Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (42 page)

As Gorbachev proceeds to justify his actions in office, Yeltsin snaps, “Switch it off. I don’t want to listen any more.” He tells Gennady Burbulis to bring him a transcript. Grachev sends the text over to Burbulis after Gorbachev has finished. As Yeltsin reads through it, he expresses exasperation at what he considers to be a self-serving political manifesto rather than a farewell to politics. Gorbachev is taking credit for all the political and spiritual freedoms Russian people now enjoy. He does not once mention Boris Yeltsin by name or even by title. He gives Yeltsin no credit for the defeat of the attempted coup against him in August. Nor does he wish the Russian president well as his successor. Perhaps he should have ordered Gostelradio to pull the plug on the broadcast as he had been tempted to do.
¹

Now, as so often in the past, the touchy Siberian allows pique to dictate his actions. He refuses to go to Gorbachev’s office to receive the nuclear suitcase as agreed two days ago. It must be brought to him, he blusters.

Yeltsin picks up the telephone and calls Marshal Shaposhnikov, who is waiting in an office on the second floor of the Senate Building for the summons to proceed to Gorbachev’s cabinet for the historic transfer. With him are a number of generals, gathered to witness and facilitate the important and symbolic exchange.

“Yevgeny Ivanovich,” says Yeltsin, “I can’t go to Gorbachev. You go by yourself.”

“Boris Nikolayevich, this is a very delicate matter,” the marshal protests. “It would be desirable that we go together. What is more, I’m not sure if Gorbachev will transfer all the [nuclear] property to me by myself.”

“If there are complications, call me,” says Yeltsin. “We will discuss other options for the transfer.”

Shaposhnikov is not altogether surprised. He, too, is exasperated by Gorbachev. Watching the farewell address, he found himself reflecting that the president has overstayed his welcome and that he should have resigned after the coup.
²
How much hope there had been for the Soviet Union when Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985! “He was young, modern, energetic, with many advantages over his colleagues. He introduced perestroika, glasnost, democratization, all human values. But the further it went the more doubts there were, and disillusions. The main thing—life was not becoming better. The economy continued to deteriorate, and the political situation was developing at such speed that the whole system started to fall apart.” Having defeated the putschists without Gorbachev, he believes the citizens of the USSR simply stopped responding to him. Many people don’t want the Soviet Union to fall apart, he knows. Shaposhnikov’s wife certainly does not want new borders created. She has been worrying that they will have to go abroad in future to visit their daughter who lives in Odessa, now in independent Ukraine. But they are all sick of the Soviet system, and they just don’t want Gorbachev anymore.

The marshal takes his briefcase with the transfer documents, mounts the stairs to the floor above, and enters Gorbachev’s suite. He waits ten minutes in the cramped reception room, along with the two colonels who are assigned to accompany the nuclear suitcase and who are perched side by side on the sofa, so ubiquitous and inscrutable that some of Gorbachev’s staff have stopped noticing them. Their gift for looking inconspicuous has frequently impressed Palazchenko, who remembers them sitting almost always silently but with an oddly inexpressive yet dignified look.

When Gorbachev calls him in, Shaposhnikov sees that the
chemodanchik
is resting on the ex—Soviet president’s desk. He finds Gorbachev holding up quite well but noticeably ill at ease. The marshal relates his instructions, that Yeltsin is not coming and that he is to take the case to Yeltsin.

Gorbachev thinks the situation is “rather comical, not to say stupid.” In this final confrontation, however, he has the upper hand. He is in possession of the object that the Russian president needs to legitimize his grab for power. Let him come and claim it. Gorbachev no longer has to answer any summons from his rival.
³

There is an impasse. Yeltsin won’t come, and Gorbachev won’t budge. Both presidents must sign the transfer documents, and both must be satisfied that this procedure is done properly, in front of witnesses.

Told that Gorbachev will not hand over the suitcase, Yeltsin still refuses to honor the original agreement on the handover. Let Gorbachev bring it to him then, he growls. Gorbachev must come to his office, or to the neutral territory of the St. Catherine Hall, and deliver it to him there. St. Catherine Hall, with its vaulted ceilings and gold chandeliers, is where Gorbachev humiliated him four years ago, prompting Central Committee members to throw a “bucketful of filth” over him for daring to question the pace of perestroika. He instructs Burbulis to convey his demand to Gorbachev.

Gorbachev is indignant. “I was told he had refused to come, despite our agreement,” he later recalled in his memoirs. “It turned out that Yeltsin, together with his entourage, had listened to my televised speech and flown into a rage. After a while I was told that the Russian president proposed to meet on ‘neutral territory’—in the Catherine Hall, i.e. the part of the Kremlin where talks with foreign leaders were usually held.... Thus even in the first minutes after stepping down I was faced with impudence and lack of courtesy.” He believes that this derogation from their arrangement is not an isolated backlash of Yeltsin’s feelings of revenge but part of a policy of harassment he is conducting against him.

Grachev believes the “preposterous idea” of Gorbachev going to Yeltsin with the suitcase was suggested by one of his more belligerent advisers, when it became clear that Gorbachev was leaving office with dignity and with his head held high rather than as a vanquished foe. “Yeltsin wanted to show Gorbachev he was no longer superior to him. Yeltsin’s fury related to his feeling that it should be his day of triumph. In his presentation, however, Gorbachev made everybody realize the historic shift he had achieved. He was stepping down not as one defeated. Yeltsin felt he remained a secondary figure in the aura of Gorbachev and the success of perestroika. He must have realized that never in his life would he match his opponent.”

Shaposhnikov tries to break the deadlock. He suggests that Gorbachev sign the transfer papers and that one of the colonels brings them to the Russian president, and when Yeltsin confirms he has received the documents, Gorbachev can transfer the nuclear suitcase to Shaposhnikov, who will send it across to Yeltsin.

The marshal calls Yeltsin, who has calmed down after his outburst. He agrees to the compromise. Shaposhnikov witnesses Gorbachev’s signature on the transfer agreement. An officer leaves with the papers, along with the decree of the USSR president transferring supreme command over the armed forces to the president of Russia. After a few minutes Yeltsin’s office calls to say the Russian president accepts that the documents are in order. The transfer can take place.

One of the colonels unlocks the black metal
chemodanchik.
Gorbachev checks the equipment inside. Everything is in its place. He shakes hands with the two men on duty who have accompanied him around the globe, thanks them for their work, and says good-bye. The brace of colonels leave the office with the nuclear device. Shaposhnikov stays behind for a final few words with his former commander in chief.

In Gorbachev’s anteroom, Chernyaev tries to make sense of the military uniforms coming and going. He sees Shaposhnikov leaving, “smiling as usual and saying ‘Hello!’” and “clearly embarrassed” about the whole affair.

He and the two Yakovlevs go in and sit at the oval table with Gorbachev. They find him red-faced and clearly upset over the way Yeltsin has behaved. They help calm him down and prepare him for the television cameras once more.

During the verbal artillery between the two Kremlin buildings, Ted Koppel of ABC has been standing by with his crew to film the ceremonial handover of the nuclear suitcase from the Soviet to the Russian president. Just before 8 p.m. he is invited back into the presidential office. Gorbachev has recovered his composure. He greets the ABC personnel with smiles. The nuclear suitcase is already with Yeltsin, he informs them, as if nothing untoward has happened. “Now it is Yeltsin who holds his finger on the nuclear button.” All that remains for him “is to clear out some personal effects, some papers.”

But Boris Yeltsin has not finished tormenting his rival.

Mikhail Gorbachev, like everyone else, expects that the Soviet flag will continue flying over the Senate dome until December 31. Russian and world media were told specifically by Yeltsin’s press secretary Pavel Voshchanov, on December 17: “On New Year’s Eve, the hammer-and-sickle flag of revolutionary red that has flown for seventy-four years over the Kremlin, the medieval brick fortress on the Moscow River, will be lowered, marking the formal end to the Soviet era.” The Russian flag would then be raised triumphantly, in a blaze of fireworks, to herald the new year and a new era, he said.

The red flag is this evening still hanging from the flagpole above the illuminated green dome as Gorbachev delivers his valedictory address, visible to the usual small crowds of strollers and tourists in Red Square. But twenty minutes after Gorbachev finishes, two workmen emerge from a trapdoor on the roof of the Senate Building and climb up metal steps on the curved side of the dome to a circular platform with a waist-high railing at the top. From there they pull down the twenty-foot-by-ten-foot flag from the tall mast. As it comes to the bottom of the pole, one of the men gathers it up, as a waiter would remove a tablecloth in a restaurant. The men then attach the white, blue, and red flag of prerevolutionary Russia to the rope and hoist it up the mast. They hold the end of the large expanse of fabric until it reaches the top, then release it so that the flag billows out triumphantly in a southwesterly breeze, helped by jets of compressed air hissing from a tube inside the flagpole.

Few people in Red Square notice what is happening. No one has alerted the public or the foreign media to expect such an act of historical significance this evening—the switching of emblems over the building where Lenin and Stalin exercised their power. Only Russian television was tipped off by Yeltsin’s aides to have a crew in position to record the event. Serge Schmemann of the
New York Times
recalls, “I was back in the bureau writing a piece about Gorbachev resigning; I don’t think there were any other reporters there.” However, his wife, Mary, and children, Anya, Alexander, and Natasha, were nearby. “They happened by chance to be in Red Square when the red Soviet flag came down for the last time over the Kremlin and the white, blue, and red Russian flag rose in its stead. My children noted the exact time, 7:32 p.m., and called me.”
⁴

As the flag with its three horizontal stripes of white, blue, and red flaps and cracks in the artificial breeze, the bells of the Kremlin’s Savior Tower start ringing and continue for several minutes. People walking near the Kremlin look up with curiosity and some concern. Though the Savior Tower clock chimes merrily every fifteen minutes, the heavy bells ring out only rarely to mark profound events. The sound prompts more late-evening strollers and tourists to notice the tricolor. Schmemann’s family recall cheers from a handful of surprised foreigners and an angry tirade from a lone war veteran. There are a few calls of “Oh!” “Oh!” “Oh!” as Russian strollers see what is happening, and whistles and laughter from young men craning their necks upwards. One person claps.

The news quickly spreads, and foreign correspondents hurry to Red Square. Militiaman Alexander Ivanovich, one of the greatcoated guards at the Lenin Mausoleum, who had marched off to dinner while the red flag was flying and returned to find the flag of the Russian Federation in its place, tells James Clarity of the
New York Times,
“It was a good surprise.” An inebriated and confused Muscovite asks an onlooker near the Mausoleum, “Why are you laughing at Lenin?” He is shushed by a passerby who cautions him that a foreigner is watching. Francis X. Clines, also of the
New York Times,
is noting down the exchange. “Who cares?” says another Muscovite. “They’re the ones who are feeding us these days.” Uli Klese, a photographer on vacation from Germany, finds the subdued public reaction strange. “When the Berlin Wall came down, everybody was out in the streets,” he tells Michael Dobbs of the
Washington. Post.
“This was an event of the same kind of magnitude, but no one seemed to care.”
⁵

Steve Hurst spots the switching of the flags through a window in the Kremlin from where the dome at the apex of the triangular Senate Building is visible. “I looked out the window and saw the hammer and sickle coming down. I remember what a strong visual that was.” According to Stu Loory, while the CNN crew is dismantling their equipment, someone gets word about what is happening, and a window is opened to videotape the event. Gorbachev’s security people demand the window be closed. “Tell them I will take full responsibility,” shouts Tom Johnson to his interpreter, but the guards shove him away from the window. “Bodyguards are bodyguards everywhere in the world,” said Loory. “They couldn’t care less about the responsibility of the president of CNN!”

Andrey Grachev sees with dismay the red flag “hastily torn from the cupola of the Kremlin as if it were the Reichstag,” as he is leaving the Russian fortress to give an interview to French television in their office in Gruzinsky Lane. The flagstaff is directly above the presidential office, and “happily for Gorbachev he cannot observe this heartbreaking moment.”

A foreign television crew that has missed filming the event acquires a video cassette for 200 French francs from an enterprising Muscovite in Red Square who recorded the change of flags.

When Gorbachev learns what has occurred, he perceives it as another affront to his dignity. He believes that Yeltsin “gave instructions for the lowering of the Soviet flag and the hoisting of the flag of the Russian Federation and personally saw to it that the procedure be completed according to schedule and filmed by television cameras.” Gorbachev wants to secure the red flag as a memento but it is too late to stop it disappearing into the basement of the Kremlin.