Moscow, December 25, 1991 Read online

  Moscow, December 25, 1991

  Conor O'clery

  The implosion of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a gripping game played out between two men who intensely disliked each other and had different concepts for the future. Mikhail Gorbachev, a sophisticated and urbane reformer, sought to modernize and preserve the USSR; Boris Yeltsin, a coarse and a hard drinking “bulldozer,” wished to destroy the union and create a capitalist Russia. The defeat of the August 1991 coup attempt, carried out by hardline communists, shook Gorbachev’s authority and was a triumph for Yeltsin. But it took four months of intrigue and double-dealing before the Soviet Union collapsed and the day arrived when Yeltsin could hustle Gorbachev out of the Kremlin, and move in as ruler of Russia.

  Conor O’Clery has written a unique and truly suspenseful thriller of the day the Soviet Union died. The internal power plays, the shifting alliances, the betrayals, the mysterious three colonels carrying the briefcase with the nuclear codes, and the jockeying to exploit the future are worthy of John Le Carré or Alan Furst. The Cold War’s last act was a magnificent dark drama played out in the shadows of the Kremlin.

  Conor O’Clery

  MOSCOW, DECEMBER 25, 1991

  The Last Day of the Soviet Union

  To Stanislav and Marietta

  Goodbye our Red Flag.

  You slipped down from the Kremlin roof

  not so proudly

  not so adroitly

  as you climbed many years ago

  on the destroyed Reichstag

  smoking like Hitler’s last fag.

  Goodbye our Red Flag.

  You were our brother and our enemy.

  You were a soldier’s comrade in trenches,

  you were the hope of all captive Europe,

  But like a Red curtain you concealed behind you

  the Gulag

  stuffed with frozen dead bodies.

  Why did you do it,

  our Red Flag?

  …I didn’t take the Tsar’s Winter Palace.

  I didn’t storm Hitler’s Reichstag.

  I’m not what you call a “Commie. ”

  But I caress the Red Flag

  and cry.

  —Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Goodbye Our Red Flag”

  RUSSIAN/SOVIET DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Afanasyev, Viktor, editor of Pravda, 1976–1989

  Afanasyev, Yury, historian, pro-Gorbachev deputy

  Akayev, Aksar, elected president of Kyrgystan in 1990

  Akhromeyev, Sergey, marshal of the Soviet army, putschist

  Alksnis, Viktor, army officer, campaigned against Gorbachev

  Andropov, Yury, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1982–1984

  Bakatin, Vadim, pro-reform minister, last chairman of the KGB

  Baklanov, Oleg, head of Soviet military-industrial complex, putschist

  Belyaev, Igor, documentary maker, friend of Gorbachev

  Bessmertnykh, Alexander, Soviet minister for foreign affairs, fired after August coup

  Boldin, Valery, Gorbachev’s chief of staff, putschist

  Bonner, Yelena, widow of Andrey Sakharov

  Bovin, Alexander, USSR/Russia ambassador to Israel

  Brezhnev, Leonid, first, then general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1964–1982

  Burbulis, Gennady, close associate of Yeltsin

  Burlarsky, Fyodor, pro-reform editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta

  Chernenko, Konstantin, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1984–1985

  Chernyaev, Anatoly, close associate of Gorbachev

  Chubais, Anatoly, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, responsible for privatization

  Gaidar, Yegor, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, responsible for shock therapy

  Gamsakhurdia, Zviad, elected president of Georgia in 1991

  Gerasimov, Gennady, Soviet foreign affairs spokesman

  Gorbachev, Mikhail, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1995–1991, president of the Soviet Union, 1990–1991

  Gorbacheva, Irina, daughter of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev

  Gorbacheva, Raisa, wife of Mikhail Gorbachev

  Grachev, Andrey, Gorbachev’s press secretary

  Grachev, Pavel, army general, sided with Yeltsin in August coup

  Grishin, Viktor, Moscow party chief, 1967–1985

  Kalugin, Oleg, KGB dissident

  Karimov, Islam, elected president of Uzbekistan in 1990

  Khasbulatov, Ruslan, chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, 1991–1993

  Khrushchev, Nikita, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1953–1964

  Komplektov, Viktor, USSR/Russian ambassador to the United States

  Korotich, Vitaly, pro-reform editor of Ogonyok, 1986–1991

  Korzhakov, Alexander, Yeltsin’s security chief

  Kozyrev, Andrey, Russian minister of foreign affairs

  Kravchenko, Leonid, head of central television, fired after August coup

  Kravchuk, Leonid, elected president of Ukraine in 1991

  Kryuchkov, Vladimir, chairman of KGB, putschist

  Kuznetsov, Alexander, Yeltsin’s personal cameraman

  Lebed, Alexander, army general, sided with Yeltsin in August coup

  Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, founder of Soviet Union

  Ligachev, Yegor, conservative member of Politburo

  Lukyanov, Anatoly, chairman of USSR Supreme Soviet, 1990–1991, putschist

  Luzhkov, Yury, mayor of Moscow, 1992–2010

  Moiseyev, Mikhail, army general, supported August coup

  Murashev, Arkady, liberal Moscow police chief

  Nazarbayev, Nursultan, elected president of Kazakhstan, 1990

  Nenashev, Mikhail, head of state television until 1990

  Palazchenko, Pavel, interpreter for Gorbachev

  Pankin, Boris, Soviet minister for foreign affairs after August coup

  Pavlov, Valentin, Soviet prime minister, putschist

  Petrov, Yury, aide to Yeltsin

  Petrushenko, Nikolay, army officer, campaigned against Gorbachev

  Plekhanov, Yury, KGB general who held Gorbachevs prisoner during August coup

  Poltoranin, Mikhail, ex-editor, Yeltsin press secretary

  Popov, Gavriil, mayor of Moscow, 1990–1992

  Primakov, Yevgeny, director of foreign intelligence service after August coup

  Pugo, Boris, Soviet interior minister, committed suicide after August coup

  Putin, Vladimir, aide to St. Petersburg mayor, later president and prime minister of Russia

  Redkoborody, Vladimir, KGB officer in charge of presidential security

  Revenko, Grigory, aide to Gorbachev

  Rostropovich, Mstislav, cellist and supporter of reform

  Rutskoy, Alexander, vice president of Russia, 1991–1993

  Ryzhkov, Nikolay, Soviet prime minister, 1985–1990

  Sakharov, Andrey, physicist and human rights campaigner

  Shakhnazarov, Georgy, adviser to Gorbachev

  Shakhrai, Sergey, Yeltsin aide, drafter of Belovezh accord

  Shaposhnikov, Yevgeny, air force general, appointed Soviet defense minister after August coup

  Shatalin, Stanislav, radical economist

  Shenin, Oleg, Communist Party Central Committee secretary, putschist

  Shevardnadze, Eduard, Soviet foreign minister, elected leader of Georgia in 1992

  Shushkevich, Stanislau, elected chairman of Belarus parliament in 1991

  Silayev, Ivan, last Soviet prime minister

  Sobchak, Anatoly, pro-reform mayor of St. Petersburg

  Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, former political prisoner and writer

  Stalin
, Joseph, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1922–1952

  Sukhanov, Lev, assistant to Yeltsin

  Suslov, Mikhail, Soviet ideologist in Brezhnev era

  Tarasenko, Sergey, aide to Shevardnadze

  Tretyakov, Vitaly, pro-reform editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta

  Tsipko, Alexander, Gorbachev speechwriter

  Varennikov, Valentin, army general, putschist

  Vlasov, Alexander, Communist candidate defeated by Yeltsin in election for chairman of Russian Supreme Soviet

  Vorontsov, Yury, USSR/Russian ambassador to United Nations

  Yakovlev, Alexander, diplomat, close adviser to Gorbachev, inspiration for perestroika

  Yakovlev, Yegor, pro-reform editor of Moscow News, later head of state television

  Yanayev, Gennady, vice president of Soviet Union, putschist

  Yaroshenko, Viktor, aide to Yeltsin

  Yavlinsky, Grigory, radical economist

  Yazov, Dmitry, Soviet minister of defense, putschist

  Yeltsin, Boris, Moscow party boss, 1985—1987, chairman of Russian Supreme Soviet, 1990–1991, president of Russia, 1991–1999

  Yeltsina, Naina, wife of Boris Yeltsin

  Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, far right Russian politician

  PREFACE

  This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city. The day is Wednesday, December 25, 1991. The city is Moscow. It is the day the Soviet Union ends and the red flag comes down from the Kremlin. It is witness to a deeply personal and politically charged drama, marked at the highest levels (and out of sight of the public) by shouts, tears, reminiscences, and melodrama. It climaxes in a final act of surrender by Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin, two extraordinary men who despised each other and whose interaction shaped modern Russia.

  In reconstructing the events of this midwinter day, I have combined my interviews and my own research in television and newspaper archives with material from over a hundred memoirs, diaries, biographies, and other works that have appeared since the fall of the Soviet Union in English and Russian. I have also drawn on my experience observing Gorbachev and Yeltsin up close in the last four years of Soviet rule, when I was a correspondent based in Moscow. During this period I frequented the Kremlin and the Russian White House, where the fight between the two rivals played out. I hung around parliamentary and party meetings, grabbing every opportunity to question the two leaders when they appeared. I interviewed Politburo members, editors, economists, nationalists, Communist Party radicals and hard-liners, dissidents, striking coal miners, and countless people just trying to get by. I was a face in the crowd at pro-democracy rallies, at Red Square commemorations, and at the barricades in the Baltics. I traveled around Russia, from Chechnya to Yakutsk, and to the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, observing the changes sweeping the USSR that would lead to the denouement on Christmas Day 1991. And since then I have returned to Russia regularly, for both professional and personal reasons.

  I was privileged to experience the last days of the Soviet Union and what came after not just as a foreign observer but as a member by marriage of a Russian-Armenian family. The Suvorovs live in Siberia, where they experienced the excitement, hardships, and absurdities of those turbulent years and taught me the joys of summer at the dacha. My philologist wife Zhanna was a deputy in a regional soviet, and later, when we moved to Washington, she worked for the International Finance Corporation on the post-1991 project to privatize Russia. My father-in-law, Stanislav Suvorov, a shoemaker now in his eighties and still working in a Krasnoyarsk theater, suffered under the old system. He served five years in jail for a simple act of speculation—selling his car at a profit. He later prospered by providing handmade shoes for top party officials. My mother-in-law, Marietta, a party member, welcomed the free market that came with the transition from Gorbachev to Yeltsin with the comment, “At least now I don’t have to humiliate myself to buy some cheese.” Nevertheless, I saw the pernicious effect on the family of economic and social chaos. My cousin-in-law Ararat, a police officer, was shot dead by the mafia in Krasnoyarsk. Marietta’s savings disappeared overnight with hyperinflation. My sister-in-law Larisa, director of a music school, went unpaid for months in the postcommunist economic chaos and one day received, in lieu of salary, a cardboard box of men’s socks. All this, and an attempt by the KGB to compromise me by trying (and failing) to intimidate Zhanna into working for them shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, has given me a fairly unique insight into what was going on in the society that threw up Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and how it all came to a head.

  In compiling the events of December 25, 1991, I have used only information that I have been able to source or verify. None of the dialogue or emotions of the characters has been invented. I have used my best judgment to determine when someone’s recollection is deliberately misleading and self-serving, or simply mistaken, as the mind plays tricks with the past and witnesses sometimes contradict each other. One person in the Kremlin recalls that it snowed heavily in Moscow on December 25, 1991, others that it didn’t (it was a dry, mild day, confirmed by meteorological records). Some players have vivid recall; others do not: Andrey Grachev and Yegor Gaidar were able to provide me with detailed accounts of what went on inside the Gorbachev and Yeltsin camps, respectively, but Yeltsin’s collaborator Gennady Burbulis told me he simply did not have memories of that long-ago day.

  A note on names and spelling: Russian names contain a first name, a patronymic, and a surname, hence Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. The respectful form of address is the first name plus patronymic, which can cause confusion outside Russia—once after I politely addressed Gorbachev on television as “Mikhail Sergeyevich,” a friend complimented me for being on first-name terms with the Soviet leader. Among family and friends a diminutive form of the first name is common, such as Sasha for Alexander, Borya for Boris, and Tolya for Anatoly. For the spelling of Russian names and words, I have used the more readable system of transliteration, using y rather than i, ii, or iy, thus Yury rather than Yuri. Different versions may appear in the bibliography, where I have not changed publishers’ spellings. For clarity I have included a list of the main characters (“Dramatis Personae”).

  Many people made this book possible by generously sharing their time and insights. I would especially like to acknowledge Jonathan Anderson, Ed Bentley, Stanislav Budnitsky, Charles Caudill, Giulietto Chiesa, Ara Chilingarova, Fred Coleman, Nikolay Filippov, Olga Filippova, the late Yegor Gaidar, Ekaterina Genieva, Frida Ghitis, Martin Gilman, Svetlana Gorkhova, Andrey Grachev, Steve Hurst, Gabriella Ivacs, Tom Johnson, Eason Jordan, Rick Kaplan, Ted Koppel, Sergey Kuznetsov, Harold Mciver Leich, Liu Heung Shing, Ron Hill, Stuart H. Loory, Philip McDonagh, Lara Marlowe, Seamus Martin, Ellen Mickiewicz, Andrey Nikeryasov, Michael O’Clery, Eddie Ops, Tanya Paleeva, Robert Parnica, Claire Shipman, Olga Sinitsyna, Martin Sixsmith, Sarah Smyth, Yury Somov, Conor Sweeney, and the staff at the Gorbachev Foundation and the Russian State Library of Foreign Literature. A special thanks to Professor Stephen White of the University of Glasgow, who provided me with some out-of-print Russian memoirs; John Murray, lecturer in Russian at Trinity College Dublin, who read the manuscript and whose corrections saved me some embarrassment; and Clive Priddle of PublicAffairs, who inspired and helped shape the concept. No words are adequate to acknowledge the research and editing skills of my wife, Zhanna O’Clery, who traveled with me to Moscow a number of times to help track down archives and sources and whose involvement at every stage in the composition and editing of the book made it something of a joint enterprise.

  INTRODUCTION

  During my tenure, I have been attacked by all those in Russian society who can scream and write…. The revolutionaries curse me because I have strongly and conscientiously favored the use of the most decisive measures…. As for the conservatives, they attack me because they have mistakenly blamed me for all the ch
anges in our political system.

  —Russian reformer Count Sergey Yulyevich Witte in his resignation letter as prime minister in 1906

  During his six years and nine months as leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev is accompanied everywhere by two plainclothes colonels with expressionless faces and trim haircuts. They are so unobtrusive that they often go unnoticed by the president’s visitors and even by his aides. These silent military men sit in the anteroom as he works in his office. They ride in a Volga sedan behind his Zil limousine as he is driven to and from the Kremlin. They occupy two seats at the back of the aircraft when he travels out of Moscow, and they sleep overnight at his dacha or city apartment, wherever he happens to be.[1]

  The inscrutable colonels are the guardians of a chunky black Samsonite briefcase with a gold lock weighing 3.3 pounds that always has to be within reach of the president. This is the chemodanchik, or “little suitcase.” Everyone, even Gorbachev, refers to it as the “nuclear button.” Rather it is a portable device that connects the president to Strategic Rocket Forces at an underground command center on the outskirts of Moscow. It contains the communications necessary to permit the firing of the Soviet Union’s long-range nuclear weapons, many of them pointed at targets in the United States. The job of the colonels—three are assigned to guard the case, but one is always off duty—is to help the president, if ever the occasion should arise, to put the strategic forces on alert and authorize a strike.

  There are three nuclear suitcases in total. One is with Mikhail Gorbachev, another is with the minister for defense, and a third is assigned to the chief of the general staff. Any one of the devices is sufficient to authorize the launch of a missile, but only the president can lawfully order a nuclear strike. So long as Gorbachev possesses the chemodanchik, he is legally the commander of the country’s strategic forces, and the Soviet Union remains a nuclear superpower.

  This all changes on December 25, 1991. At 7:00 p.m., as the world watches on television, Mikhail Gorbachev announces that he is resigning. The communist monolith known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is breaking up into separate states. He has no further role. Immediately afterwards, Boris Yeltsin, the president of newly independent Russia, is scheduled to come to his Kremlin office to take formal possession of the suitcase, whereupon the two colonels will say their good-byes to Gorbachev and leave with Yeltsin. This will be the final moment in the disintegration of the superpower that has been ruled by Gorbachev since 1985 and that dominates a land mass stretching over eleven time zones and half the globe. Thereafter Russia, the largest of the fifteen republics, will be the sole nuclear power. Boris Yeltsin will acquire the legal capacity to destroy the United States several times over. It is an awesome responsibility. The Soviet arsenal consists of 27,000 nuclear weapons, of which 11,000 are on missiles capable of reaching the United States.[2] One of these warheads alone can destroy a city.