Moscow, December 25, 1991 Page 2
The handover is to be the final act in a drama of Shakespearean intensity. Its major players are two contrasting figures whose baleful interaction has changed the globe’s balance of power. It is the culmination of a struggle for supremacy between Mikhail Gorbachev, the urbane, sophisticated communist idolized by the capitalist world, and Boris Yeltsin, the impetuous, hard-drinking democrat perceived as a wrecker in Western capitals.
The ousted president and his usurper behave in a statesman-like manner before the cameras. Yet rarely in world history has an event of such magnitude been determined by the passionate dislike of two men for each other. Some years earlier, when at the pinnacle of his power, Gorbachev humiliated Yeltsin publicly. The burly Siberian has never forgotten, and in December 1991 the roles are reversed. Gorbachev is the one who is denigrated, reduced to tears as he and his wife Raisa are hustled out of their presidential residence. Even the carefully choreographed arrangements for the transfer of the nuclear communications and codes are thrown into disarray at the last minute through Yeltsin’s petulance and Gorbachev’s pride.
Nevertheless the malevolence of Yeltsin and the vanity of Gorbachev do not stand in the way of something akin to a political miracle taking place. On December 25, 1991, a historical event on a par with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 or the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 occurs without a foreign war or bloody revolution as catalyst. Communist Yugoslavia disintegrated in flames, but the Soviet Union breaks up almost impassively as the world looks on in disbelief. The mighty Soviet army relinquishes an empire of subject republics without firing a shot. It all happens very quickly. Few politicians or scholars predicted, even as the year 1991 began, the scale and scope of the historic upheaval at year’s end.
The Soviet Union was born in the civil war that followed the 1917 October Revolution, when the Bolshevik faction led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin seized control over most of the old Russian Empire. Industrialized with great brutality under Josef Stalin, it repulsed invading Nazi forces in World War II and emerged as one of the world’s two superpowers. The subsequent Cold War between East and West shaped international politics and assumptions for almost half a century.
But Lenin’s great socialist experiment faltered. The economy stagnated and then collapsed. The center lost control. On December 25, 1991, the country that defeated Hitler’s Germany simply ceases to exist. In Mikhail Gorbachev’s words, “One of the most powerful states in the world collapsed before our very eyes.”
It is a stupendous moment in the story of humankind, the end of a millennium of Russian and Soviet Empire, and the beginning of Russia’s national and state renaissance. It signals the final defeat of the twentieth century’s two totalitarian systems, Nazi fascism and Soviet communism, which embroiled the world in the greatest war in history. It is the day that allows American conservatives to celebrate—prematurely—the prophecy of the philosopher Francis Fukuyama that the collapse of the USSR will mark the “end of history,” with the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Mikhail Gorbachev created the conditions for the end of totalitarianism, and Boris Yeltsin delivered the death blow. But neither is honored in Russia in modern times as a national hero, nor is the date of the transfer of power formally commemorated in Moscow. Contemporary leaders discourage any celebration of December 25, 1991. What happened that day is viewed by many in Russia as, in Vladimir Putin’s words, a “great geopolitical catastrophe.” It is a reminder that the fall of their once-mighty superpower was celebrated in the United States as a victory in the Cold War, rather than as the triumph of a people who peacefully overthrew a totalitarian system to embrace democracy and free-market economics. As a former Russian presidential chief of staff, Alexander Leontiyev, put it not long afterwards, “Americans got so drunk at the USSR’s funeral that they’re still hung over.”
Indeed what is remarkable is the number of Americans who gather around the deathbed for the obsequies for communist power. Never before or since are Russian and American interests so intertwined. The distrust and enmity of the long Cold War dissolves into a remarkable dalliance between the competing nuclear powers. Americans from the International Monetary Fund and from the Chicago School of Economics are to be found in Moscow collaborating with Russian policymakers on a new direction for the Russian economy. Their guiding hands are at the elbow of Yeltsin’s ministers as they embark on a mission unprecedented in economic history: the dismantling of the communist model and its substitution with the raw capitalism of neoliberal economics.
During a visit to Russia just days before Gorbachev’s resignation, U.S. secretary of state James Baker marvels at how, in all his meetings, one theme is uniform: “the intense desire to satisfy the United States.”[3] With each of the new republics trying to establish positive relations with America, he reckons that “our ability to affect their behavior” will never be greater than at this time. American president George H. W. Bush observes that the behavior of the new states is “designed specifically to gain US support for what they had done.”[4] The deference to the United States is such that all the emerging new countries declare their adherence to a list of democratic principles laid down by the Bush administration for diplomatic recognition.
In the dying days of the Soviet Union, American diplomats and Russia’s political figures enjoy such close relations that they consult each other almost on a daily basis. Gorbachev addresses the U.S. ambassador as “Comrade.” James Baker and his opposite number, Eduard Shevardnadze, dine in each other’s homes and gossip about world affairs. Friendly contacts take place between the top agents of the CIA and the KGB, who have spied on each other for decades. American evangelists show up in Moscow to rejoice and proselytize. A score of Christian leaders visit the Kremlin in the dying days of Soviet communism, and the most ardent cleric among them tells Gorbachev, “You are the person most prayed for in American churches, you are an instrument of God.”[5] The Kremlin corridors echo during the last twenty-four hours with American accents, as U.S. television personnel crowd into the president’s office to record the final hours. The only televised interviews given by the great Russian rivals are to U.S. news channels.
Mikhail Gorbachev considers himself a personal friend of President Bush, who in the end tried to help him sustain a reformed Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin courts the U.S. president to gain his approval for breaking up that same entity. The former wants the approval of history; the latter craves international respect. Both measure their standing in the world by the quality of their relations with the United States. They are equally keen to assure Washington that the transfer of control over nuclear weapons will not endanger world peace. The Americans are just as anxious to maintain a friendship that advances their global interests and economic and political philosophy.
December 25, 1991, is therefore a high-water mark in Moscow’s relations with the Western world, and in particular the United States. Only once before in history has Russia looked to the West with such enthusiasm for inspiration. That was three centuries earlier, when Peter the Great introduced European reforms and moved the Russian capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg as a window to the West. His legacy survived until 1917 and the triumph of the Bolsheviks.
Many notable events also take place in Moscow this day. The red flag with its hammer and sickle is hauled down from the Kremlin for the last time, and the white, blue, and red tricolor of prerevolutionary Russia is hoisted in its place. The national parliament changes the name of the country from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Russian Federation, or simply Russia.
At its close, the colonels say good-bye to Gorbachev and take the little suitcase to its new custodian.
Thus, as many Westerners celebrate Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet Union ceases to exist, Russia escapes from the cul-de-sac into which Lenin led it seventy-four years earlier, and a great country takes its place among the nations of Europe.
Chapter 1
&n
bsp; DECEMBER 25: BEFORE THE DAWN
In the first moments of December 25, 1991, the midnight chimes ring out from the clock on the Savior Tower inside the Kremlin. This is the signal for the hourly changing of the honor guard at the great red and black granite cubes that form the Mausoleum, where lies the embalmed body of the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Curious late-night strollers in Red Square, Russian and foreign, gather to watch as the great-coated sentinels goose-step off to the Savior Gate like marionettes, jerking their elbows high in the air. A new shift emerges to take over at what is officially known as the Soviet Union’s Sentry Post Number 1.
Many of the onlookers on this dry, still Wednesday morning are bare-headed. It is mild by midwinter standards in Moscow, about 1 degree above freezing. The bitterly cold spell earlier in December, when the temperature dipped to zero Fahrenheit, ended with a heavy fall of snow three days ago.[6] The vast cobbled square has since been swept clean, but the snow still gleams on the brightly lit onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral and on the swallow-tailed crenellations of the high, brick Kremlin walls.[7] It fringes the dome of the Senate Building inside the Kremlin, from which flies the red flag of the Soviet Union, with its gold hammer and sickle emblem, clearly visible from Red Square. It has flown there since 1918, when the Russian capital was transferred from Petrograd back to Moscow.
A small group of people have assembled at the northwestern end of Red Square, close by St. Nicholas’s Tower. Many of them hold flickering candles and press close to a group of American clerics who are conducting a midnight service. The minister, a middle-aged man in white robes, reads aloud from a large Bible. The preachers have traveled specially to Russia for this Christmas Day so that they can celebrate Christ’s birthday in Red Square, in what is still officially the godless Soviet Union, something they could not dream of doing in past years.
Near the Arsenal Tower of the Kremlin stands a tall yolka, a New Year’s fir tree. Some foreigners mistake it for a Christmas tree. However, in Russia Orthodox Christmas falls on January 7, in accordance with the old Julian calendar.
Even so, on Little Lubyanka Street, a fifteen-minute walk away, past the yellow neorenaissance façade of the feared KGB’s headquarters, the strains of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in Russian ring out in the night air. More than a thousand worshippers are celebrating midnight Mass in the hundred-year-old Roman Catholic Church of St. Louis, crushed into eighteen rows of wooden pews set among squat stone pillars that obstruct the views of the altar. By the door a notice states: “If you are suffering, if you are tired of life, know that Christ loves you.” A priest conducting the service enthuses about the historical nature of the day and “the return of our government to a normal, Christian world.”
The congregation used to consist mainly of foreigners, says Sofia Peonkova, a regular attendee, but she has noticed that in the last two years many Russians have started coming.[8] Yulia Massarskaya, age eighty-two, tells a visitor that this is her first time in a Catholic church in Moscow since the 1917 October Revolution, when she was eight years old. “I have never felt this good,” she whispers. “It is like coming back home.”[9]
The service ends, the worshippers disperse, and the darkened streets of Moscow fall quiet for a few hours. But long before dawn many thousands of people begin emerging from the city’s grim apartment blocks. Dressed in padded coats, scarves, and fur hats, they make their way through the icy slush to catch the early trams and metro trains. It is the beginning of a daily search for food that has preoccupied Moscow’s citizens for months. Their overriding goal is to find where deliveries have been made overnight. They form irritated lines in the darkness at grimy stores, where the reward for waiting might be a loaf of bread, a scrawny chicken leg, or a few wilted vegetables.
Shoppers in Moscow in December 1991 do not look for goods; they look for queues. They obey the advice of the Russian television program Vesti: “If you come across a line, join it, and count yourself lucky.”
Not since World War II has Moscow experienced such deprivation. The government has imposed rationing of “meat products, butter, vegetable oils, grains, pasta products, sugar, salt, matches, tobacco products and household, bath and other soaps… where available.”[10] Three days ago the deputy mayor, Yury Luzhkov, admitted that three hundred and fifty stores in the city have run out of meat.
Everyone in Moscow—engineers, actors, professors, shoemakers, store clerks, construction workers, poets—snap up and hoard anything they can find to buy. If a consignment of cheese, or salami, or even just a batch of loaves, appears unexpectedly, people form a queue and take as much as they can carry. Starvation would be a reality for many families were it not for the buckets of potatoes and piles of cabbages kept in their apartments that were harvested in suburban plots before the snows of winter came.
As Moscow stirs to life, small covered trucks with canvas flaps splutter and cough their way along the city’s potholed roads from the newspaper printing houses. They stop at street kiosks to dump parcels of newspapers on the ground. The bundles are much lighter than usual. Most dailies are reduced to four pages, as newsprint and printing ink are in short supply.
The concerns of the populace are reflected in stories about shortages and imminent price rises. A headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda says simply, “Meat has arrived in Odessa.” At least it is more positive than “No Bread in Krasnoyarsk” on Pravda’s front page.
There is little in the skimpy newspapers to indicate that this will be a momentous day in the political history of the country, or indeed of the world. There is a clue, however, in Pravda. In a single paragraph on page one, the Communist Party newspaper notes, without comment, that President Mikhail Gorbachev will make a major announcement, live on state television, before the day is out.
Chapter 2
DECEMBER 25: SUNRISE
The heavy snow on the spruce and fir trees that screen the large dacha west of Moscow has melted a little during the mild winter night. Water drips from the pine needles and trickles out of the snow piled high along the driveway, giving the tarmacadam a dark sheen.
In an upstairs room, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the armed forces, puts on a starched, white, single-cuff shirt and a single-breasted navy wool suit with muted stripes, handmade by his tailors on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He selects from his collection of silk ties a particular neckpiece, black with a red floral paisley design, which he often wears on important occasions.
Small in stature, with magnetic hazel eyes and silver hair that has long since receded to expose the purple birthmark on his head, Gorbachev this morning is exhausted and slightly hungover. He came home late the night before and is now succumbing to the early stages of influenza. His duties as president are almost finished, but last night he lingered for a long time in his Kremlin office to reminisce with Moscow’s police chief, Arkady Murashev, who called out of the blue to wish him well. Very few people have been taking the trouble to do that in the dying days of his reign, and on an impulse he had invited Murashev, a former political opponent, to join him for a glass or two of cognac. With the nuclear suitcase sitting an arm’s length away on the table, the last Soviet president took great pains to impress upon his visitor that he had not made any mistakes in his quest to reform the Soviet Union. It was not his fault that it was falling apart.[11]
There is nothing unusual in Gorbachev’s staying late at the Kremlin. Work has always kept him in the office until ten or eleven o’clock. On arriving home he and his wife, Raisa, have made it a practice to go for a walk together in the dark before retiring to bed. He tells her of the events of the day as they stroll along the paths around the dacha. He holds nothing back. He once caused a scandal among Russians by saying publicly that he even discussed matters of state with his wife. Gorbachev numbers the world’s leading politicians as his friends, but his only really close ally in life is his companion and soul mate of thirty-eight years. They have always “rejoiced at
the successes and suffered the failures of the other,” as he put it once, “just as if they were our own.”[12]
After breakfast in the morning—in winter it is always hot cereal, served in the upper-floor living quarters by their servant Shura, who wears a head scarf and no makeup, as Raisa requires of all the female staff—the president crosses the corridor to his library, where glass-fronted bookcases reach to the ceiling. In a space in the rows of bound volumes is a framed black-and-white photograph of Raisa, his favorite, taken when she was a rather prim-looking student at Moscow University. There is another of his father, Sergey, posing in simple military tunic decorated with three medals and two Orders of the Red Star for his service in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. These pictures, and a valuable icon embossed with gold leaf depicting the Archangel Mikhail, which the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexey II, gave Gorbachev for his sixtieth birthday in March, will have to be packed with particular care when they leave.