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
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
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,
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,
