Moscow, December 25, 1991

Lugansk, 84 percent supported independence.

The Russian government immediately recognized Ukraine as an independent country. Not to be upstaged, the American administration also formally acknowledged Ukrainian independence, causing Gorbachev to moan, “How could Bush do this!”

On December 2 Gorbachev called Yeltsin to discuss the outcome. The Russian president took the call while in his car, slumped in the back right-hand seat as usual, with his security chief, Alexander Korzhakov, in front next to the driver. Yeltsin had been drinking heavily.

“Nothing will come out of the Union now—Ukraine is independent,” gloated Yeltsin on the radio telephone.

“And you, what about Russia?” asked Gorbachev.

“So what! I am Russia! We can live without Ukraine. Perhaps we will go back to the idea of a four-member union: Russia plus Ukraine, plus Belarus plus Kazakhstan.”

Gorbachev retorted, “And where is the place for me? If so I am resigning. I’m not going to float like a piece of shit in an ice hole. I am not for myself. But you have to understand without the Union all of you are going nowhere…. You are going to condemn all the reforms. You have to decide. Everything depends on the two of us to a great degree.”

“How can we do without you, Mikhail Sergeyevich?” said Yeltsin in a mocking tone.

“Well, where is my place if there is no Union?” asked Gorbachev.

“Don’t worry, you stay,” said Yeltsin.[195]

Standing behind their outraged president, Chernyaev and Alexander Yakovlev exchanged glances. It was clear to both of them that Yeltsin did not intend that Gorbachev would stay where he was for much longer.

Chapter 20 DECEMBER 25: EARLY EVENING

As the evening of the last day draws in, Boris Yeltsin has one important thing to do before assuming full power as the undisputed ruler of Russia. He must go to the Kremlin to take formal possession of the nuclear suitcase from Mikhail Gorbachev as soon as the Soviet president resigns. But he can’t leave the White House just yet. Already he is facing the first crisis of the new era. After saying good-bye to the CNN crew, Yeltsin finds a grim- faced delegation from the Moscow soviet waiting in his fifth-floor office. Their leader is the city’s fifty-five-year-old deputy mayor, Yury Luzhkov, a thickset, bullet-headed man wearing a short black coat with fur collar.

Luzhkov has come to ask Yeltsin to dissuade the city’s democratic mayor, Gavriil Popov, from resigning. Popov is a former ally of the Russian president. The tousle-haired mayor of Greek origin was a familiar figure at pro-Yeltsin rallies before the coup, and he helped defend the White House in August. Afterwards he hoped to be given a role in Yeltsin’s government—he wanted the foreign ministry—but was passed over. He has joined Gorbachev’s consultative council instead, and he and Yeltsin are barely on speaking terms.

Popov is also at war with the Moscow soviet, which is stacked with reactionaries and is blocking his emergency plans for managing the economic transition. He worries that he will be blamed if everything falls apart when Yeltsin introduces shock therapy and privatization in the Russian economy next week.

Moscow is on a knife edge. A decree signed by Yeltsin, reported in all the day’s papers, orders the freeing of prices nationwide from January 2. This will end seven decades of subsidies for food and basic materials, during which the Politburo itself determined what people should pay for a loaf of bread. It will inevitably raise prices. Under a splash headline, “How Will We Live?” Pravda warns that from January 2 “the price of bread, milk and meat will treble, the price of salt and matches will quadruple, and that of gas and water will increase by five times.” The sense of despair is expressed by a cartoon in Izvestia. It shows a baby hijacking its pram by pointing a gun at the mother and saying, “Take me to Sweden, fast.”

Popov had appealed for help to James Baker. He told the U.S. secretary of state on a recent visit that the city faced hunger and chaos. It could not support itself through the winter and needed right away 15,000 tons of eggs, 200,000 tons of milk, and 10,000 tons of mashed potato mix.

“Some of this material is stored by your army which throws it out after three years,” Popov admonished the American visitor. “But a three-year shelf life is all right for us.”[196]

Some American supplies are now arriving in Moscow. Three days ago, two U.S. military aircraft landed at Sheremetyevo Airport with $200,000 worth of year-old surplus army rations left over from the Gulf War, and limited quantities of sugar, flour, and rice are being delivered to the city’s orphanages and homes for the elderly.

Muscovites will never forget the discontent and shortages of December 1991. University student Olga Perova recalls being sent to queue at 6 a.m. to buy milk for her newborn sister. “There were empty counters everywhere, and everything that had to do with everyday life was horrible.” Anna Pruzhiner, a fifty-two-year-old specialist at the Metro construction company, Metrostroi, is first in line for milk when the doors of the dairy shop are opened each morning, and “there is such a jam that I barely avoid being trampled into the ground.” Tina Kataeva, thirty-two, who works at an art exhibition center, is unable to get “soothers, children’s food, Pampers or anything of that sort,” and when her actor husband returns from a tour abroad, he is quizzed by suspicious German customs officers about carrying so many cans of baby food. Yevgeniya Kataeva, a fifty-five-year-old translator living in Zoologicheskaya Street, is driving on the outskirts of Moscow when she sees a middle-aged man walking down the street with a sheaf of toilet paper strung around his neck like beads. She stops the car and runs over to him to ask where he got the toilet paper. “Naturally I drive there and buy as much as I can. Every time you get something like that, it is a big deal. You feel great, and discuss it over the phone with friends and among your family.”[197]

Things are so bad that even members of the political elite like Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister Yegor Gaidar have to scramble to buy food. His wife, Masha, and their ten-year-old son join a line for bread at a shop in Nikitskaya Street, and when the boy gets the last bulka, “a woman tries to snatch this piece of bread,” he related. He recalled a city of near panic. “Grim food lines, even without their usual squabbles and scenes. Pristinely empty stores. Women rushing about in search of some food, any food for sale. Dollar prices in the deserted Tishinsky market. Expectations of disaster in the air…. Day and night, the greatest anxiety is bread.”[198] Eduard Shevardnadze confides to a visiting American that his wife, Nanuli, hoards any foodstuffs she can find in the near-empty supermarkets. The wife of Lev Sukhanov, Yeltsin’s closest aide, has had to queue for two days to buy sugar. The city is utterly depressed. Rudeness is so common that in the words of Viktor Loshak in Moscow News, “the counter is like a barricade with enemies on either side.”

Because money has run out, trade officials can no longer pay the shipping charges to bring food to Russian ports. The cargo planes that normally haul supplies to the Russian capital are grounded because of a shortage of aviation fuel. Moscow’s airports at Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, and Vnukovo resemble refugee camps, with stranded passengers sleeping on the floors. Ninety airports across the Soviet Union are closed for lack of fuel. Gas has run out at filling stations along the highways, and even the American embassy has trouble finding fuel for the ambassador’s official car. With the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, Moscow can no longer command supplies from its neighboring republics, where hunger is also a reality.

The country is humiliated by having to accept international charity. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that the residents of Vologodsky Province northeast of Moscow are receiving aid collected by the wives of Sweden’s richest businessmen. “The Americans were helping a little bit, the French a little bit, the Canadians a little bit. But all this compared to the needs was just a drop in the ocean,” recalled Gaidar. Few people can afford the prices at the peasant markets in Moscow, which are mostly controlled by the mafia. One chicken might cost a month’s wages. Adding to the intensity of this perfect economic storm, the price of oil, the main source of dollars, has plummeted on world markets, and the flow of oil dollars that kept the Soviet economy on life support has fallen to a trickle. The foreign currency bank has stopped all payments except for freight charges to import grain from Canada, animal feed from the United Kingdom, and other foreign food and medicines.

There are, however, no shortages in the handful of shops reserved for holders of foreign currency. They are crammed with everything one might find in Western supermarkets but are patronized almost exclusively by expatriates, the real elite in the dying Soviet empire. These are the diplomats, business people, and correspondents