Abroad, Gorbachev realized that he could not reform the state while engaged in ferocious competition with America. He proposed the phasing out of all nuclear weapons by 2000: in October 1986, he and Reagan met in Reykjavik and almost abolished nuclear weapons. The two got on well, though their wives disliked each other. Later Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would withdraw troops from eastern Europe, embracing not world revolution but ‘all-human values’. The Americans were unsure if this was real or just window dressing, but Reagan kept up the pressure. When he visited the Berlin Wall he said, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’
At home, Yeltsin trailblazed through Moscow, walking to work or taking the Metro, visiting cafés, shops and factories, handing out watches – his devoted bodyguard Korzhakov kept spares in his pocket. Gorbachev sneered at this self-promotion; Yeltsin found the general secretary ‘patronizing’. In January 1987, he criticized Gorbachev for being over-optimistic about perestroika; Gorbachev shot back at Yeltsin’s ‘loud, empty, ultra-leftist words’.
‘I’m still new in the Politburo,’ said Yeltsin apologetically. ‘This is a good lesson for me.’
‘You’re an emotional man,’ warned Gorbachev. At home Communist diehards resisted the reforms. Yeltsin pushed for more, admitting that he had begun ‘to abuse sedatives and become enamoured of alcohol’. In September 1987, when conservatives reprimanded Yeltsin for allowing small demonstrations, he suddenly resigned from the Politburo. ‘Wait, Boris,’ said Gorbachev, ‘don’t fly off the handle.’ But in October Yeltsin attacked Gorbachev at the Central Committee. Infuriated, Gorbachev denounced his ‘immaturity’ and ‘illiteracy’ – ‘You couldn’t tell God’s gift from an omelette!’ Gorbachev now hated him: ‘He wants to be the popular hero.’ Yeltsin drank and fell into wild depression, cutting his chest and stomach with scissors. ‘What a bastard!’ sneered Gorbachev. ‘He bloodied his own room.’ He had Yeltsin hospitalized, then forced him to face ritual denunciations. Yeltsin never forgave this ‘immoral, inhuman’ treatment. Accompanied only by Korzhakov, who resigned from the KGB to support him, Yeltsin retired to a sanatorium. ‘I looked inside,’ said Yeltsin, ‘there was no one there. I was only nominally alive.’
The KGB asked Gorbachev if he wanted something to happen to Yeltsin. Gorbachev declined the offer.
In February 1988, Gorbachev’s reforms loosened Moscow’s control over the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union that were never designed to become independent. In Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, Christian Armenians fought Islamic Azeris who then slaughtered thousands of Armenians. Georgians, seized by Lenin after a short independence, craved freedom. In the north, the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians – Nordic and Germanic peoples, not Slavs, who had been forcibly annexed by Stalin after twenty years of independence – started to campaign. The best way for them to win independence was to win it for all the fifteen republics created by Lenin and Stalin. Some, like Georgia, were ancient nations, others were Soviet inventions that had never existed before. Russia was the largest, followed by Ukraine, which, apart from the many regimes of the civil war, had been ruled variously by Russia since 1654, the 1780s and 1945. Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks had originally been ruled by ancient khanates, but Kazakhstan and the other four ‘stans’ of central Asia were Soviet inventions carved out of Romanov provinces. Before it was White Russia, Belarus had belonged to Lithuania.
As Gorbachev relaxed the Soviet hold over his client-states, he was also trying to negotiate a compromise exit from Afghanistan, where he installed a subtler ex-secret-police chief, Najibullah, to create a government of reconciliation, but conciliation was impossible in the midst of retreat. In May 1988, the Soviet army withdrew unilaterally and Najibullah’s regime started to wilt. A peaceful retreat was afoot in Europe: in December, Gorbachev started to withdraw 500,000 troops from his European vassals, promising ‘freedom of choice’. No empire lasts without the threat of violence.
Gorbachev was now a funambulist attempting not just one tightrope walk but four simultaneously – economic reform, challenging the Party, defending the Union and sustaining Soviet world power. In May 1989, he presided over the first elected Congress, which chose a ruling Supreme Soviet with him as its chairman. At the height of his fame and confidence, an increasingly autocratic Gorbachev hoped to guide reform as an omnipotent parliamentary speaker, but in fact this ponderous, often verbose apparatchik immediately struggled to control diehard Communists, republican nationalists and liberal intelligentsia. Worse, he lost the menacing mystique of a Stalinist general secretary; Moscow lost its power over its vassals. His humane aversion to violence was both his greatness and his tragedy for it doomed his achievements to failure. ‘They don’t know that if they pull strongly on the leash,’ he said, ‘it would snap.’ But the Poles, who had lost their ancient independence, were the first to test the leash. Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, asked Gorbachev what would happen. ‘Everyone,’ came the reply, ‘answers for themselves.’
Across Europe, in the brittle vassal-states from East Germany to Hungary, crowds demonstrated for freedom. Within the Union, Georgia and Lithuania pushed for independence. Yeltsin, on a visit to America, got publicly drunk but was astonished by the plenty in American supermarkets. On his way home, he questioned Bolshevism. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘have they done to our poor people?’
While Gorbachev was attempting to manage all these shocks, Deng Xiaoping was watching in amazement from Beijing, where he demonstrated that there was another way. Deng was tougher, more blood-soaked, more cautious than the naive Gorbachev. The economy could be liberated, but Little Cannon knew power rested on the gun. Lose the gun, lose everything. Gorbachev, said Deng, ‘is an idiot’.
In May 1989, Gorbachev’s arrival in Beijing embarrassed Deng, who was losing control of his own capital. Almost a million protesters, most of them students, were camped in Tiananmen Square, gathered around a huge papier-mâché statue, the Lady of Liberty, demanding democracy as the leadership agonized about what to do. The eighty-five-year-old Deng was still chairman of the Central Military Commission, but he was semi-retired, having handed over to chosen successors who had failed to restrain widening protests against corruption and nepotism. In April, after anti-reformers had ordered that Deng’s ally Hu Yaobang be fired, Hu died of a heart attack, sparking pro-democracy protests at his funeral. A Deng protégé, the general secretary Zhao Ziyang, went to talk to the students. After Gorbachev had left, on 17 May, Deng, convening the Party grandees nicknamed the Eight Immortals in Zhongnanhai, said he feared that ‘Their goal is to establish a totally western-dependent bourgeois republic,’ and warned, ‘There’s no way to back down now without the situation spiralling out of control.’ Little Cannon reached for his gun: troops were massed; Zhao spoke to the protesters in tears and was promptly dismissed by Deng. The Eight Immortals – all men except Zhou Enlai’s widow, Deng Yingchao – voted to crush the rebels.
On 2 June, Deng commanded that ‘order be restored to the capital … No person may impede the advance of the troops.’ The soldiers ‘can act in self-defence and use any means to clear impediments’. The ‘impediments’ were the students, who had built barricades. The army retook the streets. A soldier was killed, stripped naked and suspended from a bus, but then the army started firing. One student stood in front of a column of tanks, halted them and climbed on to the turret to denounce the soldiers. Hundreds were killed.