My trip to New York and Camp David was not a happy experience.
I told the bankers and businessmen we have done everything Gorbachev refused to do-free markets, supply and demand, Polish shock therapy. And did they come forward with investment? Did the central banks come up with a way to help me stabilize the ruble? No.
I told Bush, who at last asks me to call him George, we would make arms reductions that would destroy all missiles in the republics outside Russia, as he wants. And did he welcome my appeal for a joint space defense against terrorist nuclear missiles, getting the Red Army marshals out of my anteroom? No.
I told the United Nations we have not one prisoner of conscience left in Russia, the greatest triumph of freedom in the world, and the big news is Bush`s meeting with Li Peng, which forgives him for Tiananmen Square.
I am in Paris now, but I hear that back in Moscow, demonstrations have been banned in Red Square because they were tying up traffic and we couldn`t afford the police.
I am beset from three sides:
The lunatics who call themselves national patriots have started their nashi movement behind Zhirinovsky, our mini-Hitler, whose first act as dictator would be to invade the Baltics. I can use him to scare the West, but the television star Nevzorov, the brains behind him, must be watched.
The nomenklatura, the bureaucrats out of jobs, neo-Communists, the Soyuz group and some of the disloyal generals are putting together a coalition behind Aleksandr Rutskoi, who may be sick, and the man I gave 20 bodyguards and a dacha-Mikhail Sergeyevich himself-along with Yakovlev and his other hangers-on.
And what of my ardent supporters, the liberal intelligentsia? They are panicking, saying now that a union treaty would have been better than the new commonwealth, wailing about the further disintegration of the Russian republic.
(Of course, when I listened to Rutskoi and sent our Russian troops into Chechen-Ingushetia to put down the separatists, the liberals howled and made me stop. The intelligentsia want the impossible: democracy and unity, free markets and cheap food.)
The only people left on my side are the people. I`m supported by 43 percent in the polls, better than anybody else and as good as George Bush. I have asked for one year to make all the changes, which is a problem because my economist Gaidar, 35 years old and knows everything, says publicly it will take two years.
That`s why my own appointees call us a ”kamikaze government,” suicide pilots saving our country at the cost of our own political lives.
I am not a kamikaze. And unlike the nervous liberals, I do not feel pain in the amputated right arm of Ukraine. Russia is better off without the empire`s drain, but disunion has gone far enough. There will be no
independence for the Tatars or any other people on Mother Russia`s historic land.
That makes me ask myself-what if, Boris Nikolayevich, prices keep going up, and the world looks the other way, and the bureaucrats laugh at my decrees and the people make a hero out of crazy Zhirinovsky?
That would mean the time is not yet ripe for full democracy in Russia. My government-my 25 young men and a handful of grayheads-would not turn this nation over to a lunatic, nor return it to the crowd that brought us to this sorry state.
So I answer, that is why I installed Viktor Baronikov, over liberal objections, at the head of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation, which now includes the former KGB, still at its full strength.
And it is why I balanced that by assigning a reformist, Minister of Justice Nikolai Fyedorov, to watch Baronikov and to clean out the entire network of Kryuchkovite KGB generals and colonels from the Ministry of Security by July 1.
Between now and then, we will see if the world`s capitalists are willing to become our partners. We will see if old debt is forgiven, new credit extended, and help given to develop our resources-before it`s too late.
If not; if the people are not ready to sacrifice for their freedom; if the nashi or the Gorbachev nomenklatura try to take over-then it`s Dobrym parnyem bolshey nye budu. Or as my cold and tightly smiling friend in Camp David puts it, ”No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
