The chief “highwayman” boasted that Gorbachev would be gone soon. Yeltsin told his team in the White House that he had given Mikhail Sergeyevich a deadline, the end of December, or at latest January, when they would finish with one era and transition to another.
Gorbachev suggested two options to his aides. He could resign or else continue to offer his services to the republics as commander in chief and holder of the nuclear suitcase. Chernyaev and Alexander Yakovlev looked blankly at their leader. “Why are you sitting like that,” snapped Gorbachev. “Make notes, you will have to write this up.” Privately Chernyaev thought to himself: “Nobody today is going to offer him any position. So the second option is an illusion.”[225] Already Gosbank, the Soviet Union’s Central Bank, had told Gorbachev that it could no longer make payments to serving members of the Soviet armed forces and Union civil servants. The Russian government stopped all Soviet-sourced payments “to the army, officials, to us sinners,” complained Chernyaev in his diary. “We are without salaries now.” Historian Roy Medvedev reckoned that by then the power of the president did not extend further than the buildings of the Kremlin.
It was at this point that the Americans got word that Gorbachev and his aides were desperately worried about an attempt to discredit them by Yeltsin’s supporters to deflect criticism for what they had done. It came via a circuitous route.[226]
Pavel Palazchenko invited Strobe Talbott of
In his memoirs Palazchenko claimed his information came from an (unnamed) former member of the Communist Party Central Committee who had approached him in a Kremlin corridor to whisper that efforts were afoot to fabricate a case against Gorbachev. The source alleged that a shadowy team was searching frantically for compromising material to show that Gorbachev was secretly part of the August coup, and insisted that Palazchenko pass this on to the Americans, who might be able to use their influence on Yeltsin to get the effort stopped.
Palazchenko insisted he was not acting at Gorbachev’s prompting to secure American protection. “Nothing could be further from the truth or more out of character for Gorbachev.” The Americans, however, were skeptical. They believed Palazchenko was following a careful script that was intended to preserve the Soviet leader’s deniability. Nevertheless, Talbott agreed to pass on the message.
The request was conveniently timed. James Baker and State Department official Dennis Ross arrived the next day in Moscow for talks with the Russian leaders. Talbott went to see them in the Penta Hotel on Olympic Boulevard. He gave the message to Ross, who showed it to Baker.
The U.S. secretary of state met Yeltsin on the following day, December 16, in the St. Catherine Hall in the Kremlin. This was the first time Yeltsin had commandeered the sumptuous chamber where Soviet leaders had historically welcomed important guests. Marshal Shaposhnikov sat next to him, a strong signal of where the military’s loyalty lay. “Welcome to this Russian building on Russian soil,” trumpeted Yeltsin at the start of a four- hour conversation.
Baker delicately raised the rumors of possible criminal proceedings being taken against Gorbachev. Such action would be a mistake that would not be understood by the international community, he told the Russian leader. “Many people will be watching what’s going to happen to Gorbachev.” The United States hoped the transfer of power could be done “in a dignified way—as in the West.”
Yeltsin responded as if he expected the approach. “Gorbachev has done a lot for this country,” he said. “He needs to be treated with respect and deserves to be treated with respect. It’s about time we became a country where leaders can be retired with honor.”
Baker saw Gorbachev separately, in the same ornate hall and with Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze at his side. Gorbachev’s face was flushed, and he had difficulty speaking, as if he were having an attack of high blood pressure. Baker sensed, as they chewed Velamints that the secretary of state handed around, that these were three men at the end of their political rope. As with the British, Gorbachev called the Belovezh Agreement “a kind of coup,” carried out by people acting like highway robbers. The conversation trailed off inconclusively. Shevardnadze had nothing positive to say: He knew the game was up. In a telephone call with a contact in the United States, Jim Garrison, he had confided, “The Soviet Union is falling apart. My job is to preside over its collapse.”
Gorbachev went that evening in a heavy snowstorm to a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, his refuge from depression during Russia’s darkest hours. The symphony’s funereal trumpet solo was like a requiem for his career.
Yeltsin called President Bush the next day and assured him the transfer of power would take place in a friendly manner. Bush reminded him of the high regard in which Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were held for what they had done for peace. “I do guarantee, and I promise you personally, Mr. President, that everything will happen in a good and decent way,” Yeltsin promised. “We will treat Gorbachev and Shevardnadze with the greatest respect. Everything will be calm and gradual with no radical measures.”[227]
The White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, would later claim that the U.S. president not only convinced Yeltsin of the need for a peaceful transition but also told him to be good to Gorbachev and to give him a car, give him a house, and treat him well. He related that Bush then called Gorbachev and said, “You’ve got to be praising Yeltsin, or at least don’t be criticizing him in public. Don’t be tearing him down and picking a fight.”
Gorbachev’s aides were still concerned that something unpleasant was in store for them. Alexander Yakovlev confided to Chernyaev that he thought Yeltsin was fearful of opposition from people like himself and Shevardnadze and would try to liquidate them. They were alone in Gorbachev’s office at the time—the president had stepped out to make one of his regular calls to Raisa—and he lowered his voice in case of listening devices. “I think they will kill me,” he whispered to Chernyaev. “I will ask Gorbachev to send me somewhere, maybe Finland, as ambassador. Yeltsin will have to agree, I am too dangerous for him here.” Chernyaev, also wary of surveillance, responded with a complicit smile.
But these worries were set aside when, on Wednesday, December 18, Gorbachev at last conceded to Yeltsin that it was over, and agreed that at the end of the year, on December 31, the Soviet Union and its governing structures would cease to exist. As to when he would resign as president of the Soviet Union, he wrote a note to himself, “After the twenty-first—probably; after the new year—possibly.”
The first to be told, outside the Kremlin circle, that he would be gone before the end of the year was an American, Shevardnadze’s contact Jim Garrison. As head of the International Foreign Policy Association, Garrison was visiting Moscow that day as part of his task to mobilize aid for the children of the Soviet Union. Alexander Yakovlev brought him into Gorbachev’s office for a chat. “Gorbachev was ebullient, upbeat, smiling,” recalled Garrison, who would be the last foreign guest to visit Gorbachev while he was still president.[228] “Under the circumstances I was surprised he had time for the likes of me.” Garrison told him how he had organized a load of food supplies to be brought to Russia two days earlier on an Antonov transport plane, the biggest plane in the world, and that at a press conference, the American copilot had said with tears in his eyes, “All my life I have practiced flying to the Soviet Union, but I thought I would be flying with a payload of warheads.”
As Garrison got up from the table, Yakovlev put an arm around him and said, “You should know we are resigning in one week. Tell no one.” Garrison was shocked. “Are you serious?” he asked. “All options are closed,” replied Yakovlev. “What, is there anything I can do?” asked the American. “Yes,” replied Gorbachev. “Can you bring another Antonov? Can you bring some meat? Moscow is running out of meat.” On leaving the Kremlin Garrison made a call to Donald Kendall, the former chairman of PepsiCo, which then owned Pizza Hut, and arranged for him to send a planeload of canned beef to Russia in a C-5A Galaxy troop carrier.
Otherwise Gorbachev was deliberately coy for days about when he would step down. On December 20, in a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he insisted his departure was not imminent, as the transfer of power must be done in a constitutional manner. But the eviction notices were piling up. That afternoon the presidential account in the State Bank was closed on Yeltsin’s orders, leaving Gorbachev unable to authorize expenses for himself or his personal staff. Another Yeltsin decree placed the elite KGB Alpha Group under the sole
