The Last Empire (62 page)

“Hello, Boris, Merry Christmas,” Yeltsin heard at the other end of the line. He wished Bush a merry Christmas in return. He then turned to business. The news on the unified nuclear command and the
pledges of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to become nonnuclear states were the centerpieces of his presentation on the Almaty summit. He also told Bush about Gorbachev's retirement package. “Gorbachev is satisfied,” Yeltsin reported to Bush. “As we agreed with you, we are thus trying to show respect for him. I repeat that he is satisfied, and I have already signed the decree on all these matters.”

Yeltsin next addressed the question of control over the nuclear button. “After President Gorbachev announces his resignation on December 25, nuclear control will be passed to the President of Russia in the presence of Shaposhnikov. There will be no single second break in control of the button.” Bush expressed his appreciation.

After delivering the kind of news he knew Bush wanted to hear, Yeltsin used the opportunity to lobby the American president for speedy recognition of his new country and transfer of the Soviet seat in the United Nations Security Council to Russia. He also wanted to speed up the delivery of American humanitarian aid. Bush promised to work on all three issues. He also agreed in principle to Yeltsin's proposal for a bilateral summit. Yeltsin had completed his coup. In all but name, he was now the sole master of the Kremlin.
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ON CHRISTMAS DAY
1991, officially his last day in office, Gorbachev intended to follow the scenario agreed upon with Yeltsin two days earlier. At 7:00 p.m. he would give his farewell speech, then sign the resignation decrees and, finally, transfer the nuclear codes.

The choice of Christmas Day for Gorbachev's farewell address was somewhat accidental. When Yeltsin's unexpected visit to Gorbachev on December 23 derailed the planned taping of the resignation speech, the Soviet president had suggested to the head of the USSR Television and Radio Administration, Yegor Yakovlev, that he do a live broadcast in the next day or two. He wanted to get it over with as soon as possible and suggested December 24. But Yakovlev advised his boss to wait one more day. He told him that Christmas Eve was the most important part of the holiday, and he wanted television viewers to celebrate that day in peace.

The viewers Yegor Yakovlev had in mind were all abroad. Orthodox Christmas, to be celebrated thirteen days later according to the Julian calendar, would not come until January 7. Yakovlev had good reason to worry about Western viewers and forget his own
domestic audience. Despite his title, he was no longer in control of the Soviet television industry—his realm was now ruled by Yeltsin's people. The only crews he could provide for taping in the last days of Gorbachev's rule were American ones. “If, in those final days, Yegor Yakovlev had not brought in ABC, which was literally spending its days in the hallways, filming anything that turned up . . . then M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] would have remained in an information blockade until his very last in the Kremlin,” noted Anatolii Cherniaev in his diary. The ABC team he had in mind was led by a legend of American broadcasting, Ted Koppel. Apart from Koppel and his ABC team, there was CNN, which had obtained exclusive rights to broadcast Gorbachev's resignation speech outside the USSR. The CNN team was led by its then president, Tom Johnson.
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Working with the American producers and cameramen was no easy task for Gorbachev's officials, since it involved both linguistic and cultural barriers. Gorbachev and the people around him believed that Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, was the more important holiday in the West. That belief came from their own Eastern Christian tradition: in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other historically Orthodox countries of the region, the main celebration of the holiday takes place at Christmas Eve dinner. And there turned out to be another complication—to the staffers' surprise, not everyone in the West celebrated Christmas.

On the morning of December 25, when a friendly Kremlin official approached Koppel and his ABC producer, Rick Kaplan, offering Christmas greetings, Kaplan, who was Jewish, responded, “To me you have to say ‘Happy Hanukkah.'” The official was confused, never having heard the word. “Why would I have to say Happy Honecker?” he asked Kaplan, having in mind the ousted East German communist leader Erich Honecker, whose name was all over the Soviet press as he sought to avoid extradition from the crumbling USSR to a now united Germany. The Americans laughed. No, Kaplan was not talking about Honecker: he was referring to a Jewish holiday all but unknown in Russia.
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Gorbachev's aides realized that they had chosen the wrong date for the resignation speech when they tried to place Gorbachev's final call in his capacity as president of the USSR to George Bush at Camp David. The US embassy in Moscow was closed for the holiday, and
the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs was already in Yeltsin's hands. Gorbachev's interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, managed to reach the State Department's operations desk by using a regular Moscow telephone line. He scheduled the call for 10:00 a.m. EST, which was 5:00 p.m. in Moscow—two hours before Gorbachev's resignation speech. The call came through soon after George and Barbara Bush, together with their children and grandchildren, had finished opening their Christmas presents.

“Merry Christmas to you, Barbara and your family,” began Gorbachev. “I had been thinking about when to make my statement, Tuesday or today. I finally decided to do it today, at the end of the day.” Anatolii Cherniaev, who was present during the conversation and pleased that Bush had agreed to take a call on Christmas Day, was also happy with the tone of the conversation. He recorded his impressions in his diary: “M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] conversed in an almost familiar manner . . . ‘Russian style' . . . ‘as friends.' . . . But Bush also ‘departed' from his reserve for the first time, offering many words of praise.” According to the American transcript of the conversation, Bush recalled one of Gorbachev's visits to Camp David. “The horseshoe pit where you threw that ringer is still in good shape,” he said. “Our friendship is as strong as ever and will continue to be as events unfold. There is no question about that,” he told the Soviet president.
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There was also the business component of the call: Gorbachev and Bush discussed the transfer of control over Soviet nuclear forces from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. Bush would later be surprised to learn that Gorbachev had allowed Ted Koppel and the ABC crew to film the whole conversation from the Moscow side. The presence of television crews in Gorbachev's office seemed bizarre not only to Bush but also to Gorbachev's own aide, Pavel Palazhchenko, who later wrote in his memoirs, “It felt a little unreal—while the president was putting the final touches on the text of his address and the decree passing to Yeltsin control of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons, American television technicians were coming and going busily, checking their wires and microphones. Who could have thought that this—all of this—were possible just a year ago?”
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There was a certain symbolism in the fact that Americans were now at both ends of the line. With his telephone call to Bush,
Gorbachev was effectively acknowledging the United States as the sole remaining superpower on the face of the earth. Ironically, it was also the Americans who provided Gorbachev with a pen to sign his resignation decrees. As he prepared to sign, Gorbachev discovered that his pen was not working properly. Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, who had led his crew into the Kremlin, offered his own Mont Blanc ballpoint—a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary present from his wife. Gorbachev hesitated. “Is it American?” he asked Johnson. “No, sir, it is either French or German,” came the answer. Gorbachev signed the decrees with a pen produced by a German company founded in Hamburg before World War I. As if to underline the new power of the United States, it was given to a Soviet politician by an American businessman.
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Gorbachev's resignation address, which started as planned at 7:00 p.m. Moscow time, was the first of his speeches to be broadcast live not only to a Soviet audience but also to the world at large. The first task was performed by Soviet state television, which had finally shown some interest in Gorbachev; the second, by CNN. Gorbachev's press secretary, Andrei Grachev, later remembered that Gorbachev's voice was on the verge of trembling when he began his address, but he soon regained self-control. Cherniaev was happy with his boss's performance. “He was calm,” noted Cherniaev in his diary. “He did not hesitate to consult the text, and everything turned out right from the start.”

Cherniaev had special reasons to be happy with Gorbachev's performance. The text that Gorbachev did not hesitate to consult was largely written by Cherniaev himself. Another version, written by Aleksandr Yakovlev, which Cherniaev regarded as full of bitterness and self-pity, had been rejected. It included the following sentences: “And let it remain on the conscience of those who are now casting stones at me and allowing themselves to engage in vulgarity and insults. Decent people will remind them, I hope, where they would have been if everything had remained the same.” Gorbachev also turned down a version written by his press secretary, Andrei Grachev. It criticized the presidents of the rebellious republics and claimed that without a center, cooperation between the non-Russian republics and Russia would be all but impossible: “An equal political union, for instance, between tiny Moldova and gigantic Russia is impossible
in principle. Russia's obvious economic advantage is a basis for looming Russian imperialism.” Grachev proposed that Gorbachev use the address to go over the heads of the presidents of the newly independent republics and appeal for popular support in reforming the federal state.

Gorbachev clearly tried to avoid a direct confrontation with Yeltsin. Cherniaev, however, was proud that in the final version of the speech, he had managed to restore some of the boldest parts of it. They included the statement that the USSR should not be dissolved without a referendum, a line that everyone knew would anger Yeltsin and that Gorbachev had initially crossed out during the editing process. What Cherniaev heard later from his own circle convinced him that he had done the right thing. Those close to Cherniaev were telling him that the speech was the very soul of “dignity and nobility.” Aleksandr Yakovlev, whose version of the speech was rejected by Gorbachev, was of a different opinion. “This is the typical delusion of someone devoid of self-analysis,” he commented later. “He did not come out of that psychological cul-de-sac where he put himself, having taking offense with the whole world.”

“Dear Compatriots and Fellow Citizens!” Gorbachev began his address. “Given the situation that has come about with the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am ceasing my activity in the office of president of the USSR. I am making this decision for reasons of principle.” It was anyone's guess how resignation because of the liquidation of the Union and the office of its president was to be reconciled with resignation for reasons of principle. No less confusing were the sentences immediately following: “I came out firmly for independence, the freedom of peoples, and the sovereignty of the republics. But at the same time for maintaining the Union state and the integrity of the country.” How one could simultaneously support freedom, sovereignty, and even independence for the republics and unity for the state that tried to prevent them from acquiring sovereignty and independence was probably also beyond the intellectual grasp of the television audience. Along with Cherniaev, Gorbachev was caught up in the political rhetoric of the last years of the Soviet Union, when “sovereignty” was understood as something other than “independence” and neither term meant among the Soviet political class what it did to the rest of the world.

Gorbachev spoke much more coherently about the accomplishments of his rule: the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of the totalitarian system, the democratization of Soviet politics, and the opening of the country to the world. But few Soviet citizens were prepared to give him credit. Many could no longer endure even the sound of Gorbachev's voice, as his endless talking throughout his years in power had accompanied a steady decline in their standard of living. Some felt sorry for him, but almost no one wanted him to stay. For Cherniaev, Gorbachev cut a tragic figure. Indeed he was. A visionary and a man of great accomplishment, he changed the world and his country for the better by his actions but failed to change himself. A democrat at heart, he never faced a popular election and outstayed his welcome at the head of the country that was crumbling under his feet.
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All that remained for Gorbachev to do once his speech was over was to transfer his nuclear briefcase to Yeltsin. The Russian president was supposed to come to Gorbachev's office in the company of Marshal Shaposhnikov and the officers in charge of the briefcase to complete the transfer. When, after a brief interview with CNN, Gorbachev returned to his office, Shaposhnikov was waiting for him in the anteroom, but there was no sign of Yeltsin. The reason was that Yeltsin had called Shaposhnikov as the latter watched Gorbachev's resignation speech on television and told him that he would not go to Gorbachev's office. Yeltsin wanted Shaposhnikov to handle the entire transfer on his own.

It turned out that Yeltsin was outraged by the content of Gorbachev's speech, which made no reference to the transfer of power to him and assigned all credit for the Soviet Union's democratic development to Gorbachev alone. After watching the speech for a while, the enraged Yeltsin turned off the television set. As far as he was concerned, the truce concluded two days earlier had expired. Yeltsin saw no reason to do something he did not want to do in the first place—to pay Gorbachev a visit as president of the Soviet Union. After the negotiations of December 23, he had told his aides that he would never go back to see Gorbachev in his office. Now Gorbachev seemed to have given Yeltsin an excuse to avoid a final show of deference.