Moscow, December 25, 1991

by Conor O'Clery

  As Garrison got up from the table, Yakovlev put an arm around him and said, “You should know we are resigning in one week. Tell no one.” Garrison was shocked. “Are you serious?” he asked. “All options are closed,” replied Yakovlev. “What, is there anything I can do?” asked the American. “Yes,” replied Gorbachev. “Can you bring another Antonov? Can you bring some meat? Moscow is running out of meat.” On leaving the Kremlin Garrison made a call to Donald Kendall, the former chairman of PepsiCo, which then owned Pizza Hut, and arranged for him to send a planeload of canned beef to Russia in a C-5A Galaxy troop carrier.

  Otherwise Gorbachev was deliberately coy for days about when he would step down. On December 20, in a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he insisted his departure was not imminent, as the transfer of power must be done in a constitutional manner. But the eviction notices were piling up. That afternoon the presidential account in the State Bank was closed on Yeltsin’s orders, leaving Gorbachev unable to authorize expenses for himself or his personal staff. Another Yeltsin decree placed the elite KGB Alpha Group under the sole control of the president of Russia.

  On Saturday, December 21, in Alma-Ata, Yeltsin and the heads of state from ten other republics of the original fifteen signed on to the Commonwealth of Independent States. They ignored a long letter from Gorbachev offering to play a unifying role. The eleven presidents signed documents declaring that the Commonwealth was not a state or a quasi-state entity. Moscow News correspondent Viktor Kiyanitsa reported that the figure of Gorbachev loomed over the proceedings like a mute reproach. The other person on their minds was James Baker, “who had been flying round the country in search of the nuclear button” and who by insisting on his five conditions for international recognition had “knocked together the new Commonwealth, whether he knew it or not.”

  Yeltsin arrived back in Moscow the next day and told reporters that they had discussed Gorbachev’s future. In the past leaders had been removed from politics and society, consigned to oblivion, and then either reburied after death or vilified, he said. But they were above that. They would allow Mikhail Sergeyevich to continue to play an active role in society, and they would give him financial security.

  Gorbachev was furious when he was told the republic leaders had acted so condescendingly. “For me, they have poisoned the air, they have humiliated me,” he fumed.[229] The former general secretary of the Communist Party, who once had tsar-like powers over the republics, declared himself “shocked by the treacherous behavior of those people, who cut the country in pieces in order to settle accounts and establish themselves as tsars.” Gorbachev’s contempt for the republics’ leaders was shared by his aides. Alexander Yakovlev growled that their intellectual level was so low that “you yourself become dumber talking to them.”[230]

  Yeltsin called President Bush once more, to inform him that the Commonwealth had been created, “so the center will simply cease to exist.” Bush immediately telephoned Gorbachev again.

  He found the Soviet president in a foul mood, furious at Yeltsin and the way events were rushing past him. Yeltsin had done a deal behind his back to dismantle the Soviet Union, he said bitterly. “In politics anything can happen, especially when one deals with such politicians.” The American president calmed him down. “I am thinking of you professionally and personally,” Bush assured him. He thought Gorbachev was “stunned about what was happening to him as a person and as the president of the Soviet Union…. His authority was slipping away.”

  Chernyaev was exasperated with Gorbachev for clinging to the Kremlin and furious with Yeltsin for the way he was treating Gorbachev. “Nicholas II at least received a delegation from the Duma with a request for him to resign,” he wrote in his diary. “He had the courage to give up the crown after three hundred years of dynasty. Gorbachev was simply rudely toppled.”[231] Alexander Yakovlev marveled at how Gorbachev continued to nurse for so long the forlorn hope that he could rescue the Soviet Union. “The train had left and Gorbachev was running after it, as if he didn’t notice that history was going the other way.” Yakovlev himself knew well how happy the republics were to break away from the center. One president had told him crudely, “It is better to be the head of a fly than the arse of an elephant.” But Gorbachev couldn’t imagine they would think this way. Was he being too critical? Yakovlev asked himself. No. Both felt deep pain at their many unrealized hopes.

  “Criticism can only be fair,” he concluded, “if it recognizes that Gorbachev was at the forefront of one of the biggest events in the history of Russia.”[232]

  Chapter 22

  DECEMBER 25: EVENING

  With ten minutes to go before Mikhail Gorbachev’s address to the now almost extinct empire he inherited more than six years back, his stylist and makeup artist comes to his office to prepare him for the cameras. She expertly dabs powder on his birthmark, the vascular malformation on his bald dome that is commonly referred to as a port-wine stain because of its purplish color. The first official portraits of Gorbachev were issued with the birthmark airbrushed out. That was before the communist leader introduced glasnost.

  The Soviet president wonders where the CNN and Russian television cameras are. He assumes he will be making his stepping-down speech at the desk where he works as president. “Where are they going to be filming?” he inquires. As director of the television coverage, Yegor Yakovlev tells him that everything has been set up in the sham office, Room Number 4. “Why not in my office?” asks Gorbachev. Yakovlev explains that there are so many technicians, photographers, and journalists involved, not to mention equipment, that they would have had to take over the real office for two hours to prepare for the broadcast. It is too late to change anything. CNN has set up its broadcasting operation down the corridor. They must go there.[233]

  “CNN broadcasts to 153 countries,” remarks Yakovlev, emphasizing the importance of the network’s worldwide coverage of the resignation.

  “And the eleven countries of the CIS as well,” notes Gorbachev. “Well, let’s not take the risk of changing the location.”

  He rises abruptly, puts the farewell address and the resignation decrees into his soft leather document case, and leaves the office for the last time as president of the Soviet Union.

  The mock office is already brightly lit with arc lights as Gorbachev and his aides enter. Setting up and connecting the cameras and cables and communications equipment has just been completed. A last-minute change of location would have caused consternation among the television crews.

  Milling around the confined space and spilling out into the corridor are twenty-seven CNN staffers, plus a score of Russian technicians and some official photographers. Filmmaker Igor Belyaev is supervising Russian cameras for his own documentary.

  The room has been arranged to resemble the real thing as closely as possible. The floor is covered with a green floral carpet similar to that in his office. Beside the desk is a bank of four telephones, though they have never been connected. Behind the chair, on the left from the camera’s perspective, the Soviet flag droops from a ten-foot pole in front of a gold-framed painting of the Kremlin. The wall to the right is draped with scalloped white curtains. Overhead hangs a large chandelier identical to the one in the president’s office. However, instead of a high-backed leather chair there is a velvet shield-back chair, so that Gorbachev’s profile is clearly outlined for the cameras against the soft oyster green of the damask silk background.

  Among the still photographers looking for a good position is Liu Heung Shing, a staff member of the Associated Press bureau in Moscow.[234] Hong Kong—born, Liu was driving around Moscow looking for picture opportunities when Tom Johnson called him on his portable telephone and told him to get round to the Kremlin as quickly as he could. Johnson, besides being president of CNN, is also a director of AP. No foreign news agencies have been able to get a pass into the Kremlin to see history made, but Johnson has added the names of Liu and AP reporter Alan Cooperman to his crew so
he can smuggle them in.

  At first Liu doesn’t have a clear idea of what is happening. “When I entered the ornate chandeliered room, I knew something big was going on. However, I saw there was no presence of any Russian journalists or TASS photographers. Neither were there any other Western journalists. Tom greeted me and said to please hang around as Mikhail Gorbachev would talk to CNN after the televised speech. I soon found out it was going to be his resignation speech.”

  Liu squats in front of the tripod supporting a large first-generation Soviet TV camera and prepares to take the definitive picture of Gorbachev giving up power.

  Making his way through the mêlée, Gorbachev shakes hands with Tom Johnson and takes his seat behind the walnut desk. The room clears quickly, apart from a handful of CNN and Russian personnel. Chernyaev, Grachev, Palazchenko, and both Yakovlevs, Alexander and Yegor, hang around out of camera shot.

  Gorbachev opens the green folder containing his speech and two decrees. One is his resignation as president of the Soviet Union and the other the transfer of command and control of the armed forces to Boris Yeltsin. An aide comes and places a cup and saucer on the desktop to his right containing milky coffee. Gorbachev straightens his papers and says in a quiet voice, his head down as if talking to himself, “If you have to go, you have to go. It’s that time.”

  With two minutes left Gorbachev holds a whispered consultation with Chernyaev and Grachev. He asks again should he sign the texts now or after the resignation. They decide after is better.

  A solidly built Russian assistant in red blouse and purple knee-length cardigan points to the camera and asks Gorbachev, “Is that OK for you, are you comfortable with that?” “All clear, understood,” replies Gorbachev.

  As the moment approaches for the live broadcast, a security man in grey suit and blue shirt and tie leans down and orders Liu to leave. He refuses, and the guard glares at him furiously. He hisses at him not to take a photograph during the televising of the address. Liu replies “OK!” But he doesn’t mean it.

  A technician fits a microphone to the president’s tie, and Gorbachev takes a felt pen from inside his suit jacket. He tries it out on the green folder. It doesn’t work. “Andrey, it is too hard,” he says, glancing back at his spokesman, who is hovering over his shoulder. “You wouldn’t have a softer one? Give me a good pen to sign these.”

  Johnson, standing a few feet away, sees what is happening. He reaches into his pocket and draws out his Mont Blanc ballpoint, a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary present from his wife, Edwina. The sudden movement alarms the three security officials in the room. “They did everything but draw AK-47s,” laughs Caudill. “Gorbachev says to them, ‘Nyet, nyet!’”[235]

  “We were about to go live on Russian television and around the world with the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the conveyance of power to Boris Yeltsin,” recalled Johnson. “And I am standing one person away from Gorbachev within, say, forty-five seconds to a minute before air time. He takes this green Soviet-made pen out to just test it…. And it didn’t work…. And I just reached in my pocket and I said, ‘Mr. President, you may use mine.’”[236]

  “Is it American?” asks Gorbachev with a smile as he takes the German-made pen with black resin sheen and gold point.

  “No, sir, it is either French or German,” says Johnson.

  “In that case I will use it.”

  Once again a member of the media provides the instrument for the Soviet Union’s liquidation.

  Gorbachev tests the pen on the green folder and, satisfied that it works, ends the discussion with his aides and—despite what he has just been advised—signs the five-page decree abdicating as president of the Soviet Union and the second decree giving up his post as commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces. Hardly anyone takes any notice. The historic event is not televised, as the cameras have not gone live. He puts the pen on the edge of the desk beyond the coffee cup and places the decrees on the left side of the folder.

  In cities across the world, viewers tune in to watch the first and last resignation of a leader of the Soviet Union, live on CNN.

  In the Washington suburbs, a generation of sovietologists, correspondents, academics, and economists who had been dealing with the mysterious and closed USSR over the years pause in their preparations for Christmas lunch to watch the news from Moscow. Many are in a state of incomprehension—even a few weeks ago it seemed the Soviet Union would prevail in one form or other.

  As Gorbachev is preparing to make his broadcast, another convoy with sirens wailing makes its way to the Kremlin. It is the president of Russia, who has just finished his crisis meeting with Moscow’s deputy mayor, Yury Luzhkov, in the White House. His car pulls up outside Building 14 just before seven o’clock. Accompanied by Gennady Burbulis, Yeltsin takes the lift to the fourth floor, where he has his Kremlin office. An assistant has the television switched on.

  Yeltsin’s office has a more personal feel than Gorbachev’s presidential suite in the adjoining building. The walls are decorated with a picture of Yeltsin on the tank during the coup, an ornate religious icon, and a framed painting of his eighty-three-year-old mother Klavdiya Vasilyevna Yeltsina, copied from a photograph by the painter Ilya Glazunov, a well-known purveyor of Russian nationalism. There is a map of the Soviet Union covered with colored pins signifying hot spots of ethnic and nationalist crises.

  The group gathers round the television to observe Gorbachev doing what Yeltsin publicly first asked him to do in his famous televised interview ten months ago. At that time his call for Gorbachev’s resignation had provoked outrage and dismay around the world.

  Everything is now in place for the final act of the transition. As soon as Gorbachev has finished speaking, the Russian president is to walk across the narrow courtyard to Gorbachev’s office. There, in the presence of Marshal Shaposhnikov and the television cameras, he will take formal possession of the nuclear suitcase and will become the legal successor in Russia of the last president of the USSR.

  The world will see the two rivals shake hands and smile as the chemodanchik changes ownership and the curtain comes down on seventy-four years of Soviet rule. At least that is the plan.

  Chapter 23

  THE DEAL IN THE WALNUT ROOM

  The details of the transition of power were worked out during a nine-hour encounter between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin two days before the Soviet president gave his resignation address on the evening of December 25, 1991.[237]

  After the conspiracy in the Belovezh Forest, which killed off his political career, Gorbachev went through the first two stages of grief—denial and anger. After Alma-Ata he moved to the third stage—bargaining. He now had to negotiate his retirement package. He had got his aides to draw up decrees regarding his pension and living conditions and prepare drafts of a resignation address. But he couldn’t bring himself to set the final wheels in motion.

  Yeltsin forced the issue in typical fashion. In midmorning on Monday, December 23, six years to the day since Gorbachev promoted him to Moscow party chief, the Russian president sent word that he was on his way to the Senate Building to set the terms for Gorbachev’s exit from political life.

  The president’s aides were furious at the short notice. Grachev perceived Yeltsin to be acting as he always did, capriciously and aggressively.[238] But as Gorbachev’s former deputy spokesman Sergey Grigoryev put it, “Yeltsin had Gorbachev by the balls.” Now that the republics had signed up to the Commonwealth of Independent States, scheduled to come into existence on January 1, there was no longer a role for a Union president.

  The unexpected arrival of Yeltsin was doubly embarrassing for Gorbachev’s staff. They had alerted Ted Koppel and his television crew to be in the Kremlin to film something quite different.

  “When we picked up our equipment on that Monday morning, we were told Gorbachev would be taping his resignation speech in his office in a matter of minutes,” said Koppel. “He was, we were
told, getting a haircut in preparation. Waiting with us was Gorbachev’s makeup artist. At one point a member of the president’s personal security guard came to the door to tell us that Gorbachev was a minute away. The president’s desk with two Soviet flags behind it was fully lit. Two large cameras from Soviet state television were already beaming the signal out for taping.

  “But he never showed up. It was just past 11 a.m., and Boris Yeltsin was coming to the Kremlin for a meeting.”[239]

  With Yeltsin on his way, Gorbachev had to scrap plans to prerecord his speech and make up his mind quickly when he would actually announce his departure to the nation. He told Grachev he would most likely broadcast his resignation speech live the following day. “There’s no sense in dragging this out,” he sighed.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to wait until Wednesday?” Grachev suggested. “Tomorrow is December 24, Christmas Eve. In many countries this is the biggest holiday of the year. Let people celebrate in peace.” “All right,” said Gorbachev, who like his press secretary was seemingly unaware that the “biggest holiday” was Christmas Day, “but Wednesday at the latest.”

  Grachev asked Gorbachev if he thought it would be acceptable for the American and Russian television crews to film the two leaders in the act of greeting each other. This would be an important encounter between the two men who had shaped Russia’s destiny, and it should be recorded for history. Gorbachev gave his OK with a wave of his hand.