Gorbachev-Yeltsin: Political duel that sped Soviet collapse
They started out as comrades in the early stages of perestroika but ended up bitter rivals. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were united against the attempted August 1991 coup which dealt a death blow to the Soviet Union, and which left Yeltsin with the real power.
In 2011, to mark the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet empire, AFP correspondent Antoine Lambroschini explained how the bitter rivalry between these two former comrades would reshape history.
MOSCOW, December 1, 2011 (AFP) - The USSR lived through the last months of its existence against the backdrop of a political duel between the firebrand Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was long criticised for his fence sitting.
During that fateful year, Gorbachev sought to maintain the unity of an immense empire of 15 separatist-minded republics.
Yeltsin, the president of the biggest republic, Russia, officially supported his initiative.
But at the same time he worked to undermine the authority of Gorbachev, whose reforms he considered to be too timid.
The standoff became the symbol of Soviet disintegration and did much to hasten its demise.
In "The Return: Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev", political scientist Daniel Treisman said the antagonism between the two men turned the collapse of the Soviet Union into a soap opera.
Despite their later divergences, Yeltsin and Gorbachev had set out with the same aspirations. Born a month apart in 1931, they hailed from a generation which was not complicit in Stalin's regime. Their families were even victims of his purges.
Both worked hard to climb the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party, "Gorbi" in his southwestern agricultural province of Stavropol, and Yeltsin at Sverdlovsk, in the Urals, an industrial region.
When Gorbachev became Soviet president in March 1985, he surrounded himself with young supporters of reform, breaking with the geriatric regimes of his predecessors. He entrusted Yeltsin with the control of Moscow.
But Soviet realities doomed the entente to failure.
Yeltsin was a firebrand, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness: as a child he lost two fingers when trying to dismantle a grenade by hitting it with a hammer. He wanted deeper reforms, whereas Gorbachev hedged his bets to spare regime reactionaries.
- Two leaders -
The split was formalised in 1987 when Yeltsin criticised Gorbachev before the party leadership. Gorbachev reacted by sidelining him, vowing he would not be allowed to return to politics.
Believing he understood the people's aspirations, Yeltsin came back before the party to demand his "rehabilitation".
From then on he was upwardly mobile. He was elected to the Soviet parliament in 1989 at elections contested for the first time by several candidates. He then became leader of the opposition. He then set about bolstering the institutions of Russia, the largest Soviet republic, while gnawing away at Gorbachev's prerogatives.
After becoming speaker of Russia's parliament Yeltsin moved to get Russia's sovereignty proclaimed on June 12, 1990. A year later he was elected president of Soviet Russia by universal suffrage.
Moscow now had two leaders: Yeltsin, an upwardly mobile Russian president, and the Soviet president Gorbachev, who was in the process of being toppled.
While Yeltsin believed that maintaining the Soviet Union in a watered down form was possible, the option was finally swept under the carpet by the failed coup of August 1991, which was engineered by the old Soviet guard.
- Humiliation -
Gorbachev returned to Moscow after the coup, but only thanks to the support of the man who had become his enemy, who standing on a tank had stirred up the crowds against the coup plotters.
The ultimate humiliation, Gorbachev was forced to thank Yeltsin, who seized on the opportunity to dissolve the Russian Communist Party.
By December the USSR was just an empty shell after Yeltsin signed a treaty effectively ending the Soviet Union with the presidents of Ukraine and Belorussia.
Powerless and lacking popular support, Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day.
Twenty years later, and even with Yeltsin dead since 2007, Gorbachev still holds a grudge. "It was the worst of betrayals. We were sitting together, talking, we agreed... and behind my back he was doing exactly the opposite," he railed in February 2011 on Radio Svoboda.
Even though Yeltsin won the duel, he ended up sharing his predecessor's fate.
Poverty, inflation, corruption, the war in Chechnya -- after an enthusiastic start, the 1990s ended in chaos.
And in December 1999 the country greeted the resignation of Russia's then president Yeltsin, weakened by alcohol, with as much relief as it had Gorbachev's eight years earlier.