Evening at Three Peskari

The post-election night from December 19 to 20, 1999, SPS activists met in the capital’s restaurant “Three Peskarya”. A cozy basement on Zubovsky Boulevard, dim lights, aquariums with strange overseas fish flickering in the semi-darkness, colorful New Year’s lights. Going there, we already knew that the electoral bloc “Union of Right Forces”, hastily put together from Gaidar’s “Democratic Choice”, Nemtsov’s “Young Russia”, Kiriyenko’s “New Force” and several other organizations, won an unexpected brilliant victory. All day long, exit poll data were sent to the election headquarters by fax, predicting the confident passage of the Union of Right Forces into the State Duma.

The excitement gradually grew, more and more people appeared in the hall. In the far corner, near the table with snacks, Deputy Minister of Finance Alexei Kudrin was patiently waiting for the banquet to begin. The director of the Rosinformtsentr, Mikhail Margelov, was walking around the tables lined with bottles of Ararat and Sovetsky and dishes with fish salad. RAO UES employee Leonid Gozman shook hands with everyone he met, congratulating him on his victory. Yegor Gaidar brought his teenage daughter (I think Masha) to the banquet. VIP guests appeared: head of the Kremlin administration Alexander Voloshin, daughter and adviser to the president Tatyana Dyachenko, grandson Boris Yeltsin Jr. A wide-screen TV mounted on the wall (it was a novelty then) showed NTV - a special edition of Evgeniy Kiselev’s “Itogi” program. The first results of the vote count confirmed: the Union of Right Forces is one of the leaders in the 1999 elections; the Communists seem to be losing their parliamentary majority. The Unity bloc, created by Boris Berezovsky, took second place. In the far corner of the hall, sitting near the Christmas tree, the soloists of “Time Machine” tried to shout out the clatter of forks and the clink of glasses.

The winners of this night - Sergei Kiriyenko, Irina Khakamada, Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais - either appeared in the Three Minnows hall, then suddenly disappeared and immediately appeared on the NTV screen at Kiselev’s, then came again. The only one of the SPS leaders who was not in “Three Gudgeons” or in Moscow in general that evening was Boris Nemtsov, who was waiting for the results in Nizhny Novgorod, where he won the elections that day in a single-mandate constituency.

It was about midnight. The music somehow suddenly stopped, and everyone turned to the stairs along which Anatoly Chubais was descending into the basement of the restaurant. Walking next to him was a short, bald man in a gray knitted sweater. Those gathered politely parted ways, the man in the sweater followed Chubais to the head of the table, raised a glass of wine and made a short congratulatory speech. “We did it... We showed them that we can... For our common victory...”

The next day, this quiet man, who raised a glass to the “common victory” in “Three Gudgeons,” will make a toast to Joseph Stalin (of the leaders of the Duma factions present at that meeting, only Grigory Yavlinsky will refuse to drink for this) and will unveil a memorial plaque to KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov . And a year later, President Vladimir Putin will return the country to the melody of the Stalinist anthem. “The vile, rotten breed of traitors / You menacingly sweep away from your path...”

The participants of that night banquet at Three Minnows, Sergei Kiriyenko and Anatoly Chubais, will successfully fit into the new “vertical”. Irina Khakamada, who was sitting at the next table, and Boris Nemtsov, who missed the banquet, will find themselves in the ranks of irreconcilable opposition. Deputies elected from the SPS Sergei Yushenkov and Vladimir Golovlev will die at the hands of hired killers.

But all this is ahead. In the meantime, the festive night was drawing to a close. It was snowing outside; white flakes swirled over the Garden Ring and settled on the pavement. The “Hitchhiker” raced through the deserted Moscow streets. The night was completely black, as it happens before dawn, and only bright neon shop windows illuminated the houses rushing past. The city was sleeping. There were 11 days left before the change of political eras in Russia.

The author is a member of the federal political council of the Solidarity movement, in December 1999 - an activist of the Democratic Choice of Russia party.

Photos from the author's archive. Published for the first time