Gorbachev and Yeltsin's political confrontation

Gorbachev and Yeltsin's political confrontation was a contest over whether the Soviet system could be reformed from within or had to be dismantled, and over who could claim to speak for the country. Gorbachev held the Party's highest authority but hesitated as its power ebbed; Yeltsin built a rival legitimacy through direct election and resistance to the August 1991 coup. Their conflict ended in a public, carefully staged humiliation of Gorbachev, as Yeltsin directed him to sign the suspension of the Russian Communist Party.

Reform and competing legitimacy

The division was already apparent in the argument between Gorbachev and Andrei Sakharov. Gorbachev insisted that the immediate task was to reform the Party; Sakharov answered that a normal political system required its abolition. As demands became more radical, Gorbachev struggled to respond. He hedged between positions, at times appearing to take himself for a pope and at others for Luther, and in the narrator's account ended up hated by both democrats and conservatives.

The democrats had initially admired Gorbachev, especially the largely urban, young, intellectual constituency that hoped he would carry change forward. Their support diminished when he no longer seemed willing to advance it. At the May Day parade on Red Square in 1990, demonstrators jeered at him and demanded that the Party—and Gorbachev with it—be scrapped. The scene expressed the contradiction of his position: people could openly insult the leader who had helped make such public dissent possible, while concluding that his reforms had stopped short of the change they wanted.

Yeltsin's authority came from a different source. Gorbachev's mandate as general secretary came from the Party; Yeltsin had just been elected president of Russia by direct suffrage. Gorbachev treated him with disdain as a so-called democrat, but that response only enhanced Yeltsin's stature. Their rivalry was therefore not simply a disagreement between two leaders. It set Party authority against an electoral mandate, and a cautious effort to preserve and alter the existing system against a figure increasingly associated with breaking from it.

Vilnius and the erosion of Gorbachev's position

In January 1991, while the world's attention was fixed on the First Gulf War, Russian tanks entered Vilnius. They met major resistance and withdrew, leaving around fifteen people dead. The intervention, remembered as Black Sunday, profoundly discredited Gorbachev among democrats. The episode made it harder for him to present humane socialism as a credible answer to political coercion.

Gorbachev claimed that he had not been informed about the intervention. That denial left the public with an unsettling choice: regard him as a liar or as a leader so isolated that military action could happen without his knowledge. Army movements and border clashes continued without his apparent control, sometimes timed to embarrass him in front of Western leaders. Yet, the narrator observes, Gorbachev appeared to smile more in photographs as these provocations mounted. He continued to act as though his authority derived from the Party, while Yeltsin's directly elected position gave him a visibly different claim to power.

Warnings from within Gorbachev's circle sharpened the contrast. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze resigned, publicly warning that dictatorship was approaching. Alexander Yakovlev, though he did not resign, hinted to journalists that he might be sent to Siberia and tried to alert Gorbachev to sedition in the Politburo. Gorbachev dismissed his concern, assuring him that the people involved were merely stubborn and that everything was under control. His failure to grasp the danger left Yeltsin better placed to present himself as the defender of a political order Gorbachev could no longer reliably direct.

The August coup and the Moscow White House

During the August 1991 coup, the contrast between the two men became a contest over action. Yeltsin organized resistance from the Moscow White House, the seat of parliament. The building became the center of a public defense of Russia's emerging freedom: Muscovites erected barricades, and soldiers received encouragement to remain on the side of the law and the state rather than obey the coup plotters. Yeltsin's position was made unmistakable in the widely circulated photograph of him standing on a tank outside the building. Crowds protected the White House with their bodies; soldiers' rifles received flowers and their crews kisses as the tanks withdrew.

Gorbachev, by contrast, was cut off in Crimea during the coup. The account presents his return as almost farcical: he came back absurdly tanned and apparently unaware of what had happened. The crisis registered, it suggests, partly through the inconvenience he and his family had endured in a villa from which they had been isolated. Yeltsin's public resistance had made him the visible actor of the crisis, while Gorbachev returned to a political landscape transformed in his absence.

The decisive reversal came at a parliamentary session on August 23, broadcast around the world. Yeltsin first made Gorbachev read, in an unsteady voice, the minutes of the council meeting in which ministers appointed by Gorbachev had resolved to betray him. He then raised a decree for Gorbachev to sign. When Gorbachev objected that he had not read it and that they had not discussed it, Yeltsin told him to sign anyway. The decree suspended the activities of the Communist Party of Russia. Gorbachev signed. The scene turned their long-running conflict into an image of reversed command: the Party's leader remained in office, but Yeltsin controlled the moment and the decision.

Unequal interpretations and the aftermath

The book describes sharply different judgments of the men, especially in France and Russia. In France, Gorbachev was often treated as a hero and Yeltsin as a brutal, ill-mannered ruffian whose role in the coup had seemed ambiguous. Yeltsin's populist language and later conduct led some observers to wonder whether he might become a dictator. His act of saving Gorbachev's position during the coup did not prevent him from publicly rubbing in the defeat afterward; the parliamentary signing scene made that tension visible.

The narrator's mother, in contrast, shared the view of the Russian majority as the book presents it. She saw Gorbachev as a Party apparatchik overwhelmed by forces he had unwillingly set in motion, and Yeltsin as the embodiment of the people's demand for freedom. Yeltsin had followed Sakharov's coffin beside Yelena Bonner, defended the Moscow White House, and outlawed the Party that had constrained its citizens. In two years, the account argues, he had become a major historical figure. That judgment does not settle whether he would build a democracy, a market economy, or a new society; it marks the scale of the expectations attached to his victory.

The political transfer led into a project that differed markedly from Gorbachev's attempt to reform the Party. Aware of his limited economic knowledge, Yeltsin turned to Yegor Gaidar, an ardent advocate of liberalism, and their government launched shock therapy. Price liberalization produced inflation of 2,600 percent. Vouchers worth ten thousand rubles were mailed to citizens beginning in September 1992 as a means of distributing shares in national wealth, but inflation had so eroded their value that recipients could find them worth little more than a bottle of vodka. This was not a continuation of the two men's direct confrontation; it was part of the new political and economic order that followed Yeltsin's ascendancy, and a reminder that the victory over Party rule did not itself resolve the country's future.

In the narrator's account, Gorbachev's personal fate was comparatively lenient for a deposed ruler: he was to receive a dacha, a foundation, and the right to give highly paid lectures. His political defeat, however, was more consequential than that comfortable retirement suggests. The relationship's final image is not a negotiated settlement between equals but Gorbachev signing the decree at Yeltsin's direction. One man had held the formal office; the other had become the effective agent of its undoing.