A VERY PERSONAL POLITICAL FEUD
Anne McElvoy investigates the mood
of Mikhail Gorbachev, as Boris Yeltsin exacts his revenge
Moscow MIKHAIL Gorbachev listened patiently to my halting Russian, rendered even less comprehensible by a heavy cold brought on by the plunging temperature of a Moscow October. He dallied in the grandiose hall of his institute — two days later President Boris Yeltsin would sur- round the building with police and confis- cate it for as yet unspecified reasons — to lambast his successor as 'intolerant', and the constitutional court investigating the Communist Party he led as 'a cynical instrument of the mighty'. As I snuffled out a supplementary ques- tion, he laid a comforting hand on my arm and said, 'Young lady, you're not well. Go to bed with some tea and vodka.' I thought it intriguing to be advised to drown my germs in Stolichnaya by the man who at the height of his power did what no tsar or dictator had dared: tried to stop Russians downing the stuff. His attempt to enforce temperance failed: an early adumbration of his later failure to save the Communist Party, the Soviet Union and a job for him- self. Now Mr Gorbachev is reduced to strutting and fretting on the international stage in search of the sympathy which no one feels towards him at home.
Foreigners like Gorbachev a lot better than Russians, and these days he is more at ease with Westerners than with his com- patriots. So he presents an altogether nicer face to us than to his own countrymen. The man who listened so courteously to my bad Russian and expressed concern for my well-being, at a press conference the next day described the constitutional court's investigation into the legality of the Communist Party as 'a shitty trial'. I thought the Russian correspondents assembled were going to faint. Swearing, no matter how mild, is still virtually unknown in public life here, a hangover from the attenuated prudery of Soviet life.
Such is Mr Gorbachev's embitterment at the 'ingratitude' of the Russian people, at the attempts to make him testify at the trial of the Communist Party, that he appears to have begun to dislike his own People, which has the unsurprising effect of increasing their hostility to him. What keeps him in Russia at all is a mystery, apart perhaps from a determination not to delight the Yeltsin government by disap- pearing to America or Germany for good.
Not that he has been short of escape routes, until recently. He has been to America this year, to Berlin twice in a month, and plans to return for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. With Raisa in tow, he should have been enjoying the agreeable climate of Italy this weekend on a trip to meet the Pope and President Scalfaro and receive the laurels of Italy's oldest univer- sities. Instead, he is languishing in cold, wet Moscow like the rest of us, having been forbidden by Yeltsin to extend his trip to Germany for the funeral of Willy Brandt last Saturday. He wouldn't have got there either had it not been for the ministrations of the German government who have added Gorbachev to their list of heroes with roughly the same ranking as Luther and Adenauer. Quite understand- ably too, as it was he who gave them unifi- cation without a struggle and at the relatively low price of some aid and a clutch of favourable bilateral treaties.
Even Boris Yeltsin does not mess with Germany, which he regards as a piggy- bank to be rattled to the benefit of Russia now and then. The Italians not being quite so rich, the Russian government had no qualms about offending them by issuing Mikhail Sergeyivich with an exit visa valid only for Germany. It was not a nice thing to do, but then, as Boris would point out, the then President Gorbachev showed him precious little mercy in 1987 when he hounded him from office as secretary of the Moscow Communist Party. Revenge is sweet, and, in Russia it tends to be savoured over several years.
Quite how sorry we should feel for Gor- bachev is a complicated matter. He lost power in a coup whicli, even if he did not accept it, was made possible by his lack of courage in not removing hardliners from his inner circle. His refusal since to co- operate with the proceedings concerned with the legality of the Communist Party has been hysterical and has served his pur- pose of keeping himself in the range of the West's cameras and pressmen. He is a vain man, still hungry for power, and does not see that his time is over. Tellingly, he refers to himself in the third person.
This week's suggestion that Gorbachev will be able to give his evidence in camera will not please the majority of Russians, who think that he is overrated and privi- leged enough as it is. Gorbachev is, after all, the only former communist notable for not having taken the stand.
Even Gorbachev's once powerful adviser on Germany, Valentin Falin, appeared on Friday on condition that he was allowed free passage to leave again on Monday, despite being under investigation for cor- ruption. Falin's case was supported by a group of liberal Hamburg notables who are giving him financial aid and easing him into their city's dinner-party set. They include the prominent Social Democrat, Egon Bahr, and the publisher of Die Zeit, Mari- on, Countess DOnhoff. These same people are also leading players in the international 'Stop Hounding Gorby' campaign. It is a matter for their judgment whether the Soviet Union's former ruling elite are fit candidates for such charitable efforts. But disgraced communists appear to be the chic new cause to support at the better soirees in Hamburg and Bonn.
There is someone else on Gorbachev's side. That man, perversely, is Boris Yeltsin. For the Russian leader who clearly had his rival on the run is now making the tactical error of overdoing his revenge. In the last fortnight he has confiscated the Gorbachev Foundation's building, impounding the computers and insisting that its head use the tradesman's entrance. He has meddled mercilessly with his travel plans. And now he has accused him of withholding infor- mation on the truth behind the massacre of 21,000 officers at Katyn in 1940. True, Gor- bachev could have announced the Soviet guilt before he did so in April 1991. But the tone of the Russian government's announcement, which gloated over the fact that 'the internationally respected Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev long ago knew of this tragedy', was deeply unpleasant in its use of dead men's bones to sustain a very personal political feud.
Anne McElvoy is the Times's bureau chief in Moscow.
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