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I spent the better part of two days watching both sides question Nikolai Ryzhkov, a politician so emotional and prone to personal slights in his time that he was known in the press as “the weeping Bolshevik.” In his days as Gorbachev’s prime minister, Ryzhkov would choke up and splutter if members of the Supreme Soviet dared question his economic plans or his role in a weapons scandal. Unlike Ligachev or Polozkov, who affected the steely toughness of a regional Party boss, Ryzhkov had a touching vulnerability and righteousness that was his last selling point before his popularity vanished completely by late 1990. His memoir, Perestroika: A History of Betrayals, was filled with venom toward Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and Yeltsin.

Uncommonly slender and spry for a Party leader of his seniority, Ryzhkov stood at the witness stand with a studied casualness, his hip cocked, his left hand thrust in his pocket, as he answered the first easy volleys from the Communist side. Then, as Makaraov and Fedotov began to ask questions based on confidential Party documents, he bristled at what his life had come to. He came to attention.

Makarov picked up one bound set of documents after another and seemed to mock Ryzhkov simply with the manner of his question. Makarov was possessed of an elephantine girth and the voice of a field mouse; somehow this queer combination made him seem skeptical, even sarcastic, with no effort at all. He needed only to open his tiny cupid’s mouth.

Respected witness, he would say. Here is a document describing secret arms sales to foreign Communist parties using government monies. Here’s another specifically setting out the plan to cover up the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. Here the Politburo allocates money to “education.” Do political parties usually have educational systems? Respected witness, respected Nikolai Ivanovich, the CPSU supported left-wing parties in capitalist, developed countries. Does that mean we gave succor to capitalist, developed countries? Toward what end?

For a long time Ryzhkov kept his cool and deflected painful questions about the past by saying “that was then” and “the Party was in the process of reform.” “Why did the Party, even after it relinquished its constitutional guarantee of power in 1990, why did it continue to control the government and virtually run public life?” Makarov asked. “Does that indicate to you constitutional, legal behavior?” Finally, Ryzhkov lost his temper. “I protest these questions!” he said. “You are asking me questions as if I were a criminal.… You are trying to paint me into a corner!” Ryzhkov’s self-image, that of the reasonable moderate surrounded by reactionaries like Polozkov and unconscionable radicals like Gorbachev and Yakovlev, began to appear ridiculous. When transcripts were read to him describing how he voted for one pernicious measure after another, his explanations were weak and absurd.

“Many times I spoke out against a measure,” he said, “but when I found myself alone or in the minority, I voted for it.” Chief Justice Zorkin tried to keep the proceedings above emotion and raw political battle, but the effort was doomed. After Makarov had whispered into his microphone the proceedings of yet another Politburo meeting that the Communist Party never imagined would be read aloud, Ryzhkov snapped.

“Secrets are secrets!” he said. “One day soon we’ll realize that. There were always secrets! Try and make an American turn himself inside out for you!” At one point, Makarov swung his bulk in Ryzhkov’s direction and said he “worried” whether the “respected Nikolai Ivanovich” wasn’t tired.

“You don’t have the figure for worrying,” the former prime minister said. “You shouldn’t worry.” “Well,” the lawyer huffed, “at least I don’t cry.”

One night after a long court session, I accepted an invitation from Shakhrai’s team to follow them out to their “work dacha” at a government compound in the village of Arkhangelskoye. The compound was one of the Russian government’s many spoils of victory. Although most former members of the Communist Party leadership were still living lives of relative splendor even as they pled poverty in court and on television, most of the booty—the vacation homes, the resorts, the limousines—were now in the hands of the state. Yeltsin made his name by mocking the privileges of the Party powerful, but he was now doing a fairly good imitation of Louis XIV. Gorbachev’s old arrangement of a cortege of three Zil limousines did not suffice; Yeltsin traveled in a fleet of three or four Mercedes-Benz sedans.

A high gate, a surveillance camera, and an armed guard marked the entrance to the compound. Shakhrai himself was in Austria that day—“buying himself a dacha in Salzburg, no doubt,” one of the Party lawyers had cracked—and Fedotov and Makarov had a long night ahead of them to prepare for the next witness, Yegor Ligachev. They seemed unfazed by their twenty-hour workdays. Fedotov, whose reddish beard and bald pate earned him the nickname “Lenin” among his friends, had grown up in what he called “dissident circles.” In the early 1960s, he attended public readings at Pushkin Square and Mayakovsky Square of banned poetry; for his trouble, he was expelled for a while from university. Fedotov was now the Russian government’s minister of “intellectual property,” presiding over the country’s copyright bureaucracy.

If Fedotov was the earnest intellectual of the team, Makarov was its rogue. In 1984, he defended the Soviet president of a Soviet-Swiss bank that went mysteriously bankrupt. “Americans killed the bank, the CIA,” Makarov said without malice. “Nine members of the Politburo testified in the case, and so anything I learn now about the Party comes as no surprise.” In 1988, Makarov defended Brezhnev’s son-in-law Yuri Churbanov. After his marriage to Brezhnev’s daughter, Churbanov won a high-ranking post in the Interior Ministry police, a job he rather quickly exploited for its bribe-taking possibilities. On a trip to Uzbekistan, he accepted a suitcase stuffed with a few hundred thousand rubles. Makarov won high marks for his defense, but there was not much he could do for a son-in-law who was on trial as much for his relation to a family in disgrace as for his hunger for gold.

Fedotov led the way into dacha No. 6—the same cabin where Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s advisers had tried to hammer out the abandoned 500 Days economic package in 1990. While dinner was being prepared, Makarov and Fedotov led me to a small study. A desk was stacked high with folders, many of them red and marked “Materials of the Politburo.” “We have to meet for a while,” Makarov said. “Why don’t you sit down and help yourself.” The hors d’oeuvres he offered were several short stacks of some of the most closely guarded secrets of the 1970s and 1980s in the Soviet Union.

“We’ve gotten about eighty thousand documents,” Fedotov said. “Now there’s only around forty million more to go.” “Oh, before we leave you with these things, you might want to hear our performance of the Politburo meeting of August 29, 1985,” Makarov said.

The two men began laughing with the anticipation of it, and like an old radio team—Bob and Ray coming to you live from dacha No. 6!—they read their script from one of the documents marked “Top Secret, Sole Copy.” Makarov read Gorbachev’s lines, giving a fair approximation of Gorbachev’s southern accent and grammatical flubs, and Fedotov read the remaining parts. The document was even more fascinating than its bizarre performance.

At that session, the members of the Politburo discussed their strategy options regarding Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, who were still living in forced internal exile in the closed city of Gorky (its name has since been changed back to the original, Nizhni Novgorod).

Gorbachev says the Politburo has received letters from the Sakharovs and from elsewhere asking that Bonner be allowed to go abroad for medical treatment.

Viktor Chebrikov, chief of the KGB, dominates the discussion and informs the other members of the Politburo that Sakharov “is not in excellent health and now is receiving an oncological exam because he is losing weight.” He fails to mention that Sakharov’s weight loss was due to a hunger strike which led the KGB to attempt to cram a tube down his throat and feed him.

Another participant, Mikhail Zimyanin, warns that “no decency can be expected of Bonner. She is a beast in a skirt who was appointed by imperialism.” They are clearly worried that Bonner, half Jewish and half Armenian, will plead the case for emigration and human rights while in the West. Chebrikov cautions that if they allow Bonner to go to the West for treatment “she may make statements and get awards.… But it would look like an act of humanism.… Sakharov’s behavior is under the huge influence of Bonner and he is always subject to that.…” Gorbachev: “Well, that’s what Zionism is!”

Makarov and Fedotov collapsed in laughter.

Later on, over a dinner of broiled chicken and rice, Fedotov said that the two of them had spent hours reading the documents and had been alternately stunned and amused at the banality of the Politburo sessions. Makarov said he hoped that the theaters of Moscow would soon stage the old sessions of the Politburo using the transcripts as scripts.

“When we read these absurd documents we laugh ourselves all the way to the floor,” Fedotov said. “But that is only when we are not crushed and despondent. Recently I read a Central Committee document from 1937 that said that the Voronezh secret police, according to the ‘regional plan,’ repressed in the ‘first category’ nine thousand people—which means these people were executed. And for no reason, of course. Twenty-nine thousand were repressed in the ‘second category’—meaning they were sent to labor camps. The local first secretary, however, writes that there are still more Trotskyites and kulaks who remain ‘unrepressed.’ He was saying that the plan was fulfilled but the plan was not enough! And so he asked that it be increased by eight thousand. Stalin writes back: ‘No, increase by nine thousand!’ The sickness of it! It’s as if they were playing poker.” “It’s true,” Makarov said. “Later, we read a document from Marshal Tukhachevsky giving instructions to his men saying if you meet a person on the street and he fails to identify himself immediately … shoot him! This is 1921, not the Stalin era. See, the thing to remember about the documents is not the sensations they provide. It’s their routineness, their banality, the way these very ordinary directives ordered the life of the country.” After dinner, I sat at the desk once more leafing through documents that recorded those banalities and, until now, were considered “eyes only”: KGB analyses of a school of writers in 1970 known as SMOG; a list of Western correspondents and dissidents at a rally at Pushkin Square on December 5, 1975; copies of private letters sent by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and intercepted by the KGB; a KGB dossier on the creation in Krasnodar at School No. 3 of an eighth-grade “Club for the Struggle for Democracy”; a September 1986 Politburo meeting at which the KGB chief, Chebrikov, says that while political prisoners are being released, “they will be watched … in connection with prophylactic work”; an analysis by Brezhnev’s ideologist Mikhail Suslov of Sakharov’s first set of underground essays (“To read this is to become nauseated”).

The minutes of a July 12, 1984, Politburo session revealed a truly nauseating spectacle: the leaders of the Party still defending Stalin against Khrushchev’s revisionism. At the meeting, the members listen to a report on how Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, was “overwhelmed with joy” at the Politburo’s decision to restore him to the Party ranks. Molotov had been expelled during Khrushchev’s “thaw.” “And let me tell you,” says Marshal Dmitri Ustinov, the head of the armed forces. “If it hadn’t been for Khrushchev, they never would have been expelled and there never would have been these outrageous actions regarding Stalin.… Not a single one of our enemies has inflicted so much misfortune on us as Khrushchev did regarding his policies and his attitude toward Stalin.” Gorbachev, who knew well at the time that he would have to get the support of the conservatives to win the top job once Chernenko finally died, plays a marvelous game, saying that he would support the restoration to Party ranks of Molotov’s cohorts, Lazar Kaganovich and Georgi Malenkov. (“Yes, these are elderly people,” the Leningrad Party boss, Grigori Romanov, chimes in. “They may die.”) But Gorbachev also knows the value of discretion. As for the Molotov rehabilitation, he says, “I think we can do without publicity.” Ustinov gets so excited by this little neo-Stalinist wave that he says, “And in connection with the fortieth anniversary of our victory in the Great Patriotic War, shouldn’t we rename Volgograd back to Stalingrad?” “Well,” Gorbachev says, “there are pluses and minuses to this.”

Even after Chernenko’s death and his own assumption of power, Gorbachev offered bones for his reactionary colleagues to gnaw on. At a March 20, 1986, Politburo meeting he suggests changing the name of the icebreaker Arktika to Brezhnev.

“Yes, let’s do it,” Ryzhkov says, “but don’t announce it on television.” Finally, I lingered over a document that Sovietologists have been waiting to see for years: the transcript of the March 11, 1985, Politburo meeting at which Gorbachev was made general secretary. For years there had been speculation that it was a close vote, that the chief of the Moscow Party organization, the hard-liner Viktor Grishin, challenged Gorbachev, and had it not been for the absence of one or two conservative voters, Grishin might have won. Former Politburo members Geidar Aliyev, Yegor Ligachev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Grishin himself, in a brief phone conversation before his death, told me that it was untrue, that the vote was unanimous. But that was never good enough for Sovietology.

Gorbachev opens the fateful meeting with the announcement of Chernenko’s death, and Yevgeny Chazov, the minister of health, gives a detailed description of Chernenko’s illnesses and final hours. Then, in a move that stunned some of the conservatives, Andrei Gromyko, a top official under every Soviet leader since Stalin, stands up at his place at the table and nominates Gorbachev. First, he provides some ritual words of praise for Chernenko’s “historical optimism” and the general “rightness of our theory and practice.” And then, in nominating Gorbachev, the baby of the Politburo, Gromyko pays tribute to his man’s “indomitable creative energy” and his “attention to people.” “When we look into the future—and for many of us this is hard—we have no right to let the world see a single fissure in our relations,” Gromyko says. “There is more than enough speculation on this abroad.” For his part, Viktor Grishin says, “When we heard yesterday about the death of Konstantin Ustinovich, we predetermined to some extent this issue [of the new leadership] when we arranged to approve Mikhail Sergeyevich chairman of the funeral commission.” Clearly, Grishin, who had worked with one party ideologist, Richard Kosolapov, to devise a program for his own election, could not have been thrilled that the behind-the-scenes maneuvering had left him powerless and Gorbachev head of the committee in charge of Chernenko’s funeral and, now, general secretary. But he did not challenge Gorbachev, and, instead, sings his praises just as loudly as the rest. During Chernenko’s illness, Gorbachev had proved a superior politician and Grishin must now swallow his ambition.

Finally, Gorbachev gets up to speak. His performance, even on the page, is worthy of Machiavelli’s demands for a would-be prince. “Our economy needs more dynamism. This dynamism is needed for the development of our foreign policy,” he says. “I take all your words with a sense of tremendous excitement and emotion. It is with this sense that I am listening to you, my dear friends.

“We do not need to change policy. It is correct and it is true. It is genuine Leninist politics. We need, however, to speed up, to move forward, to disclose shortcomings and overcome them and realize our shining future.… I assure you I will do everything to justify the trust of the Party.” Then he announces a plenum of the Central Committee in a half hour at which the leadership question will be “resolved.” Thus was the last general secretary of the Communist Party elected—with, as the old newspapers would add in parentheses, “prolonged and thunderous applause.” The morning after my trip to Arkhangelskoye, I went to court to hear the testimony of Yegor Ligachev, once the second most powerful man in the country. In power, “he was like a locomotive,” Ryzhkov recalled, and he certainly looked fit now. Ligachev had just published a memoir titled Zagadka Gorbacheva (“The Enigma of Gorbachev”), in which he laid out the conservative case against the last general secretary. Gorbachev, he wrote, “began well” with a gradualist program, but then fell victim to international acclaim, vanity, and the duplicity of the “extremists” in his midst. And instead of reforming the system, Gorbachev started on the road to “antisocialist” thinking. As he had in his memoirs, Ligachev tried in his testimony to portray himself as the last honest man victimized by endless conspiracies to destroy him and the socialist state. He was never an “opponent of perestroika,” as he had been portrayed in the press in Russia and abroad, but merely an advocate of gradual change.

The Communist lawyers wanted Ligachev to feel comfortable and lobbed him a few easy leading questions to fuel his soliloquy. The government lawyers were not nearly so accommodating. For their part, they insisted on knowing Ligachev’s reaction to a raft of Politburo and Central Committee decisions during his years in power. Once more, Makarov read through the documents: Respected Yegor Kuzmich, he would say, what of this document dated November 1, 1989, in which the Politburo approves the funding for the construction of a rec room for the Afghan leader and his family? And what of this document that you drew up dictating to the press the rules for the coverage of the war in Afghanistan? “There will be not more than one report of a death or wound per month among Soviet servicemen.” And what of this document in which the Politburo approves of the creation of a news bureau for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Canada and stipulates that the resident correspondent be an officer of the KGB?

“What of it?” Ligachev said. “This is a practice broadly implemented by other countries.” And what of the Politburo decision to create a special military unit of the KGB manned by people “infinitely loyal to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the socialist Motherland”? Isn’t it curious that the Party, which had allegedly relinquished the one-party system, could still dictate such a policy to a government ministry?

“Well, I am sure there was no ill will intended,” Ligachev said.

And what of this document, esteemed Yegor Kuzmich, a Politburo session on March 24, 1987, at which the members agree that permissions given for business trips abroad must be tightened up because, as they say, “we regret that only professional competence is being taken into account and not political concerns”?

“What’s wrong with that?” he answered. “That just means that we were not indifferent to how people behaved abroad—moral factors included.” Finally, after a long day at the witness’s lectern, Ligachev began to show flashes of why he was feared by the hundreds of men and women working in the Central Committee apparatus. For years he had been the one asking the tough questions, not answering them, and now he, like Ryzhkov, snapped.

“Look,” he said, “if we’d taken decisive measures at the beginning, this country would not be on fire as it is today! This war is not only close to Russia, it is entering our own homes. It is here!… Mikhail Sergeyevich took decisions only when every last citizen in the country knew they were necessary, when every last apple had ripened and fallen from the tree!” After a few days of watching the testimony at the Constitutional Court, I found it remarkable that there was hardly any interest at all among the public. The spectators’ gallery was nearly empty. Some days there were no more than five or six journalists around. Nearly all the regulars—the true court buffs—were themselves dinosaurs of the Communist Party.

For nearly everyone else, the struggles and pleasures of the present were of far greater concern, for Moscow now, little more than a year after the coup, had become a phantasmagoria, a post-Communist world as painted by Hieronymus Bosch. Younger Muscovites, especially, seemed determined to rush headlong into some weird, pleasurable, vulgar world of primitive capitalism. In a leap typical of all Russian history, the new economy had bounded from one stage of development to the next, gliding quickly from complete deficit to sensual indulgence, never stopping to solve the mundane problems of subsistence, structure, and property. In the subway stations and the kiosks, you could buy a lace tablecloth, a bottle of Curaçao, Wrigley’s spearmint gum, Mars bars, a Public Enemy tape, Swiss chocolate, plastic “marital toys,” a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament, American cigarettes, and Estonian pornography.

In the alleyways and restaurants, Moscow was beginning to look like the set of Once Upon a Time in America. As the old Communist Party mafia structures withered, more conventional ones took their place. The city was awash with twenty-five-year-old men wearing slick suits and black shirts and announcing their occupation as “a little buying, a little selling.” Their molls dressed in spandex and fox. A kiosk owner’s failure to pay his weekly protection money usually left him with a kiosk reduced to sticks and broken glass.

As hyperinflation drove the ruble into irrelevance, a system of financial apartheid arrived. The dollar, suffering everywhere else, was supreme in Russia. Every day more foreign business executives arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport, toting their briefcases like pickaxes and pans, hoping to find the new Klondike. In the meantime, they were also the new colonials, hiring servants and snapping up Russian antiques for a song. In the House on the Embankment, the swank home of the nomenklatura a half century ago, the former apartment of Stalin’s chief executioner was now occupied by the top executive of McDonald’s.

There was no nostalgia or reverence for the old dogma. At the biggest bookstore in the city, the House of Books, I saw a weary sales clerk using a stack of the collected works of V. I. Lenin as a stool while she handed out copies of the latest editions of Agatha Christie and Arthur Hailey. Moscow had become a city of disorientation, so much so that you could easily take a wrong turn into the nineteenth century. A former journalist named Vadim Dormidontov sat in an office at Moscow City Hall and decided which streets and neighborhoods would lose their Soviet-era names and regain their old ones. Lenin Hills was Sparrow Hills once more. The residents of Ustinov Boulevard now lived again on Autumn Boulevard.

While nearly everyone tried to get his bearings in this strange new world, Yeltsin struggled with a hard-line opposition more than willing to exploit the collapse of the economy for its political gain. The coalition of conservatives was often known as the “red and browns,” the alliance of former Communist Party bosses and ultranationalists, even neofascists. For Yeltsin, the trial was a critical front in the battle to stave off the reactionaries. “The so-called red and brown forces are advancing,” he said on the eve of the trial. “I would say that today Russia’s destiny depends on the Constitutional Court rather than on the president.… Any support for the Communists may play into their hands and promote their destructive activity, which may push us into a civil war.” In Moscow now, hardly any politician dared refer to himself as a “democrat,” for fear of appearing too Western, too liberal, incompetent. Some of the leaders of the radical reform movement tried to broaden their political appeal by playing, however cautiously, the nationalist card. Sergei Stankevich, the young adviser to Yeltsin, had begun his political career in 1989 as a radical democrat and now referred to himself as a “statist democrat.” He wanted a little nationalist shading to broaden his political base. Yeltsin, too, had to emphasize his “national feeling,” making fast friends with the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church and refusing to make a deal with the Japanese on the Kuril Islands. Yeltsin realized that it was hard for Russians to lose all the time—lose territory, power, influence—and count it as victory.

But the radical right was not impressed with Yeltsin’s guile. He was considered the chief culprit in the fracturing of the Soviet state and the fragmentation of Russia itself. The historian Yuri Afanasyev, a deputy now in the Russian parliament, told me he thought the Russian scene was one of dangerous flux. “The old system will never regain its shape, but all kinds of possibilities exist for the future of Russia,” he said. “We could look like South Korea, or, say, Latin America with a taint of Sicily. It is a far from sure thing that we will resemble the developed Western democracies. The pull of the state sector, the authoritarian tug, is still a very dangerous thing. Fascism, in the form of national socialism, is a major threat. And it is finding supporters not only in the lunatic fringe, but in the alleged center. The Russian consciousness has always been flawed by a yearning for expansion and a fear of contraction. Unfortunately the history of Russia is the history of growth. This is a powerful image in the Russian soul, the idea of breadth as wealth, the more the better. But the truth is that such expansion has always depleted Russian power and wealth. Berdyaev was right when he said that Russia was always crippled by its expanse.” To some degree, the Communist Party’s myth-making machinery had been replaced by Russian nostalgia for a prerevolutionary utopia that never was. Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1992 film The Russia We Lost portrayed the last czar—previously considered a dolt and a weakling in Communist propaganda—as a man of great learning, military skill, and compassion. Lenin is a “slit-eyed” fanatic with “pathological obsessions” and, naturally, Jewish forebears. Gorvorukhin told the newspaper Megapolis-Express that were there to be another putsch he would not rush to the White House to defend the popularly elected government as he had during the August coup. “Following a totalitarian regime,” he said, “a sea of democracy and freedom is a safe road to fascism.” His credo now was the famous declaration of the czarist reformer Pyotr Stolypin to the Russian Duma: “You want great upheavals, but what we need is a great Russia.” Although there were only a half-dozen people in the Moskva Theater when I went to see The Russia We Lost, and while the opinion polls did not indicate a great public longing for an overthrow of the Yeltsin government, Moscow seemed filled with demagogues who would be czar. The first to appear on the scene was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an unabashed neofascist who won six million votes—almost 8 percent of the electorate—in June 1991 when he ran against Yeltsin and four other candidates for the Russian presidency. Just after the coup, I watched Zhirinovsky at a parliamentary session at the Kremlin deliver two hour-long monologues to clumps of fascinated deputies in the corridors. He rambled on, picking up so much speed as he described his imperial ambitions that he showered his listeners, and the television cameras, with little sprays of spit: “I’ll start by squeezing the Baltics and other small nations. I don’t care if they are recognized by the UN. I’m not going to invade them or anything. I’ll bury radioactive waste along the Lithuanian border and put up powerful fans and blow the stuff across the border at night. I’ll turn the fans off during the day. They’ll all get radiation sickness. They’ll die of it. When they either die out or get down on their knees, I’ll stop it. I’m a dictator. What I’m going to do is bad, but it’ll be good for Russia. The Slavs are going to get anything they want if I’m elected.

“I will send troops to Afghanistan again, and this time they’ll win.… I will restore the foreign policy of the czars.… I won’t make Russians fight. I’ll make Uzbeks and Tajiks do the fighting. Russian officers will just give the orders. Like Napoleon. ‘Uzbeks, forward to Kabul!’ And when the Uzbeks are all dead, it’ll be ‘Tajiks, forward to Kabul!’ The Bashkirs can go to Mongolia, where there’s TB and syphilis. The other republics will be Russia’s kitchen garden. Russia will be the brains.

“I say it quite plainly: when I come to power, there will be a dictatorship. I will beat the Americans in space. I will surround the planet with our space stations so that they’ll be scared of our space weapons. I don’t care if they call me a fascist or a Nazi. Workers in Leningrad told me, ‘Even if you wear five swastikas, we’ll vote for you all the same. You promise a clear plan.’ There’s nothing like fear to make people work better. The stick, not the carrot. I’ll do it all without tanks on the streets. Those who have to be arrested will be arrested quietly at night. I may have to shoot one hundred thousand people, but the other three hundred million will live peacefully. I have the right to shoot these hundred thousand. I have this right as president.” Despite his surprisingly strong showing in the last Russian presidential race, the vast majority of people believed Zhirinovsky was either mad, an agent of the secret police, or both. But he was not alone in his extremism. Aleksandr Sterligov, a former KGB colonel who promised the “iron hand,” was only the latest in a collection of would-be dictators who were hoping the public would grow so disenchanted with the Yeltsin government that it would turn to them.

One afternoon on my trip in the fall of 1992, I visited the grungy editorial offices of Dyen, the newspaper that was now one of the leading voices of the hard-right coalition. Just weeks before the August coup, Dyen published the infamous “Word to the People,” the front-page appeal for a military seizure of power. I met with the author of the appeal and the editor of the paper, Aleksandr Prokhanov, and his deputy, Vladimir Bondarenko. Bondarenko told me he had just returned from the United States, a trip, he said, that was sponsored, in part, by David Duke, the former Nazi and Ku Klux Klansman.

“Perhaps Duke’s views are a bit extreme,” Bondarenko allowed. “I suppose my views are better compared to those of your Patrick Buchanan.” We talked a long time about the coup, and here, too, the conservatives spoke of the putsch as a shadow play, something that was not what it seemed.

“When people heard about the putsch, most of them said, ‘Finally, at last, they are doing what they have to do,’ ” Bondarenko said. “They did not believe in terror, but they wanted elementary order, the sort of order that states have everywhere. But the leaders of the coup were so stupid. They are to be condemned not because they pulled off a coup, but because they did it so stupidly.” Prokhanov, a performance artist of the right wing, made Bondarenko seem almost rational. “You did it!” he said, pointing at me as the representative American. “You did it! And how do I know? I have friends at Langley, at the State Department, and at the Rand Institute. The general concept was yours—the CIA’s. I am sure of it. The process was regulated and designed by your people. The so-called leaders of the coup were pushed forward and then betrayed. They were left to be torn to pieces by the public opinion. They were so stupid to have believed Gorbachev.

“In this whole drama, only the CIA was smart. They alone knew that the Soviet Union would fall apart under the concept of republican sovereignty—an idea they planted in the Baltics and then elsewhere. Do you think East Germany fell apart on its own? Do you think Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and finally the Soviet Union fell apart on their own? The plan of struggle against the Soviet Union has existed ever since World War II.” Prokhanov said he was “elated” on the first morning of the coup and “disgusted” when it collapsed three days later. But he said he was sure that his time would come again. “After a year in which the government has lost trust and the democrats are in a state of collapse, the patriots from the left and the right will come together and the war will continue. And it will be, I assure you, an anti-American movement. There are three ways we can come to power—and we will use any means to do it. First, we can do it in parliament. Second, there can be a split within the government and the liberals lose the support of the army, the new KGB, and there is a gradual drift to the right. Or we can do it through extra-governmental means: strikes, demonstrations, general chaos. In any case, the Yeltsin people should not relax.” The trial shoved ahead. Interest dwindled even further. “Society is sick of history,” Arseny Roginsky, of the Memorial historical society, told me. “It is too much with us. For people trying to cope with crazy inflation and adjusting to a new economy in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it’s a natural psychological situation. People do have some sense that their current troubles are tied to the history of the Party, but it is not always easy to step back and see that.” The only aspect of the trial of the Communist Party that was grabbing any space in the newspapers and on the evening news was the question of Mikhail Gorbachev’s refusal to testify. Chief Justice Zorkin insisted from the start that Gorbachev’s testimony, as general secretary of the party from March 1985 until August 1991, was essential. In Zorkin’s summons, however, Gorbachev saw only the invisible hand of Boris Yeltsin and another attempt to humiliate him. The two men had been playing out their opera of rivalry and unconscious cooperation for so long that Muscovites had wearied of it. As part of his “retirement package,” Gorbachev got from Yeltsin a dacha, bodyguards, a pension, and a fine piece of real estate—the former Party institute on Leningrad Prospekt. Gorbachev, for his part, said he would use the institute as a base for research, not political opposition. But détente, such as it was, collapsed quickly. Gorbachev began accusing Yeltsin of running a government not dissimilar to “an insane asylum,” and Yeltsin’s aides began chipping away at Gorbachev’s retirement deal, first taking away his limousine and replacing it with a more modest sedan, then threatening worse. “Soon,” one newspaper cracked, “Mikhail Sergeyevich will be going to work on a bicycle.” During the trial, I went to see Gorbachev at his institute, hoping to talk about many things besides the furor over his refusal to testify. There was no chance of that. He had already been fined 100 rubles by the court—around 30 cents at the time—and he knew well that more sanctions were on the way. After he greeted me, he plopped himself down into an armchair, saying with false cheer, “They are running around like mad. They all got into this shit and they don’t know what to do now.” Gorbachev was furious, obsessed. I asked a question and he finished his answer forty minutes later, an answer that was part set piece, part harangue. I had spent many hours while living in Moscow listening to Gorbachev at press conferences, summits, interviews, meetings, and he was never one for concision. But now, he seemed at times like Lear raging about plots against his underappreciated self. He truly believed that the court’s summons amounted to political persecution of the most heinous sort.

“Even Stalin’s sick mind could not have dreamed up anything like this!” Gorbachev said. “To rule that eighteen million Communists be deprived of their citizenship and swept away! Not just simply to deprive them, but sweep them away with a broom. And with their families, we are talking about fifty to seventy million people. Only a lunatic would do this. If you call yourselves democrats, prove it with your deeds. Gorbachev had enough courage always to tell the truth to everyone and endure the pressure. I’ve got plenty of courage and even now I will not yield.

“What is this, a Constitutional Court? There is no court in the world that can judge history! It is up to history proper to judge history. Historians, scholars, and so on.… Will the court go all the way back to the October Revolution, to the Bolsheviks, or even earlier? Will they anathematize it all? Is this the business of the Constitutional Court? Let’s analyze what Lenin did to take power. Does this mean that all the countries that cooperated with Soviet Russia, and all the agreements that were made, do they all go … pffffft?… Is it all rubbish? Unconstitutional? God knows what this all is! You don’t have to be too bright to understand what this process is likely to lead to.” Somewhere along the way I managed to ask Gorbachev if he kept in contact with Yeltsin any longer. Gorbachev frowned. He was being ignored. This seemed to him worse than any sanction of the court.

“He never calls me,” Gorbachev said. “I called him several times at first, but from his side there has never been a call. Boris Nikolayevich knows everything! We have no relations. What kind of personal relations can there be when his press secretary publishes a statement saying that they will take measures against Gorbachev, that they will put him in his place? What relations can there be? This is ruled out.

“The democrats have failed to use their power. Look at how they struggled for power and how much they promised. There were even statements that the Russian president would lay himself down across the railroad tracks if living standards went down. Well, now they’ve gone down fifty percent! The tracks must be occupied.

“They have to tell the people how they are going to get through the winter, what there will be to eat, whether there will be any heat, and what will happen to reforms. And they have no answer. They don’t know what to say. They need to play for time and they need to find a lightning rod. It’s amazing—Yeltsin’s team, the Constitutional Court, and the fundamentalists who defended against the August coup are all in this struggle together against Gorbachev. This is phenomenal!” I left Gorbachev’s office thinking that everything about him was outsize: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness. At one point in his monologue he even passed on a rumor that at the tensest moments of the coup, Yeltsin had been making plans to hide in the American embassy. This was hard, if not impossible, to believe. For all of Yeltsin’s shortcomings, it was his courage that won the day in August of 1991. Gorbachev, in suggesting otherwise—especially in such a dark and clumsy way—revealed the depths of his bitterness. He had loved his place in the world—a place he had earned despite all the mistakes—and now, it seemed, it was slipping away, almost gone. He was despised in his own country.

Feeling a little stunned, I left Gorbachev and headed down a flight of stairs to visit the man who had been his closest friend and ally in the leadership, Aleksandr Yakovlev. I told Yakovlev what I had just heard, and he rolled his eyes in amusement and frustration. Yakovlev had always betrayed a certain intellectual condescension for Gorbachev, but he also appreciated his political gifts, his complexity.

I told Yakovlev I had finally seen the transcript of the historic March 11, 1985, Politburo meeting and I was a little surprised that things had gone so easily for Gorbachev. Why had there been no opposition? And had Gorbachev been deceiving the conservatives? Why had they made him general secretary if they knew he would try to change the system?

“There was a preliminary agreement,” Yakovlev said. “Everything was agreed on beforehand. Everything was clear. Grishin’s entourage prepared a speech, a program for him. Richard Kosolapov, the editor of Kommunist, was very active on Grishin’s behalf. But that was just in case. In fact, there were no other candidates for this position. Once Gorbachev was made chairman of the funeral commission for Chernenko’s funeral on March 10, everything was clear.

“But about deception. This was really a question of the inertia of the Communist Party. Every new general secretary got carte blanche at the beginning. A new man would come to the fore and he was supported. You know, let him talk about innovations, about something new, it has to be tolerated, and then he will calm down and everything will go back to normal. Let him talk about democracy and pluralism, but sooner or later we’ll all be back together harnessed to the same horsecart. That happened with every newcomer: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov. And the same destiny was expected of Gorbachev.

“Gorbachev played politics, but he also realized that things had to change. It was impossible to go on living as we were. But when he started changing things, the system resisted those reforms. These changes were hindered by the simple logic of the state. And whether he wanted to or not, Gorbachev had to deal with these contradictions. Like Gorbachev, at the beginning, I believed that in our country, only a revolution from above was possible.

“Even now Gorbachev talks about our ‘socialist choice.’ … But we cannot speak of a socialist choice in this country. Our experience, our ‘choice,’ is not socialist and never was. We had a slave system here. Who can talk about a socialist choice? Maybe Germany, or Israel, or Spain. But not us.… But Gorbachev could not overcome his mentality. In general, this power, the concept of power, acts like a poison on a person.” During my talk with Gorbachev, his press aide, Aleksandr Likhotal, had slipped him a note. Gorbachev went silent, read the note quickly, darkened with what seemed to be anger, composed himself, and then picked up the long string of his monologue. I didn’t think much of it then. But later that evening, as I watched the evening news show Vesti, I realized what the note must have said: for his refusal to appear in court, he was being deprived of his right to travel abroad. He had a trip planned to South Korea and there were more on the schedule. That was a cruel and clever blow. Gorbachev was endlessly applauded abroad; he was treated as one of the great figures of the century. In Moscow, he was punished, mocked, and ignored.

Three days later, the Russian government announced it would take back most of the building it had given Gorbachev as part of his resignation package. On a cool, gray morning, three buses filled with Moscow police officers pulled up to the institute. The police chief, Arkady Murashev, ordered his men to surround the building.

Just minutes later, Gorbachev arrived, in a rage. The press gathered around him on the front steps of the building. “You don’t know the pressure that my family and I have endured in the past seven years!” he told the reporters. “But personal matters are not the thing. They are trying to put Gorbachev in his place! The Russian press speculates that Gorbachev is traveling the world looking for a vacation house! There’s the rumor that my daughter is in Germany and her husband is to join her there. Or America. And now that he has a daughter settled, Gorbachev is looking for a warm place for himself. Well, they’d be very happy if Gorbachev left the country. They’d probably pay a million for it. But I’m not leaving.…” A few miles away, the Constitutional Court heard its next witness. The tired men of the Communist Party protested their innocence. How could we have been what you charge? they seemed to say. Just look at us. We are plain. We are ordinary. We are nobody now.

A few weeks later, the Constitutional Court of Russia ruled that Communists were free to meet on a local level but the Communist Party, as a national entity, was illegal. The Party’s assets and properties remained under the control of the elected government of the Russian Federation. The era that had begun in 1917 with the Bolshevik coup had now ended—in a court of law.