Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (46 page)

After the Italians leave, Grachev asks his boss to sign a copy of
The August Coup,
the slender volume Gorbachev wrote about his experience at Foros. The former president writes a message of gratitude to his spokesman, ending with the words “The most important events are still before us. It is noon on the clock of history.” As he reads the inscription in the anteroom, Grachev glances up and sees to his amazement that the hands of the clock stand at noon. Later he learns that the clock has stopped
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Shortly afterwards Jose Cuenca, the Spanish ambassador to the Soviet Union who overnight has become ambassador to Russia, arrives with a letter of condolence from his head of state. Chernyaev seizes the opportunity to take the envoy aside and ask for his help in getting a new job for Andrey Grachev. Knowing that Cuenca is friendly with the director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Chernyaev asks him if he would lobby for a position there for his colleague. The ambassador’s expression changes. “This is not possible, not acceptable,” he splutters. “OK it’s not acceptable, I know that myself,” replies Chernyaev, “but what are you afraid of? Are you afraid of Kozyrev? Are you afraid he will throw you out?”
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Elsewhere on the Kremlin grounds, the Soviet Union is going through its death throes. The Supreme Soviet, the working parliament of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, is holding its last session in Building 14 just inside the Spassky Gate. Most of the elected deputies represent communist institutions that are now defunct or republics now independent and have departed for good. There is a single item on the agenda: a declaration disbanding the USSR and recognizing its successor as the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The deputies are intent mainly on making a gesture of protest at the extinction of the Soviet Union and availing for one last day of the well-stocked parliamentary buffet. Waiting for proceedings to start, they lounge around and read newspapers on the wide rows of orange armchair seats, like the early arrivals for a movie in a big-screen cinema. The chamber was actually once the official Kremlin theater, but only nonfictional dramas have been played out here for the last thirty years.

The forlorn lawmakers are almost outnumbered by journalists expecting to see history made, though the reporters themselves are not infused with excitement, as the end of the assembly is such an anticlimax.

Just as the session is starting, five Kremlin workers, two in fur hats, two bareheaded and one in a ski cap, appear at the entrance doors to the building. They unscrew the matching four-feet-by-three-feet brass plates on each side that proclaim, “Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR,” and carry them off to a storeroom.

Anuarbek Alimzhanov, chairman of the Congress’s Council of Republics, takes his seat at the large, wood table on the stage, flanked by seven flags representing fewer than half the former Soviet republics. He claims enough deputies have registered to form a quorum to vote on a resolution winding up the USSR, though the few Russian and Belarusian parliamentarians there are attending only as observers.

Their predecessors “spoke of great things, of world revolution, of social equality, of socialism, of the dream of advancing to communism,” declares Alimzhanov. “Now our country is returning to capitalism in its wildest form.... We understand perfectly well what we have lost. We don’t know what we have gained.” He chides journalists for “dancing around the lion that has not yet been slain” but acknowledges that the red flag has come down, their president has resigned, and this is their last meeting.

Hard-line communist Vladimir Samarin steps up to fulminate against Yeltsin’s “coup d’etat.” He uses such demagogic and offensive terms that the secretariat stops taking notes for the official record. Samarin complains that events have brought the congress to its knees, an image famously countered by anticommunist deputy Ilya Zaslavsky with the words, “This congress was never off its knees in the first place.” Zaslavsky argued at a previous session that while the Bolsheviks disbanded the last elected prerevolutionary assembly in January 1918 on the pretext that deputies should leave as the guards were tired, “This time it’s not the guards who are tired; it’s the people who are tired.” Deputy Viktor Giblin from the Archangelsk region announces that he will have to take up a job as street cleaner. Other deputies exchange views on whether the end of the Soviet Union is a tragedy or a comedy.

Liu Heung Shing, the Associated Press photographer whose picture of Gorbachev’s resignation is reproduced today on front pages all over the world, wanders around the near empty chamber with his camera. “There was only one Soviet lawmaker in the empty hall,” he recalled. “He was yawning as a speaker at the podium announced the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Alimzhanov brings the proceedings to an end after less than an hour. “Now that the president has resigned and the red flag has been lowered over the Kremlin it is time for us to take our leave,” he says. The deputies vote to consign the USSR to history. The motion states: “Relying on the will expressed by the top elected bodies of state power of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, the House of the Republics announces the dissolution of the USSR,” as soon as each republic has ratified the Alma-Ata agreements. Their final act is to dismiss the chairmen of the USSR Supreme Court, the Prosecutor’s Office, and the State Bank, institutions that no longer exist.

The deputies leave in Chaika and Volga sedans laden with belongings and files, sparking rumors that they are stripping the building of televisions, computers, and other official property. Ivan Boiko, head of the department for the security of property of the government of Russia, later denies that any looting took place, though there was a brazen attempt by an official to take out 127,000 rubles from the Committee of Constitutional Control in a suitcase. It is, however, a last opportunity to remove and destroy files that might prove embarrassing or dangerous in future. Similar action is going on in many official buildings across Moscow. Quoting Russian presidential sources, TASS reports that some of the top brass at the new supersecurity ministry combining the KGB and the interior ministry are fast destroying files on corrupt senior police officers.

The USSR deputies elected from Russian districts are allowed to keep half their annual salaries, thanks to a resolution of the Russian parliament in the White House. This concession was not unanimous. Sergey Baburin, a thirty-two-year-old Afghan veteran and extreme nationalist—he is a friend of Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic—recommends bitterly that they should be awarded thirty pieces of silver for their treacherous role in failing to protect the Soviet Union.

Shortly before 5 p.m. Gorbachev leaves his Kremlin office. He is driven in his limousine across the Moscow River to the President Hotel, located in the historic Zamoskvorechye District. The five-star hotel built in 1982 was formerly known as the Hotel Oktyabrskaya, the Hotel October, in memory of the Russian Revolution, when it was used exclusively by the Communist Party to house visiting dignitaries and fraternal delegates.

In the absence of an official state send-off, Andrey Grachev has organized a grand reception in the ballroom for three hundred Russian and foreign media representatives to accord Gorbachev a final salute. He billed it in messages to journalists as “the last briefing by the presidential press service.” Those invited are, in Grachev’s opinion, “the only interlocutors capable of appreciating the true role of Gorbachev, and not embarrassed to express their appreciation.”

The director of the hotel, fearful of incurring the displeasure of the new authorities, has done everything in his power to prevent the event taking place in his establishment. He at first refused to accept the booking, insisting that the presidential account was closed. Even when Grachev got Gorbachev to provide cash from his own pocket, he kept saying no, but his Russian bosses in the end instructed him to take the reservation. Chernyaev notes with some satisfaction that the hotel manager, while no longer answerable to the party, is employed by a joint venture company with Western capitalists, so he had to give in. After all, “There are some uses for privatization!”

The ex-president looks so downbeat and exhausted as he arrives that those close to him fear he is in danger of having a heart attack.

But as he begins to climb the wide, carpeted marble stairway to the ballroom, Mikhail Gorbachev is greeted with a sound that washes over him like balm. At the top of the stairs the large assembly of guests starts applauding. His mood brightens immediately. Here are people who still want to listen to what he has to say. The brilliant sparkle comes back to his eyes as he is surrounded by wellwishers, and he joins in making toasts with glasses of lemon vodka. He hugs several of his friends, champions of glasnost, such as Len Karpinsky of
Moscow News
and Vitaly Tretyakov of
Nezavisimaya Gazeta,
and signs autographs for foreign correspondents who have been covering perestroika for years. CNN’s Tom Johnson gets him to sign his diary with the Mont Blanc pen with which the president dissolved the Soviet Union. The journalists also besiege Andrey Grachev, Anatoly Chernyaev, Yegor Yakovlev, Grigory Revenko, and Georgy Shakhnazarov for insider accounts of the final days.

Everyone wants to know what Gorbachev will do next. As he grabs a few sardines from the banquet table, he relates how in his native village of Privolnoye in the North Caucasus, his eighty-year-old mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva, had watched his speech on television and then sent him a message: “Leave everything, and come home.” Gorbachev predicts that when he calls her back, she will say, “Thank God, take a break, and be yourself again.”
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He speaks with such bravado about his future participation in the political process that a number of journalists feel he is laying the groundwork for a political comeback. “My role is changing, but I am not leaving the political scene,” he promises. “I have big plans.”
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As always in the presence of ardent admirers—though several in the gathering have written very critically of Gorbachev—he is voluble, expansive, and unfailingly charming, masterfully hiding the corrosive effects of the humiliations he has endured in the previous twenty-four hours. The rancor shows only in brief flashes. He complains that Yeltsin opposed everything he did in the last few months and—in an echo of Richard Nixon’s famous remark after an election defeat in 1962 that “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more”—he comments bitterly, “It’s easy to be against Gorbachev all the time. There is no one for them to oppose now. So, let them do what they can.”
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He remarks jokingly that there are so many presidents in what was the Soviet Union that losing one is not such a big thing, but losing a country is much more important. Fred Coleman, the
Newsweek
bureau chief, finds him in top form, relaxed, and composed. Over a glass of champagne, Gorbachev tells him, “A great task fell to my lot, and it was accomplished. Others will come who will perhaps do a better job. I wish them success.”
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Chernyaev watches his chief having to “talk his heart out for two hours . . . and us sinners were also tortured quite a bit!” He tells David Remnick of the
Washington. Post
that Yeltsin has insulted and provoked Gorbachev and made it personal, but that Gorbachev feels he has completed his mission, no matter what lies ahead. “His goals, his strategy and events all bear him out, despite the mistakes in tactics, the hesitations. His greatest mistake was that he always tried to balance things, to unite everyone, and that was absolutely impossible to do.”
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While the reception is in progress, the news reader on the television in the bar of the hotel is reminding viewers that as a consequence of the demise of the Soviet Union, they all woke up that morning no longer citizens of a great superpower but citizens of one of fifteen independent nations.

As he is driven home after the reception, Gorbachev passes several buildings where the Russian tricolor has been hung to mark the change in government. There are no red flags to be seen anywhere. The lowering of the communist emblem over the Kremlin on December 25 was the signal for Soviet flags to be pulled down from public buildings across the vast country and replaced with the white, blue, and red flag of independent Russia.

In St. Petersburg, as elsewhere, the Russian flag is hoisted over public buildings. But a red flag continues to fly from a metal pole on the House of Political Enlightenment, where the communists have been allowed to retain an office since it was turned into an international business center. It is visible from the Smolny Institute, where Vladimir Putin, future president of Russia, works as the head of the committee for external relations in the office of the mayor, Anatoly Sobchak.

The ex-KGB officer gives the order to workmen to remove the flag. The next day the communists put up another one. Putin gives the order once more, and once again his men remove the flag. Vladimir Churov, an aide to Mayor Sobchak, watches as back and forth it goes. “The communists began to run out of flags and started using all sorts of things. One of their last versions wasn’t even red but more of a dark brown. That put Putin over the edge. He found a crane and under his personal supervision had the flagpole cut down with a blowtorch.”
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CHAPTER 28

DECEMBER 27: TRIUMPH OF THE PLUNDERERS

Just before 8 a.m. on Friday, December 27, a little over a day and a half after Mikhail Gorbachev announced he was ceasing his activities as president of the USSR, Russian president Boris Yeltsin leaves his apartment at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, as usual groomed and spruced up by the women of his family. He climbs into the back of the presidential Zil, taken from Gorbachev’s dacha two nights ago, and directs the driver to take him straight to the Kremlin.