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The Communists also appear to have helped themselves to the government's gold stocks. When perestroika started, Western estimates put Soviet gold reserves at 2,500 to 3,500 tons. In January 1990, said former Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov last week, the country had 784 tons. After the August coup failed, Russian officials announced ominously that "a certain amount of gold is missing." In September, Grigori Yavlinsky, Gorbachev's top economic adviser, claimed that two-thirds of the gold reserves had been sold abroad in 1990, leaving only 240 tons.
The gold is only one item on a list of lost riches that Soviet citizens believe were pilfered by the party. Despite mounting evidence, party officials deny that even one ruble has been squirreled away in foreign banks. But a string of mysterious suicides casts doubt on such disavowals. Five days after the coup fizzled, party treasurer Nikolai Kruchina threw himself out a window. Six weeks later, his predecessor, Georgi Pavlov, fell to his death the same way. And two weeks ago, Dmitri Lisovolik, former deputy chief of the party's international department, also leaped out a window several weeks after investigators found $600,000 in U.S. dollars in the office of Lisovolik's boss, Valentin Falin, at Central Committee headquarters.
Except for 1 billion rubles discovered at a Soviet bank in September, the multiple inquiries have so far yielded little in the way of recovered cash. Foreign governments have refused to freeze Soviet assets, and Swiss banks decline to help unless investigators can obtain account numbers and the permission of their holders -- both unlikely developments. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union is struggling under the weight of a 76.5 billion-ruble budget deficit, a foreign debt of some $70 billion and a looming winter food crisis -- misery that could have been eased had the party of the people only lived up to its name.