on his breath, and he noticed how Gorbachev chose his words carefully, “perhaps partly because he did not want any slips of the tongue caused by the drinks he had had.” Grachev also thought that his boss looked flushed and a little dazed as he lifted the receiver and that he struggled to find the tone of familiarity he used with world leaders, though within a minute or two he had recovered. Chernyaev observed his boss then conduct a conversation with Major that he felt must have stunned the British prime minister with its sincerity.
“Today, dear John,” began Gorbachev, “I am trying to accomplish what is most important: to keep what is happening here from resulting in losses. You know I still feel that the best solution would be a unified state, but there are the republics’ positions to consider.” He reassured Major that the breakup of the Soviet Union would not result in another Yugoslavia. “That’s what matters the most to me—to you too, I would imagine.” Yeltsin and he had been talking for six hours, he said, and had reached “a common understanding of our responsibility to the country and the world.” He added diplomatically, “I ask you to help the Commonwealth and Russia in particular.” Glancing over at Grachev, as if to confirm their earlier agreement about the timing of his resignation, Gorbachev confided, “Sometime in the next two days I will make my position public.”
He added a comment that betrayed his unwillingness, even then, to accept the finality of his situation. “I don’t want to say my farewells yet,” he told Major, “because any turn of events is still possible, even a reversal.”
Gorbachev became quite emotional when the British prime minister told him that whatever decision he made, “you will unquestionably occupy a special place in the history of your country and the world.”
“Thank you for everything,” replied Gorbachev, his eyes glistening. “Raisa and I have grown very fond of you, both you and Norma.”
While Gorbachev was out of the room, the conversation between Yakovlev and Yeltsin continued in a more relaxed fashion, fueled by more glasses of vodka. The Russian president reproached Yakovlev for publicly criticizing his actions in making Russia independent, and Yakovlev retorted that he thought the decision was “illegitimate and undemocratic.” But there was little personal antagonism. Yeltsin asked him what he would do with himself now that he no longer had a job as presidential adviser. Yakovlev said he would work for Gorbachev in the foundation. “Why would you? He betrayed you more than once,” said Yeltsin. “It’s not as if you don’t have other opportunities.” This sounded to Yakovlev like an invitation to work with the Russian administration, but he didn’t take it up. He said he was simply sorry for Gorbachev. “God forbid that anyone should be in his situation.”
Yakovlev took it on himself to warn Yeltsin not to let the intelligence service get too powerful or allow it to control information reaching him. He reminded him that information fed to Gorbachev by the KGB had succeeded in frightening the president into adopting a hard line against the democrats. Yeltsin agreed and said that he was going to set up five or six channels of information—though as Yakovlev later noted, nothing ever came out of that. In this context the name of Yevgeny Primakov, director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, came up. Yeltsin said from what he knew, Primakov was inclined to drink too much. “No more nor less than others,” said Yakovlev dryly. Yeltsin looked at him suspiciously but didn’t say anything.
Gorbachev seemed in no hurry to return to Yeltsin’s company and kept Major on the phone for half an hour. The less power he had, the longer his conversations lasted. Alexander Rutskoy was overheard once, as he rushed from his office late for a meeting, “Damn, every time Gorbachev calls he blabs on for a half hour.”[249]
After he bid Major good-bye, Gorbachev remarked to Grachev and Chernyaev that he and Yeltsin had worked everything out, and “I’m going back in to wind things up.”
Glancing into Gorbachev’s office where the door had been left open, Grachev noted the red flag standing in the corner, Gorbachev’s eyeglass case on the desk, and the nuclear suitcase on the table, all visible confirmation that Gorbachev was still, if only nominally, president of the Soviet Union. “This is the surrealistic tableau that would have presented itself to anyone who could have taken a cross section through the building and looked into the rooms on the third floor,” he thought. “Atop the dome, the red flag of the Soviet Union was still flying.”
Zhenya brought plates of cold meat and smoked fish and pickles into the Walnut Room. He also managed to rustle up bread and jam and coffee for Grachev and Yegor Yakovlev in the kitchen. As they ate, they saw that Russian television was showing the “Dance of the Cygnets” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the same ballet broadcast on Soviet television during the three days of the August coup. It was as if someone inside the television studios was subtly signaling that a second coup was being conducted, this time by Yeltsin.
The two Gorbachev associates pestered the waiter as he hurried in and out of the Walnut Room about the mood of the men inside. “The mood seems to be good,” the diplomatic Zhenya responded.
In the television room next to the kitchen, Ted Koppel and Rick Kaplan waited in vain, with their antenna rigged up, to communicate with New York via satellite link, in the event of dramatic news from down the corridor. Eventually they gave up and left.
The meeting in the Walnut Room went on for another two and a half hours. Around 9 p.m., after Gorbachev had downed two more small glasses of cognac, Yakovlev noticed that he was showing signs of strain. Saying that he wasn’t feeling very well, the Soviet president excused himself. He left the room and went to lie down in a resting room attached to an adjacent office.
Yeltsin and Yakovlev found themselves alone again. They threw back little shots of alcohol for another hour. In an expansive mood, Yeltsin promised he would draw up a decree directing that special provision be made for Yakovlev, taking into account his exceptional merits in the cause of the democratic movement. Gorbachev’s aide thanked him but noted afterwards, “He by the way forgot about his promise.”
After they said good-bye, Yakovlev watched Yeltsin striding along the narrow Kremlin corridor, as if marching on the parade ground. “This was the strut of a victor,” he thought, though the Russian president may have been concentrating on keeping himself erect. Yeltsin’s aides took the archive files and followed him. “In the state he was in it would not have been prudent to hand over to him any sensitive documents,” commented Grachev.
Yeltsin made his way out of the Senate Building into the exceptionally mild night air—it was just below freezing—and crossed the narrow courtyard to Building 14. His closest collaborators were there: Kozyrev, Burbulis, Korzhakov, his loyal assistant Lev Sukhanov, and spokesman Pavel Voshchanov.
“It’s over. That’s the last time I will have to go and see him,” Yeltsin announced.
“You mean that from now on, Gorbachev will have to come and see you,” one of his acolytes asked.
“What for?… Well, maybe to pick up his pension,” snorted Yeltsin. With a clinking of glasses, they celebrated his final ascendancy over Gorbachev.[250]
“On this whole territory there is now nobody above you,” said Sukhanov, pointing triumphantly to the wall map of Russia.
“And for this, life has been worth living,” Yeltsin replied.
Meanwhile Yakovlev went to check on Gorbachev. He found him in the resting room. He was crying. “He was lying on the sofa with tears in his eyes.” Gorbachev looked up at his old friend. “You see, Sasha, that’s it,” he said.
Yakovlev recognized that this was the most difficult moment of Gorbachev’s life. “These words meant nothing but they sounded like a confidence, a repentance, a desperate cry from the heart, as if they illustrated [Russian poet Fyodor] Tyutchev’s words: ‘Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly.’”
Doing his best to console his comrade, Yakovlev assured him of a glorious retirement and world renown through his research institute. He was close to tears himself. “I had a lump in my throat. I was so sorry for him I wanted to cry. I was overcome with the feeling that something unfair had taken place. Here is the person who was yesterday a tsar of cardinal changes in the world and in his own country, the executor of the fate of billions of people in the world, and today he is the lifeless victim of another crisis of history.”
Gorbachev asked his friend to bring him a glass of water and to leave him alone. “And that,” observed Yakovlev, “was how the golden years of reform ended.” He sincerely believed that Gorbachev wanted the best for his country but couldn’t see it through to the end. “He couldn’t understand that if you took a sword to a monster like the system, you have to go all the way… but he was an evolutionist…. He has no blood on his hands, he wanted to start a civilized society.”[251]
Yeltsin would remember the daylong session as “protracted and difficult.” He told a reporter that the discussion was confidential, as it involved the passing on of state secrets, but “after that meeting I felt like going and having a shower.”
Looking back after the passage of time, Gorbachev remembered the marathon session with Yeltsin as “informal and seemingly friendly,” but he would reflect bitterly that “Yeltsin’s word, like many of his promises, could
