Moscow, December 25, 1991

by Conor O'Clery

  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.”[290]

  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.”[291]

  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.”[292]

  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.”[293]

  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.”[294]

  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 intern
ational 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.”[295]

  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.

  The limousine cuts across the ring road, cruises along Tverskaya Street, and turns right past the Intourist Hotel, then left in through the Borovitsky Gate of the Kremlin, finally stopping at the Senate Building. He is joined there by his deputy prime minister, Gennady Burbulis, parliament chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, and his minister for press and information, Mikhail Poltoranin.

  The four men crowd into the lift and take it to the third floor. Guards snap to attention as they stride purposefully along the red runner in the corridor and burst into the anteroom of the presidential office to confront the receptionist on duty.

  Mikhail Gorbachev has not yet arrived. He has an appointment at 11 a.m. in the presidential office with a group of journalists from the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. Under the deal worked out with Yeltsin in the Walnut Room, he believes he has the use of the office until Sunday. An unpleasant surprise awaits Gorbachev, however. In the early hours of the morning, on Yeltsin’s personal instructions, a group of workmen came with a bag of tools and unscrewed the plaque on the door of the office with the inscription in brass letters: “M. S. Gorbachev, President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” They replaced it with one stating, “B. N. Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation.” Gorbachev is no longer welcome.

  “Well, show us around!” Yeltsin commands the receptionist.[296] Without waiting for a response, he barges into the room. “Here on the table there was a marble pen set,” he thunders. “Where is it?” He clearly is implying that the property of the Kremlin is being pilfered by the outgoing officials. The secretary protests, “There was no set…. Mikhail Sergeyevich did not use such pens. We bought for him felt pens.”

  “OK and what’s here?” demands Yeltsin, peering into the resting room where Gorbachev takes his afternoon naps and seeing only the couch and toilet facilities. The Russian president goes behind the office desk and starts pulling out drawers. He comes upon one that will not open.

  “Why is it locked?” he booms. “Call the commanding officer.” An aide arrives with a key and opens the drawer. It is empty.

  After nosing around some more, Yeltsin summons Kremlin staff and orders them to dump Gorbachev’s remaining private belongings in the corridor. The group then gathers around the oval table in the office. “OK! Give us glasses,” calls out Yeltsin. A bottle is produced and whiskey splashed into the tumblers, which are raised in a triumphal toast.

  The secretary in the reception room nervously telephones Gorbachev and tells him what is happening: Yeltsin, Poltoranin, and Burbulis have occupied the office and are holding a party there, emptying a bottle of whiskey, the assistant says. And his name is no longer on the door.

  After an hour and a half of revelry, Yeltsin announces benevolently to the trembling receptionist that he has no need to inspect the Walnut Room or the State Council office. He has seen them before. He and his companions leave, laughing among themselves. “Behave yourself!” he calls over his shoulder. “I’m going to come back today!”

  Georgy Shakhnazarov arrives minutes later to check that the office is ready for Gorbachev’s interview with the Japanese correspondents. “I found that all the president’s things were taken out of the office and there was an order that by ten o’clock in the morning the office was to be ready for the arrival of the new master.”

  Anatoly Chernyaev is horrified. “What a nightmare! And Yeltsin gets more and more uncouth. He is trampling on everything…. He must be paying us back for yesterday’s reception with the press!” He once again feels utterly dismayed that his boss would still want to come to the presidential office at all. “Why should he humiliate himself? Why does he have to go to the Kremlin? The flag has already been brought down over the cupola… and he is already not a president.”[297]

  Gorbachev is in a fury when he arrives shortly after Yeltsin has left. On December 18 Yeltsin had publicly announced that Gorbachev could wait until the end of December or, at a maximum, until the middle of January to make a decision on his resignation. When he did decide to resign on December 25, Yeltsin had clearly and categorically agreed that he could remain in his office until December 29 to wind up his affairs.

  “Yeltsin put off his presidential duties to supervise personally my ‘expulsion’ from the Kremlin,” complained Gorbachev in his memoirs. “I was informed that Yeltsin, Khasbulatov and Burbulis had occupied my office at 8:30 a.m. and held a party there, emptying a bottle of whiskey… for their ‘victory.’ This was the triumph of plunderers, I can find no other word for it.”[298]

  The Russian president has had for some time the use of an office in the adjacent Kremlin building. But Gorbachev’s continued presence in the historic seat of power, two days after he stepped down, is a manifestation that a single all-union state still exists. It is an affront to the new ruler. Yeltsin is the sole president of Russia, but it is Gorbachev who is being fêted by the foreign media and who still claims the right to occupy the presidential office in the Kremlin, with the red flag of the Soviet Union behind his desk.

  Grachev reckons that the door plaque and the red flag are not merely symbols for Yeltsin but the very goals of the struggle, the chief trophies of his crusade against Gorbachev.

  Yeltsin does not like the “rumors” that appear later in the press that they literally threw Gorbachev’s things out of the Kremlin office. He makes some backhand charges of his own. “The old tenants did not unscrew the handles from the doors, of course. But they did remove some furniture and even took some official state gold fountain pens from their inkwells. Well, that kind of thing’s a habit in our country.” He denies acting imperiously and blames “friction among the clerks.” He claims that they warned Gorbachev and his staff a week before the move of their intentions. “It was a period of time quite sufficient to pack up one’s papers. From the outset I did not want Gorbachev and his team, or rather its remnants, either to be thrown out of the Kremlin or allowed to linger an extra month packing. Long farewells make for too many tears.”[299]

  The idea of moving into Gorbachev’s office crystallized in Yeltsin’s mind only in the previous few weeks, when it became evident that the Soviet Union had no future. Before that, when there was a chance that some form of union would be salvaged, there was no discussion of Gorbachev leaving the Kremlin, as he would have continued to command the center from there, however weakened.

  Up to then Yeltsin also gave the impression to his family that he would rule Russia from the White House. Since being elected Russian president in June, he has made minimal use of his Kremlin office, going there mainly for formal purposes. His daughter, Tanya, said a few weeks ago, “The White House is his real office; the Kremlin office is just for show—to receive foreign guests and hold other official ceremonies.”[300]

  Yeltsin is aware that
to rule from the Kremlin will give the world reason to suspect his “great power” ambitions and that many of his colleagues will question whether a democratically elected leader should occupy the centuries-old citadel of imperial and totalitarian rule. Some regard the White House, the scene of Yeltsin’s heroic stand in August, to be the state symbol of Russia, rather than the fortress of the tsars on Red Square.

  The Russian president has no patience, however, for suggestions that the Kremlin should be turned into a museum of history and culture after the departure of the last Soviet ruler. The Kremlin is an artistic gem, he acknowledges, but it is also the most important government compound in Russia. “The country’s entire defense system is hooked up to the Kremlin, the surveillance system, all the coded messages from all over the world are sent here, and there is a security apparatus for the buildings, developed down to the tiniest detail.” The Kremlin is, moreover, the symbol of “stability, duration and determination in the political line to be followed.”

  It also was Gorbachev’s bailiwick, and it is now his for the taking.

  One drawback for Yeltsin is that by moving to the Kremlin and bequeathing the White House as a kind of independent territory to the elected deputies, he is exacerbating the division between parliament and presidential rule and has left the White House with its squabbling parliamentarians to become a staging post for a future revolt against him.