The World

‘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’.