Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (40 page)

Glancing into Gorbachev’s office where the door had been left open, Grachev noted the red flag standing in the corner, Gorbachev’s eyeglass case on the desk, and the nuclear suitcase on the table, all visible confirmation that Gorbachev was still, if only nominally, president of the Soviet Union. “This is the surrealistic tableau that would have presented itself to anyone who could have taken a cross section through the building and looked into the rooms on the third floor,” he thought. “Atop the dome, the red flag of the Soviet Union was still flying.”

Zhenya brought plates of cold meat and smoked fish and pickles into the Walnut Room. He also managed to rustle up bread and jam and coffee for Grachev and Yegor Yakovlev in the kitchen. As they ate, they saw that Russian television was showing the “Dance of the Cygnets” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the same ballet broadcast on Soviet television during the three days of the August coup. It was as if someone inside the television studios was subtly signaling that a second coup was being conducted, this time by Yeltsin.

The two Gorbachev associates pestered the waiter as he hurried in and out of the Walnut Room about the mood of the men inside. “The mood seems to be good,” the diplomatic Zhenya responded.

In the television room next to the kitchen, Ted Koppel and Rick Kaplan waited in vain, with their antenna rigged up, to communicate with New York via satellite link, in the event of dramatic news from down the corridor. Eventually they gave up and left.

The meeting in the Walnut Room went on for another two and a half hours. Around 9 p.m., after Gorbachev had downed two more small glasses of cognac, Yakovlev noticed that he was showing signs of strain. Saying that he wasn’t feeling very well, the Soviet president excused himself. He left the room and went to lie down in a resting room attached to an adjacent office.

Yeltsin and Yakovlev found themselves alone again. They threw back little shots of alcohol for another hour. In an expansive mood, Yeltsin promised he would draw up a decree directing that special provision be made for Yakovlev, taking into account his exceptional merits in the cause of the democratic movement. Gorbachev’s aide thanked him but noted afterwards, “He by the way forgot about his promise.”

After they said good-bye, Yakovlev watched Yeltsin striding along the narrow Kremlin corridor, as if marching on the parade ground. “This was the strut of a victor,” he thought, though the Russian president may have been concentrating on keeping himself erect. Yeltsin’s aides took the archive files and followed him. “In the state he was in it would not have been prudent to hand over to him any sensitive documents,” commented Grachev.

Yeltsin made his way out of the Senate Building into the exceptionally mild night air—it was just below freezing—and crossed the narrow courtyard to Building 14. His closest collaborators were there: Kozyrev, Burbulis, Korzhakov, his loyal assistant Lev Sukhanov, and spokesman Pavel Voshchanov.

“It’s over. That’s the last time I will have to go and see him,” Yeltsin announced.

“You mean that from now on, Gorbachev will have to come and see you,” one of his acolytes asked.

“What for? . . . Well, maybe to pick up his pension,” snorted Yeltsin. With a clinking of glasses, they celebrated his final ascendancy over Gorbachev.
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“On this whole territory there is now nobody above you,” said Sukhanov, pointing triumphantly to the wall map of Russia.

“And for this, life has been worth living,” Yeltsin replied.

Meanwhile Yakovlev went to check on Gorbachev. He found him in the resting room. He was crying. “He was lying on the sofa with tears in his eyes.” Gorbachev looked up at his old friend. “You see, Sasha, that’s it,” he said.

Yakovlev recognized that this was the most difficult moment of Gorbachev’s life. “These words meant nothing but they sounded like a confidence, a repentance, a desperate cry from the heart, as if they illustrated [Russian poet Fyodor] Tyutchev’s words: ‘Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly.’”

Doing his best to console his comrade, Yakovlev assured him of a glorious retirement and world renown through his research institute. He was close to tears himself. “I had a lump in my throat. I was so sorry for him I wanted to cry. I was overcome with the feeling that something unfair had taken place. Here is the person who was yesterday a tsar of cardinal changes in the world and in his own country, the executor of the fate of billions of people in the world, and today he is the lifeless victim of another crisis of history.”

Gorbachev asked his friend to bring him a glass of water and to leave him alone. “And that,” observed Yakovlev, “was how the golden years of reform ended.” He sincerely believed that Gorbachev wanted the best for his country but couldn’t see it through to the end. “He couldn’t understand that if you took a sword to a monster like the system, you have to go all the way . . . but he was an evolutionist. . . . He has no blood on his hands, he wanted to start a civilized society.”
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Yeltsin would remember the daylong session as “protracted and difficult.” He told a reporter that the discussion was confidential, as it involved the passing on of state secrets, but “after that meeting I felt like going and having a shower.”

Looking back after the passage of time, Gorbachev remembered the marathon session with Yeltsin as “informal and seemingly friendly,” but he would reflect bitterly that “Yeltsin’s word, like many of his promises, could not always be trusted.”

There was little left for Gorbachev to do now but to tell the citizens of the mortally wounded superpower that he was leaving the stage.

It was the last occasion when Gorbachev and Yeltsin would meet or even speak to each other.

CHAPTER 24

DECEMBER 25: LATE EVENING

History finally catches up with Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Thirty seconds before 7 p.m. Moscow time, 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, on December 25, 1991, the first and last president of the Soviet Union takes off his large-lens spectacles, checks to see if they are clean, and puts them back on. He glances a couple of times at his watch. Then he looks up at the camera and begins reading from a typed sheet of paper, without the benefit of a teleprompter.

“Dear fellow countrymen! Compatriots!” he begins.
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“Given the current situation and the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am ceasing my activities as president of the USSR. I have arrived at this decision for reasons of principle. I have always spoken out firmly in favor of autonomy and the independence of nations and sovereignty for the republics. But at the same time, I support the preservation of a union state and the integrity of the country.”

Even now he has not quite given up. By “ceasing” his activities, he leaves open the door to perhaps resuming them at a future date.

“Events have taken a different course,” he continues. “The trend towards dismembering the country and the disintegration of the state has prevailed, which I cannot accept. My position on this issue has not changed after the Alma-Ata meeting and the decisions made there. Furthermore, I am convinced that decisions of such importance should have been made by popular will. However, I will do everything within my power to ensure that the Alma-Ata agreements bring real unity to our society and pave the way out of the crisis, facilitating a sustained reform process.”

Watching him from behind the cameras, Grachev feels that Gorbachev’s voice at first sounds unnatural and hollow. “It seemed on the verge of trembling, as did his chin.” But the moment passes, and Gorbachev proceeds with his emotions under control.

“Addressing you for the last time as president of the USSR, I find it necessary to state my position with regard to the path we have embarked on since 1985—especially since controversial, superficial, and biased judgments abound,” he says.

Having signed the decree giving up his presidency a few minutes ago, Gorbachev is in fact no longer president of the USSR, but he has ignored the advice of his aides and lost the opportunity to complete the broadcast with a touch of ceremony.

Fate has decided that, when I became head of state, it was already obvious there was something wrong in this country. We had plenty of everything; land, oil, gas, and other natural resources, and God has also endowed us with intellect and talent—yet we lived much worse than people in other industrialized countries, and the gap was constantly widening. The reason was apparent even then—our society was stifled in the grip of a bureaucratic command system. Doomed to serve ideology, and bear the heavy burden of the arms race, it was strained to the utmost. All attempts at implementing half hearted reforms—and there have been many—failed one after another. The country was losing hope.

We could not go on living like this. We had to change everything radically.

For this reason I never regretted that I did not use my position as general secretary merely to reign for a few years. This would have been irresponsible and immoral. I understood that initiating reforms on such a large scale in a society like ours was a most difficult and risky undertaking. But even now, I am convinced that the democratic reforms started in the spring of 1985 were historically justified. The process of renovating the country and bringing about fundamental change in the international community proved to be much more complex than originally anticipated. However, let us acknowledge what has been achieved so far.

Society has acquired freedom; it has been freed politically and spiritually. And this is the most important achievement, which we have not fully come to grips with, in part because we still have not learned how to use our freedom. However, a historic task has been accomplished.

The totalitarian system, which prevented this country from becoming wealthy and prosperous a long time ago, has been dismantled.

A breakthrough has been made on the road to democratic reforms. Free elections, freedom of the press, freedom of worship, representative legislatures, and a multiparty system have all become realities.

We have set out to introduce a pluralistic economy, and the equality of all forms of ownership is being established. In the course of the land reform, peasant ry is reviving, individual farmers have appeared, and millions of hectares of land have been allocated to the urban and rural population. Laws were passed on the economic freedom of producers, and free enterprise, shareholding, and privatization are under way.

Shifting the course of our economy towards a free market, we must not forget that this is being done for the benefit of the individual. In these times of hardship, everything must be done to ensure the social protection of the individual—partic—ularly old people and children.

We live in a new world. An end has been put to the Cold War, the arms race, and the insane militarization of our country, which crippled our economy, distorted our thinking, and undermined our morals. The threat of a world war is no more.

Once again, I should like to stress I have done everything in my power during the transitional period to ensure safe control over nuclear weapons.

We opened ourselves up to the rest of the world, renounced interference in the affairs of others, and the use of troops beyond our borders, and we have gained trust, solidarity, and respect.

We have become a major stronghold for the reorganization of modern civilization on the basis of peaceful, democratic principles.

The peoples and nations of this country have acquired genuine freedom to choose their own way towards self-determination. The quest for a democratic reform of our multinational state had led us to the point where we were about to sign a new union treaty.

All these changes demanded utmost exertion and were carried through under conditions of an unrelenting struggle against the growing resistance from the old, obsolete, and reactionary forces—the former party and state structures and the economic management apparatus—as well as our patterns, our ideological prejudices, our egalitarian and parasitic psychology. The changes ran up against our intolerance, a low level of political culture, and a fear of change. That is why we have wasted so much time. The old system tumbled down even before the new one could begin functioning. And our society slid into even deeper crisis.

I am aware of the dissatisfaction with today’s grave situation, the harsh criticism of authority at all levels, and of my personal role. But I would like to stress once again: In so vast a country, given its heritage, fundamental changes cannot be carried out without difficulties and pain.

The August coup brought the overall crisis to a breaking point. The most disastrous aspect of this crisis is the collapse of statehood. And today I watch apprehensively the loss of the citizenship of a great country by our citizens—the consequences of this could be grave for all of us.

I consider it vitally important to sustain the democratic achievements of the last few years. We have earned them through the suffering of our entire history and our tragic experience. We must not abandon them under any circumstances, under any pretext. Otherwise, all our hopes for a better future will be buried.

I am speaking of this frankly and honestly. It is my moral duty.

Today I want to express my gratitude to all those citizens who have given their support to the policy of renovating this country and who participated in the democratic reform. I am thankful to statesmen, political and public leaders, and millions of ordinary people in other countries—to all those who understood our objectives and gave us their support, meeting us halfway and offering genuine cooperation.

I leave my post with concern—but also with hope, with faith in you, your wisdom and spiritual strength. We are the heirs of a great civilization, and its revival and transformation to a modern and dignified life depend on all and everyone.

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to those who stood by my side, defending the right and good cause over all these years. We certainly could have avoided certain errors and done better in many ways. But I am convinced that, sooner or later, our common efforts will bear fruit and our peoples will live in a prosperous and democratic society.