Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (44 page)

Like Chernyaev, the other Yakovlev in the circle has also been hurt over time by Gorbachev’s thoughtlessness. Alexander Yakovlev once confided to Chernyaev that in six years working with Gorbachev he had never heard a single thank you. He complained, “I don’t even feel any gratitude from him for the fact that the idea of perestroika was born in our first conversations in Canada back when I was ambassador.” Their relationship was at times quite fraught and is still complicated. Only a year earlier Gorbachev was told by Kryuchkov that Yakovlev was an agent of the CIA. The president became so paranoid that one day in late summer 1990 he got it into his head that his adviser was planning a coup with other radicals.
³
He tracked Yakovlev’s whereabouts to a forest hundreds of miles away, where he was picking mushrooms with his grandchildren. On the telephone he practically charged the flabbergasted Yakovlev with conspiring against him. In the event the diehard conservatives were right to suspect the long-term intentions of Gorbachev’s ally. Three years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Yakovlev asserts that he and Shevardnadze realized full well during the perestroika years that their advice to Gorbachev would lead to the destruction of the system, and he boasts that “we did it before our opponents woke up in time to prevent it.”
⁴
The coup opened Gorbachev’s eyes to the machinations of Kryuchkov, but he has never completely got over his mistrust of Yakovlev. He knows that it wasn’t only Yeltsin who relished his humiliation in the Russian parliament after the coup. He noticed some of his own associates gloating, Alexander Yakovlev among them.

Georgy Shakhnazarov also helped destroy the system, though he has often been frustrated by Gorbachev’s vacillations. The sixty-seven-year-old Armenian regularly urged Gorbachev in the late 1980s to convert to social democracy and move towards multiparty politics, which was unthinkable at the time. “As often happens in revolutionary systems,” he would observe later, “there are things which seem banal today but which you couldn’t even mention then.” Gorbachev once suspected him, too, of leaking information—about decisions on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh—and asked Kryuchkov to investigate, but nothing came of it. Twenty-one months earlier it was Shakhnazarov alone who was invited to join Mikhail and Raisa for a private glass of champagne to celebrate his leader’s elevation to the presidency. Now he is here to bear witness to his abdication. Raisa herself has not come for the obsequies. The Kremlin late nights have always been men-only affairs.

For all the perceived slights and injustices in the service of Gorbachev, however, a warmth and sense of camaraderie has returned to the relationship between the dethroned king and his reform-minded courtiers in these final hours. The small group of aides in the empty Kremlin building are at one in believing they serve a historic figure and a great man. This bond unites them and draws them to Gorbachev as December 25, 1991, comes to a close.

The lowering of the Soviet flag from the Kremlin has a profound effect on all of them. Even Alexander Yakovlev, the most radical of the perestroika reformers, feels it tear at his emotions. He, Chernyaev, and Shakhnazarov all fought under the red flag in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler’s armies. Only a year ago Yakovlev had declared that he would defend the revolutionary emblem, “as my father defended it during the four years of the civil war and as I defended it during the Great Patriotic War.”
⁵
It is no longer there to defend.

Andrey Grachev regards the day as both a defeat and a tragedy. It signals the defeat of a statesman forced out of office before completing his mission and the tragedy of a reformer forced to abandon his plans before they bore fruit. It occurs to the comparatively youthful spokesman (in this company) that some other friends are missing at the table, but at least no one is present who is not wanted. Judas is not at this last supper, but “even if Judas had been in Gorbachev’s entourage, his betrayal would have already taken place.”
⁶

The most prominent reformer at Gorbachev’s side as the Cold War ended is missing from the gathering. Eduard Shevardnadze watched the resignation speech in his apartment on Plotnikov Lane, off the Old Arbat, preoccupied with news of a civil war that has broken out in his native Georgia. The former Soviet foreign minister, like the two Yakovlevs, rejoined the presidential team after the coup. Recently he and Gorbachev have spent some late evenings alone together in the Kremlin, just to talk, but they never could rediscover the warmth that marked their relationship when they were achieving great things together on the international stage. Shevardnadze cannot forgive Gorbachev for protecting the Soviet army over the 1989 killings of demonstrators in the Georgian capital Tbilisi and for not speaking out in his defense when he was under attack from hard-liners. He feels that the president never listened to the advice of the people genuinely loyal to him. Moreover, he bears a grudge over Gorbachev’s failure to mention him when accepting the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. He believes that had Gorbachev “done something, said just a couple words, Shevardnadze would have received the Nobel Prize, too.”
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He is convinced Gorbachev came to resent his foreign minister’s popularity in the West, concluding that “the world had gotten to know me and trust me and Gorbachev wasn’t pleased about it.” During the coup Shevardnadze publicly raised questions about Gorbachev’s degree of complicity, and Gorbachev later told a press conference that that statement should be on Shevardnadze’s conscience. Shevardnadze would also have liked Gorbachev to acknowledge, in the farewell address, his role in ending the Cold War, but his suggested input to the resignation speech was ignored. Now he feels that returning to his old job was a grave personal mistake.

As the men in the Walnut Room make toasts and refill their glasses, Gorbachev reminisces about his early days as a career communist and the importance in his life of Mikhail Suslov, the ascetic grey eminence who shaped communist thinking in the period between the Stalin and Gorbachev eras. The young Stavropol apparatchik was at one time so in awe of Suslov he took to sporting the same type of fedora he wore. Suslov groomed Gorbachev for stardom, never imagining that his protégé would one day help destroy the party as a would-be reformer. Alexander Yakovlev has only contempt for Suslov. In his research he has identified him as one of the ideologues and directors of a program of mass murders under Stalin. He has established that Suslov took part in organizing arrests, was directly responsible for deporting thousands of people from the Baltic states, and orchestrated the persecution of prominent Soviet artists and scientists. In his opinion, Gorbachev’s mentor deserves to be tried for crimes against humanity. But he says nothing.

Gorbachev recalls how terrified he was when he came to work in Moscow and how his eyes were opened as to how policy was made when he became a candidate member of the Politburo. He informs his comrades that after finishing his memoirs, he intends to write a book explaining how and why the idea of perestroika was born in his head. He asks Chernyaev, by the way, to tell Horst Telchik, the senior aide to German chancellor Helmut Kohl, that money for his book
The August Coup
, which has just been published in the West, should not be sent to Moscow.
⁸
In the uncertain economic and political climate it is better to keep hard currency outside the country for now.

Though he is slow to voice his appreciation for loyalty, Gorbachev is moved by the fact that on this evening of his utmost distress, “together with me were the closest friends and colleagues who shared with me all the great pressures and drama of the last months of the presidency.” These are the people who understand the real meaning of what has taken place. “Many were on duty in the Kremlin around the clock. They were not motivated by professional interests but by sincere feeling. I felt it very deeply, especially as I had conflicts with some of them in the past.”
⁹
He believes that only close associates like these could know how great a burden was the historical task he undertook, how hard things were sometimes, and how events often drove him to the point of despair.

The melancholy reformers stay on in the Kremlin until it is approaching midnight, reluctant to accept the fact that the last day of the last Soviet leader has to end—and their careers with it.

“A couple of bottles of cognac were drunk,” recalled Grachev. “The atmosphere was solemn, sad. There was something of a feeling of a big thing accomplished. There was a kind of feeling of everyone sharing.”
¹⁰

The presidential Zil is waiting for Gorbachev when he leaves the Senate Building and steps out into Kremlin Square after bidding emotional farewells to his comrades. The driver takes the exhausted ex-president through the deserted streets of the city center, across the Moscow River bridge, along Kutuzovsky Prospekt to Rublyov Highway, and finally into the driveway of the dacha. It is turning colder, and the headlights reflect off ice crystals on the frozen snow piled up by the tarmac. The driver does not park the Zil in the garage, as he normally does, but turns and heads off into the night.

There is a shock for Gorbachev when he enters the presidential residence. Clothes, shoes, books, framed pictures, and personal souvenirs are piled on the floor or crammed into boxes and crates, ready for moving to their new home. It is not a night for a relaxing midnight walk with Raisa around the paths. Besides, he is feeling the symptoms of influenza.

Igor Belyaev brings to his Moscow apartment the tapes he has made of the president holding talks with officials and diplomats during his last days. The documentary maker has some unique shots of Gorbachev taking care of outstanding business, such as releasing Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s KGB file. Belyaev admires his fellow alumnus from Moscow University. He wants him to be loved by the Russian people while he is still alive and appreciated as a person whom Russia has failed to understand. Knowing of Belyaev’s devotion, Yegor Yakovlev had put him in overall charge of the project by ABC and Gosteleradio to record Gorbachev’s departure. As he expects, the filmmaker finds that there is extreme sensitivity at the television center about any attention being paid to Gorbachev. Other than the actual resignation broadcast and the Soviet-American film, hardly anyone in television headquarters in Moscow wants to be involved in a positive program on Gorbachev’s contribution to the world.

Belyaev stores the reels under a sofa, where they remain for a decade before they are retrieved. He is not able to show his documentary on Russian television until the tenth anniversary of Gorbachev’s resignation, in December 2001.

In another part of the Kremlin, Yeltsin is also staying late rather than returning home. But as Gorbachev is downing cognac, it is Yeltsin this evening who is the sober one. The Russian president is chastened by his new responsibility as supreme commander in chief of the armed forces, with legal control of the nuclear suitcase. When Shaposhnikov comes to his office to complete the business of transferring the
chemodanchik,
he finds Yeltsin in a subdued mood.
¹¹
As has happened before, an outburst of petulance has been followed by self-doubt and feelings of remorse.

An hour ago there were two presidents of two different political entities resident in one city. Now Yeltsin is on his own and must play by new rules. His rapture on seizing absolute power, he admits later, is quickly replaced by “a bad case of the jitters.”

Yeltsin is intrigued by the communications screen, authorization buttons, and telephone system in the case. Shaposhnikov observes how he thoroughly familiarizes himself with the equipment and how it works, talks to the officer-specialists, and resolves all questions of their accommodation, their routine, their personal life and work procedures. “After that I stayed with Yeltsin for another hour, and we talked in detail about the problems of the armed forces.”

The problems are overwhelming. Since 7 p.m., when the last Soviet leader signed the decree resigning as commander in chief, the 3.8 million-strong Soviet military has ceased to exist. The country to which they all swore an oath of allegiance is no more. Its nuclear forces are in four republics but are now subordinate to the Russian president. As defense minister and commander, on paper, of the armed forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Shaposhnikov has new responsibilities. He expresses grave concern to his political chief about the chaos that may follow after the vast military machine is broken up.

The collapse of the communist superpower has left units of the Soviet army, navy, and air force in newly independent countries. The marshal must oversee the withdrawal of conventional forces of Russian nationality and all nuclear weapons from Russia’s neighbors. Before the fall of the USSR the operational area of Moscow’s armed forces extended across 8.65 million square miles, from the Pacific to Western Europe. It has been reduced to the 6.6 million square miles of Russian territory, which shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea.

All the operational maps are out of date. Moscow has lost Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, with their strategic Baltic Sea ports; Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine in the heart of Europe; the Caucasian states of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan; and the once loyal “stans,” Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

The new governments are busy seizing Soviet military assets. There is confusion everywhere. Ships and aircraft are being hurriedly relocated by Russian commanders to prevent them being requisitioned by other republics. On Shaposhnikov’s advice Yeltsin this morning ordered the pride of the Soviet fleet, the enormous and sophisticated new aircraft carrier the
Admiral Kuznetsov,
still undergoing trials, to set sail from the Crimean port of Sevastopol and relocate to Murmansk in northern Russia to prevent it from being seized by the new Ukrainian authorities.