are now carrying a heavy cross on the road to your Calvary, and once again I so admire you.…
With respect, faith and hope,
I have no regrets about participating in the 1996 election.
Discrediting elections
Yeltsin’s supporters were far from sure he would be victorious in the second round. Disagreements worsened within his team, as a result of which financial machinations surfaced, like the notorious ‘case of the Xerox box’, when it eventually came to light that both the rival factions within his team were carting illicit cash round the regions in boxes, bags and backpacks, and not forgetting to stuff their own pockets in the process. There had never been such discreditable election tactics before, and all for the sake of keeping an increasingly dysfunctional individual in the Kremlin!
None of those in the president’s entourage contemplated for an instant the option of giving up power. Among the options they did consider was cancelling the second round. They made no secret of it. Before the election, Yeltsin’s security chief, Alexander Korzhakov, publicly touted the idea of cancelling it entirely in order to ‘maintain public order’. They decided to go ahead with the second round only after they got the better of Alexander Lebed who, from inexperience, failed to realize they would dump him just as soon as they no longer needed him. I publicly warned him that throwing in his lot with either Yeltsin or the Communists would compromise him politically.
I had no doubt that the second round of the election would see all the irregularities that had marred the first part, only to an enhanced degree. The election, which fell far short of the international standards for fair elections (the West was curiously silent about this very obvious fact) demonstrated that Yeltsin had not gained the support of a majority of Russians.
Personally, I voted in the second round against both candidates (there was such an option at the time, but it has since been removed). It was my protest against the no-choice election. Millions of voters did the same, or refused to turn out for the second round. A poll conducted after the election revealed that 45 per cent of those who voted for Yeltsin did so not because they supported him, but because they did not want Zyuganov to be president.
In the interval between the first and second rounds of voting, Yeltsin was taken to hospital with a heart attack, but this was concealed from the electorate. On the day of the second vote he could not make it even to his local polling station, and voted in the Barvikha sanatorium. It reminded me of the occasion when the terminally ill Konstantin Chernenko voted in a ward at the Kremlin Hospital, which had been hastily disguised to look like an office. Yeltsin appeared in public only on the day of his re-inauguration. The ceremony was curtailed.
Immediately after the election, those who had managed and financed Yeltsin’s electoral campaign were appointed to the highest offices in the land. Anatoly Chubais became head of the Presidential Administration, Boris Berezovsky was appointed deputy secretary of the Security Council and Vladimir Potanin got the post of deputy prime minister. Yeltsin had heart surgery, and was unable to return to his presidential duties until six months later, at the beginning of 1997.
Commenting on the election after the results of the second round were announced, I said in an interview for Interfax that they showed a rift in Russian society that could only be overcome by a change of course and radically realigning reforms to benefit the great majority of Russians. While confrontation lasted, we had no prospect of clambering out of the crisis.
In my opinion, the current president of Russia and his entourage will be committing a serious error if, in the aftermath of the election, they get carried away and trumpet a glorious victory. There are already signs of that.
Boris Yeltsin’s re-election for a second term by no means signifies that a majority of citizens approve of his political approach. At least half of those who voted for Yeltsin on 3 July did so only because they wanted to avoid letting the Communists back into power. They are not at all in raptures over what has happened to Russia during the past five years, including the events of autumn 1993, the war in Chechnya, rampant criminality and the huge social cost of the reforms.
Frankly, I doubt that Yeltsin will prove capable of drawing the proper conclusions, because that would demand too much courage. He would have to admit to major miscalculations in the strategy of implementing reform, his own shortcomings as a leader and the need for a fundamental change of course.
Regrettably, the ruling ‘elite’ drew their own conclusions from the 1996 election, and decided they could hoodwink tens of millions of people and blithely carry on with a parasitical course destructive for society and Russia. The result of their victory was that, only two years down the line, the regime, and with it the country’s economy, faced bankruptcy.
In an interview published in Novaya Gazeta, I talked with the paper’s editor, Dmitry Muratov, about what people could do who found the current situation unacceptable:
DM: A large segment of the intelligentsia have ceased to be in opposition and the media have largely compromised their reputation. Is it possible in Russia now to move beyond ‘sullen dissidence’ to civilized opposition? If so, who do you think represents it?