Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (3 page)

Many notable events also take place in Moscow this day. The red flag with its hammer and sickle is hauled down from the Kremlin for the last time, and the white, blue, and red tricolor of prerevolutionary Russia is hoisted in its place. The national parliament changes the name of the country from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Russian Federation, or simply Russia.

At its close, the colonels say good-bye to Gorbachev and take the little suitcase to its new custodian.

Thus, as many Westerners celebrate Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet Union ceases to exist, Russia escapes from the cul-de-sac into which Lenin led it seventy-four years earlier, and a great country takes its place among the nations of Europe.

CHAPTER 1

DECEMBER 25: BEFORE THE DAWN

In the first moments of December 25, 1991, the midnight chimes ring out from the clock on the Savior Tower inside the Kremlin. This is the signal for the hourly changing of the honor guard at the great red and black granite cubes that form the Mausoleum, where lies the embalmed body of the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Curious late-night strollers in Red Square, Russian and foreign, gather to watch as the great-coated sentinels goose-step off to the Savior Gate like marionettes, jerking their elbows high in the air. A new shift emerges to take over at what is officially known as the Soviet Union’s Sentry Post Number 1.

Many of the onlookers on this dry, still Wednesday morning are bare-headed. It is mild by midwinter standards in Moscow, about 1 degree above freezing. The bitterly cold spell earlier in December, when the temperature dipped to zero Fahrenheit, ended with a heavy fall of snow three days ago.
¹
The vast cobbled square has since been swept clean, but the snow still gleams on the brightly lit onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral and on the swallow-tailed crenellations of the high, brick Kremlin walls.
²
It fringes the dome of the Senate Building inside the Kremlin, from which flies the red flag of the Soviet Union, with its gold hammer and sickle emblem, clearly visible from Red Square. It has flown there since 1918, when the Russian capital was transferred from Petrograd back to Moscow.

A small group of people have assembled at the northwestern end of Red Square, close by St. Nicholas’s Tower. Many of them hold flickering candles and press close to a group of American clerics who are conducting a midnight service. The minister, a middle-aged man in white robes, reads aloud from a large Bible. The preachers have traveled specially to Russia for this Christmas Day so that they can celebrate Christ’s birthday in Red Square, in what is still officially the godless Soviet Union, something they could not dream of doing in past years.

Near the Arsenal Tower of the Kremlin stands a tall
yolka,
a New Year’s fir tree. Some foreigners mistake it for a Christmas tree. However, in Russia Orthodox Christmas falls on January 7, in accordance with the old Julian calendar.

Even so, on Little Lubyanka Street, a fifteen-minute walk away, past the yellow neorenaissance façade of the feared KGB’s headquarters, the strains of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in Russian ring out in the night air. More than a thousand worshippers are celebrating midnight Mass in the hundred-year-old Roman Catholic Church of St. Louis, crushed into eighteen rows of wooden pews set among squat stone pillars that obstruct the views of the altar. By the door a notice states: “If you are suffering, if you are tired of life, know that Christ loves you.” A priest conducting the service enthuses about the historical nature of the day and “the return of our government to a normal, Christian world.”

The congregation used to consist mainly of foreigners, says Sofia Peonkova, a regular attendee, but she has noticed that in the last two years many Russians have started coming.
³
Yulia Massarskaya, age eighty-two, tells a visitor that this is her first time in a Catholic church in Moscow since the 1917 October Revolution, when she was eight years old. “I have never felt this good,” she whispers. “It is like coming back home.”
⁴

The service ends, the worshippers disperse, and the darkened streets of Moscow fall quiet for a few hours. But long before dawn many thousands of people begin emerging from the city’s grim apartment blocks. Dressed in padded coats, scarves, and fur hats, they make their way through the icy slush to catch the early trams and metro trains. It is the beginning of a daily search for food that has preoccupied Moscow’s citizens for months. Their overriding goal is to find where deliveries have been made overnight. They form irritated lines in the darkness at grimy stores, where the reward for waiting might be a loaf of bread, a scrawny chicken leg, or a few wilted vegetables.

Shoppers in Moscow in December 1991 do not look for goods; they look for queues. They obey the advice of the Russian television program
Vesti:
“If you come across a line, join it, and count yourself lucky.”

Not since World War II has Moscow experienced such deprivation. The government has imposed rationing of “meat products, butter, vegetable oils, grains, pasta products, sugar, salt, matches, tobacco products and household, bath and other soaps . . .
where available.
”
⁵
Three days ago the deputy mayor, Yury Luzhkov, admitted that three hundred and fifty stores in the city have run out of meat.

Everyone in Moscow—engineers, actors, professors, shoemakers, store clerks, construction workers, poets—snap up and hoard anything they can find to buy. If a consignment of cheese, or salami, or even just a batch of loaves, appears unexpectedly, people form a queue and take as much as they can carry. Starvation would be a reality for many families were it not for the buckets of potatoes and piles of cabbages kept in their apartments that were harvested in suburban plots before the snows of winter came.

As Moscow stirs to life, small covered trucks with canvas flaps splutter and cough their way along the city’s potholed roads from the newspaper printing houses. They stop at street kiosks to dump parcels of newspapers on the ground. The bundles are much lighter than usual. Most dailies are reduced to four pages, as newsprint and printing ink are in short supply.

The concerns of the populace are reflected in stories about shortages and imminent price rises. A headline in
Komsomolskaya Pravda
says simply, “Meat has arrived in Odessa.” At least it is more positive than “No Bread in Krasnoyarsk” on
Pravda’s
front page.

There is little in the skimpy newspapers to indicate that this will be a momentous day in the political history of the country, or indeed of the world. There is a clue, however, in
Pravda.
In a single paragraph on page one, the Communist Party newspaper notes, without comment, that President Mikhail Gorbachev will make a major announcement, live on state television, before the day is out.

CHAPTER 2

DECEMBER 25: SUNRISE

The heavy snow on the spruce and fir trees that screen the large dacha west of Moscow has melted a little during the mild winter night. Water drips from the pine needles and trickles out of the snow piled high along the driveway, giving the tarmacadam a dark sheen.

In an upstairs room, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the armed forces, puts on a starched, white, single-cuff shirt and a single-breasted navy wool suit with muted stripes, handmade by his tailors on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He selects from his collection of silk ties a particular neckpiece, black with a red floral paisley design, which he often wears on important occasions.

Small in stature, with magnetic hazel eyes and silver hair that has long since receded to expose the purple birthmark on his head, Gorbachev this morning is exhausted and slightly hungover. He came home late the night before and is now succumbing to the early stages of influenza. His duties as president are almost finished, but last night he lingered for a long time in his Kremlin office to reminisce with Moscow’s police chief, Arkady Murashev, who called out of the blue to wish him well. Very few people have been taking the trouble to do that in the dying days of his reign, and on an impulse he had invited Murashev, a former political opponent, to join him for a glass or two of cognac. With the nuclear suitcase sitting an arm’s length away on the table, the last Soviet president took great pains to impress upon his visitor that he had not made any mistakes in his quest to reform the Soviet Union. It was not his fault that it was falling apart.
¹

There is nothing unusual in Gorbachev’s staying late at the Kremlin. Work has always kept him in the office until ten or eleven o’clock. On arriving home he and his wife, Raisa, have made it a practice to go for a walk together in the dark before retiring to bed. He tells her of the events of the day as they stroll along the paths around the dacha. He holds nothing back. He once caused a scandal among Russians by saying publicly that he even discussed matters of state with his wife. Gorbachev numbers the world’s leading politicians as his friends, but his only really close ally in life is his companion and soul mate of thirty-eight years. They have always “rejoiced at the successes and suffered the failures of the other,” as he put it once, “just as if they were our own.”
²

After breakfast in the morning—in winter it is always hot cereal, served in the upper-floor living quarters by their servant Shura, who wears a head scarf and no makeup, as Raisa requires of all the female staff—the president crosses the corridor to his library, where glass-fronted bookcases reach to the ceiling. In a space in the rows of bound volumes is a framed black-and-white photograph of Raisa, his favorite, taken when she was a rather prim-looking student at Moscow University. There is another of his father, Sergey, posing in simple military tunic decorated with three medals and two Orders of the Red Star for his service in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. These pictures, and a valuable icon embossed with gold leaf depicting the Archangel Mikhail, which the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexey II, gave Gorbachev for his sixtieth birthday in March, will have to be packed with particular care when they leave.

Off the library is a small wood-paneled study with a desk of Karelian birch on which sit several white telephones and one red telephone beneath a transparent cover—the hotline for national emergencies, which the cleaners are instructed never to touch. Raisa has learned of late to dread these telephones ringing out, “like a gunshot, destroying the peace of the night,” bringing “shouts of despair, entreaties, suffering and, sometimes, death.”
³

Petite and attractive at fifty-nine, Raisa too is showing the strain of this period of political upheaval. It has, as she puts it, tested her spirit, her mind, and her will and brought her incurable heartache and sleepless nights. Her health has been poor since she collapsed with a stroke during the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August. The stroke affected her power of speech and the movement in her right arm. The wrinkles on her once porcelain complexion reveal the torment of watching her husband shrink in stature day by day.

To Raisa, Mikhail Gorbachev is a man of destiny. Indeed many superstitious people have interpreted the distinctive birthmark on his head as an omen. But Mikhail and Raisa themselves believe they were once given a sign that he is special. When they were in their twenties, both had the same dream. They were in a deep, black well from which they were trying to get out, and they kept falling back. Finally they succeeded in escaping, and they saw in front of them a wide road and a huge bright sun. Raisa told her husband then, addressing him by his pet name, “Misha, you are destined for greatness.”
⁴

Gorbachev has come to see himself as the embodiment of providence. He talks about his mission, of being
chosen
to carry out perestroika—a task that began as reconstruction of society and has come to mean for him the historic revival of Russia. He sees his forced abdication as the outcome of an epic struggle between good and evil, loyalty and treachery, hope and disillusion, generosity and vengefulness. To him this day of his downfall is a black page in history.

While in his study, the Soviet president has an opportunity to cast his eyes, for the umpteenth time, over his much-annotated resignation speech. It will be one of the most important pronouncements of his career. It will define him and his legacy and put down a marker for the future of the country. He has little influence over that now, of course. He is being forced to transfer power into the hands of incompetent, irresponsible people, ambitious and ruthless political adventurers, who he is firmly convinced are sacrificing the Soviet Union for the sake of their ardent desire to take over the Kremlin and push him out. Less than two weeks ago Gorbachev was telling George Bush on the telephone how confident he was that the Soviet Union would survive. At the time he had reason to believe that he would continue as president and would be residing indefinitely in the state dacha here in Razdory, on the banks of the Moscow River. The successor to Lenin has done everything to keep the Union in existence since it started falling apart after the August coup four months ago and the republics one after another began declaring their intention to break away. He has made himself hoarse trying to convince republic leaders, visiting statesmen, journalists, and anyone else who would listen that the country should not be split up, that it was absurd, that it would lead to famine, civil war, blood.

The demise of the superpower he inherited finally became inevitable the previous Saturday, when all the republics ganged up to reject even a weakened central authority. Only on Monday morning, just two days ago, did he decide—he had little choice—that he would announce his resignation this evening. It was only on Monday afternoon that he established the terms for a peaceful transition with his hated rival. This was a painful experience. And he is not even being accorded the dignity of a solemn farewell ceremony.