Read Online Moscow, December 25th, 1991 by Conor O'Clery - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Conor O'Clery
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all the briefcase holders are killed in an attack, officers of the general staff have codes to launch counterstrikes on their own initiative.
Andrey Grachev notes that besides the two colonels, the normally bustling anteroom is strangely empty. Not a single visitor is present, other than the Americans from ABC television. The appointments diary is blank.
Gorbachev’s English-language interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, finds the Kremlin corridors “hushed, even more quiet than usual” as he arrives and walks along the corridor to his cubicle-sized office filled with dictionaries. The interpreter, whose bald head and moustache are often seen over Gorbachev’s shoulder at international gatherings, senses an air of inevitability about what is happening in the Kremlin, where he has never felt at home since Gorbachev moved his presidential staff here from party headquarters in Old Square some months ago.
Palazchenko also senses something hostile in the building. It is as if, he feels, “the environment itself is trying to eject us.”
CHAPTER 5
THE STORMING OF MOSCOW
Less than a year after he took office, Mikhail Gorbachev summoned Communist Party leaders from all over the Soviet Union to a great congress in the Kremlin. As Moscow city boss, Boris Yeltsin saw to it that the streets of the capital were decorated with red banners for the occasion.
The day of the conference, February 25, 1986, was clear and bitterly cold, with the temperature hovering around zero. Inside the conference hall the new general secretary got a warm reception from the 5,000 delegates. They expected much from the dynamic new leader after the stagnation of the previous two decades.
At this, the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, Gorbachev launched his ambitious reform program to revitalize the Soviet economy. He called it perestroika, or restructuring. Its aim was to renew Soviet-style socialism through greater freedom for initiative and to liberalize society through glasnost, or openness.
Gorbachev had worked on his speech to the congress for several days at his holiday dacha in Pitsunda, with the help of his close collaborator, Alexander Yakovlev. A heavy-jowled, balding man in his late sixties, with large plasticrimmed glasses and his left knee stiff from a war wound, Yakovlev provided much of the intellectual drive for perestroika. Gorbachev had met him in May 1983, when he visited Canada, where Yakovlev was semi-exiled as Soviet ambassador after speaking out against Russian chauvinism.
In fact perestroika could be traced back to a long and frank discussion Gorbachev and Yakovlev held in the backyard of a farm in Amherstburg, Ontario. 1 The ambassador told him there how the Canadian system was superior because openness and democracy acted as a check on corruption. Yakovlev so impressed Gorbachev as a liberal but loyal party theoretician that he had him brought back to Moscow and made a candidate member of the Politburo. Behind the scenes the former ambassador urged his comrade to think dangerous thoughts, like splitting the party in two, holding elections, and lifting censorship on the press.
Raisa listened to the discussions that day in Pitsunda and participated, chiding them for ignoring the plight of women and the family in Soviet society.
When he took the podium at the congress, Gorbachev lectured the delegates on the need to combat corruption and inertia. He promised that with perestroika, living conditions would improve and consumer goods would become more available. He spoke of “new thinking” in international relations, meaning noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs, and said that Moscow must turn away from the policy of military confrontation with the West. He made it clear that everything that was not forbidden by law was to be allowed, reversing the unwritten rule that everything not expressly allowed was prohibited.
He also called a halt to the party habit of delivering panegyrics to the general secretary and
Andrey Grachev notes that besides the two colonels, the normally bustling anteroom is strangely empty. Not a single visitor is present, other than the Americans from ABC television. The appointments diary is blank.
Gorbachev’s English-language interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, finds the Kremlin corridors “hushed, even more quiet than usual” as he arrives and walks along the corridor to his cubicle-sized office filled with dictionaries. The interpreter, whose bald head and moustache are often seen over Gorbachev’s shoulder at international gatherings, senses an air of inevitability about what is happening in the Kremlin, where he has never felt at home since Gorbachev moved his presidential staff here from party headquarters in Old Square some months ago.
Palazchenko also senses something hostile in the building. It is as if, he feels, “the environment itself is trying to eject us.”
CHAPTER 5
THE STORMING OF MOSCOW
Less than a year after he took office, Mikhail Gorbachev summoned Communist Party leaders from all over the Soviet Union to a great congress in the Kremlin. As Moscow city boss, Boris Yeltsin saw to it that the streets of the capital were decorated with red banners for the occasion.
The day of the conference, February 25, 1986, was clear and bitterly cold, with the temperature hovering around zero. Inside the conference hall the new general secretary got a warm reception from the 5,000 delegates. They expected much from the dynamic new leader after the stagnation of the previous two decades.
At this, the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, Gorbachev launched his ambitious reform program to revitalize the Soviet economy. He called it perestroika, or restructuring. Its aim was to renew Soviet-style socialism through greater freedom for initiative and to liberalize society through glasnost, or openness.
Gorbachev had worked on his speech to the congress for several days at his holiday dacha in Pitsunda, with the help of his close collaborator, Alexander Yakovlev. A heavy-jowled, balding man in his late sixties, with large plasticrimmed glasses and his left knee stiff from a war wound, Yakovlev provided much of the intellectual drive for perestroika. Gorbachev had met him in May 1983, when he visited Canada, where Yakovlev was semi-exiled as Soviet ambassador after speaking out against Russian chauvinism.
In fact perestroika could be traced back to a long and frank discussion Gorbachev and Yakovlev held in the backyard of a farm in Amherstburg, Ontario. 1 The ambassador told him there how the Canadian system was superior because openness and democracy acted as a check on corruption. Yakovlev so impressed Gorbachev as a liberal but loyal party theoretician that he had him brought back to Moscow and made a candidate member of the Politburo. Behind the scenes the former ambassador urged his comrade to think dangerous thoughts, like splitting the party in two, holding elections, and lifting censorship on the press.
Raisa listened to the discussions that day in Pitsunda and participated, chiding them for ignoring the plight of women and the family in Soviet society.
When he took the podium at the congress, Gorbachev lectured the delegates on the need to combat corruption and inertia. He promised that with perestroika, living conditions would improve and consumer goods would become more available. He spoke of “new thinking” in international relations, meaning noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs, and said that Moscow must turn away from the policy of military confrontation with the West. He made it clear that everything that was not forbidden by law was to be allowed, reversing the unwritten rule that everything not expressly allowed was prohibited.
He also called a halt to the party habit of delivering panegyrics to the general secretary and
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