The Gorbachev Files: Secret Papers Reveal Truth Behind Soviet Collapse

Aug. 13, 2011 — -- Communist hardliners staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev 20 years ago, and the Soviet Union collapsed soon afterwards. Previously unknown documents, which SPIEGEL has obtained, show just how desperate the last Soviet leader was as he fought to retain power -- and how he begged Germany for money to save his country.

There is one moment -- a single decision -- that some people still hold against Mikhail Gorbachev today, 20 years later.

Gorbachev, the last leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and last president of the Soviet Union, his wife and his closest confidants had survived the attempted coup by the KGB, the military leadership and the interior minister. They returned to Moscow from their house arrest at Gorbachev's vacation home in the Crimean resort of Foros. Their plane landed in the capital at 2:15 a.m., local time, on Aug. 22, 1991.

For the last three days, some 60,000 people had been holding out in front of the Russian White House, the parliamentary seat of the Russian Soviet Republic, which had become the bastion of Gorbachev's supporters. When they heard on the radio that he had been released from house arrest on the Crimean Peninsula, they cheered and chanted "President, President," and waited for an appearance by the then 60-year-old Gorbachev.

But Gorbachev, who was only released because the leaders of the coup had become afraid of their own people and did not venture to storm the White House, shocked his jubilant fellow Russians. Instead of asking to be taken from the airport directly to his supporters, and instead of savoring the moment of victory and celebrating the defeat of the plotters, he ordered his driver to take him out to his dacha. He spent the rest of the night at home, and drove to work at the Kremlin the next morning.

By today's standards, it was a PR gaffe beyond compare. But the three days of house arrest on the Crimean Peninsula didn't just confuse the country, it also upset Gorbachev's inner balance -- and especially that of his wife, Raisa Maximovna Gorbachova.

Erasing the Past

Gorbachev's wife had paid the highest price for those three days. She was forced to lie down on the flight to Moscow. She had hematomas in her eyes, her speech was impaired and she felt paralyzed on one side of her body. Doctors diagnosed a stroke, which was later found to have been a severe attack of hypertension.

The stress of those days, when the Soviet Union was coming to an end after almost 69 years in existence, was too much for the Gorbachevs to handle. It was not the Kremlin chief but his former protege Boris Yeltsin who was now shining as the new political star in Moscow. Immediately after the coup, Yeltsin banned all activities of the Soviet Communist Party, of which Gorbachev had been the general secretary until then. And because the secession movement among the non-Russian Soviet republics was continuing, Gorbachev became a president without a state. Soon the only remaining core republic of the Soviet Union would be Russia, which Gorbachev no longer had control over.

Raisa Gorbachova spent those post-coup days on the veranda of the president's dacha. It was on one of those days that she erased a part of her past, by burning 52 letters her husband had written to her while on official trips. They were "letters from our youth," as Gorbachev would later say, letters his wife had kept her entire life. But following her experiences in Foros, she had become fearful, including of those who would be in power in the future. She wept as she threw the carefully preserved letters into the oven, telling her husband that she wanted to prevent outsiders from peering into their lives.

Gorbachev, who was equally in the dark as to what would happen to his family and the country in the coming weeks, and who respected his wife's opinions, followed her lead and began burning other documents.

He tossed 25 notebooks into the flames. They included notes he had made while in office, details of everyday political life, descriptions of politicians and various plans. The only notebook he kept was his private diary. Almost 20 years would pass before he spoke of the incident again, in a February 2011 interview with Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper he publishes.

Archive Contains Thousands of Documents

The official papers from his almost six years in office were preserved. Gorbachev took them with him when he announced his resignation as the Soviet president at the end of the year, and donated them to the foundation that bears his name. Since then, about 10,000 documents have been in storage at the foundation's headquarters on Leningrad Prospect 39 in Moscow. They include the personal archives of his foreign policy advisers, Vadim Zagladin and Anatoly Chernyaev.

The papers illustrate the end period of the communist experiment. They include the minutes of negotiations with foreign leaders, the handwritten recommendations of advisers to Gorbachev, speaker's notes for telephone conversations and recordings of those conversations, confidential notes by ambassadors and shorthand records of debates in the politburo.

None of the issues with which the self-proclaimed reformer of the Soviet Union was confronted in those years has been left out.

There are memorandums in which the Soviet leader is advised on how to end the war in Afghanistan or how to deal with Jews seeking to emigrate, or explaining to him why he should refuse to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ("nothing real to be expected from him") or why he should avoid putting Mathias Rust, a young German aviator who had illegally landed a light aircraft near Red Square, on trial and receive him in the Kremlin instead ("there are questions as to his psychological state").

There are reports from informers within the East German Communist Party leadership, describing how bad conditions were in East Germany and detailing who could still be depended upon in the East Berlin politburo. And there are equally meticulous reports on what the French magazine Paris Match wrote about Raisa Gorbachova or what the Russian singer Alla Pugacheva told a German magazine about Gorbachev's perestroika policy.

Inefficient Bureaucracy

Reading the documents feels like stepping back in time. All at once, they reveal the many problems of the calcified system, where farmers and miners alike were rebelling and intellectuals were demanding democratic elections. The people of the Baltic states, the Georgians and the Moldovans were revolting against the Russians, while the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine -- the Soviet Union foreign policy that countries could not leave the Warsaw Pact -- was looming in Eastern Europe.

Gorbachev, who had once been a provincial official in Stavropol, stood at the helm of this country, watching it suffocate as a result of its sheer size and the refusal of its bureaucracy to change course. The documents also show that even under Gorbachev, the bureaucracy was as inefficient as ever.

Gorbachev's aide Anatoly Chernyaev, for example, complains about incompetent leaders in the global communist movement, like French Communist Party leader Georges Marchais ("a dead horse") and Gus Hall, the chairman of the Communist Party USA ("a philistine with plebeian conceits"). Nevertheless, Moscow was still paying millions to support its representatives around the world.

At this time, shops in the Soviet Union had run out of eggs and sugar, and even vodka was in short supply. Conditions were so bad that, in September 1988, Chernyaev had to submit a written request to get a telephone connection in the apartment of his driver Nikolai Nikolayevich Maikov, so that the general secretary could reach him.

SPIEGEL is also mentioned repeatedly in the internal documents in the Gorbachev archive. For example, a June 1987 memo reveals that Chernyaev was clearly upset about 54 questions SPIEGEL journalists had sent to the Kremlin leader, which he characterized as "rather insolent." He suspected that SPIEGEL intended to conduct an interview it had requested with Gorbachev "as an interrogation." In the memo, Chernyaev writes that the Kremlin should "of course not react" to this request. The request is stamped "return with denial." As it happened, the interview did not take place. Now, 24 years later, it is clear why.

Still Taboo

Gorbachev later used some of the documents in his books, much to the chagrin of the current Kremlin leadership. But many of the papers are still taboo to this day. This is partly because they relate to decisions or people that Gorbachev is still unwilling to talk about. But most of all it is because they do not fit into the image that Gorbachev painted of himself, namely that of a reformer pressing ahead with determination, gradually reshaping his enormous country in accordance with his ideas.