along with other AP photos that earn the agency the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.
Many of Gorbachev’s supporters are immensely moved by his address on television, though in the British embassy across the river from the Kremlin, Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite considers Gorbachev’s address to be “dignified, adequate, but no more.”
Fyodor Burlatsky, editor of
Lev Kerbel watches the speech on a small TV in the kitchen of his Moscow apartment. The seventy-four- year-old Soviet-realistic sculptor, born on the day of the Bolshevik Revolution and famous for his marble statues of Lenin and the enormous Karl Marx monument in Karl Marx Stadt in the former East Germany, makes tea, adds cognac, and tells John Kampfner, who has dropped by to see him, “We fought fascism, we fought for the Soviet Union, and now we are told it’s no longer there.” For Kampfner, correspondent of the Daily
Yegor Gaidar watches Gorbachev’s resignation speech in his office in Old Square, where he is working late on a policy statement called the Memorandum of Economic Policies in conjunction with the IMF and the Central Bank. Though he helped engineer his downfall, he is sorry for Gorbachev to some degree. “I think he was well meaning as a politician. The very good thing about him was that he literally did not want to use force to retain the power of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. So his going is not a surprise, but a thing accomplished.” For Gaidar three key dates marked the end of the Soviet Union. “The first is the twenty-first of August, when the coup collapsed. The second is the eighth of December, when we had Belovezhskaya Pushcha. The third is the twenty-fifth of December, when Gorbachev resigns.”[260]
President Bush follows Gorbachev’s address on television at Camp David. It is still only 11 a.m. on a balmy winter morning on the East Coast of the United States when the last Soviet president starts speaking. “The finality of it hit me pretty hard; it was Christmas time, holiday time,” Bush recalls. He feels “a tremendous charge” watching “freedom and self-determination prevail as one republic after another gained its independence.” He was always confident that in the end, given the choice, the people of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would put communism aside and opt for freedom. But without Gorbachev and Shevardnadze the Cold War would have dragged on, and the fear of impending nuclear war would still be with them. “We all were winners, East and West,” he notes later. “I think that was what made much of the process possible—that it did not come at the expense of anyone.”[261]
According to Robert Gates, head of the CIA, there is no feeling in the administration on this historic day that the United States has helped destroy the USSR, nor any sense of winning. He does not think that George Bush is about to declare victory in the Cold War. He worries, however, that this “cataclysmic” event has unleashed forces pent up for seventy years, and they have yet to see, much less understand, the full consequences.
Brent Scowcroft believes that Gorbachev deserves a less ignominious exit. Bush’s national security adviser is stunned that the end of an era of enormous and unrelenting hostility has come in an instant, and most incredibly of all without a single shot being fired. Looking back, he takes “pride in our role in reaching this outcome…. We had worked very hard to push the Soviet Union in this direction, at a pace which would not provoke an explosion in Moscow, much less a global confrontation.”[262]
Colin Powell, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has made a number of trips to Moscow, reckons Gorbachev hoped to revive a dying patient “without replacing its Marxist heart.” He believes that the end of the Cold War was made possible because of the bold brand of leadership practiced by Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. “That Christmas Day, the unimaginable happened,” he wrote. “The Soviet Union disappeared. Without a fight, without a war, without a revolution. It vanished… with the stroke of a pen.”[263]
Chapter 25
DECEMBER 25: NIGHT
Boris Yeltsin can hardly bring himself to look at the television screen in his office as Gorbachev begins to speak. He has not been provided with a copy of the text, and he does not know what the outgoing occupant of the Kremlin is about to say. Within a minute, however, the Russian president has worked himself up into a fury. Gorbachev does not say he is resigning, only ceasing his activities. He implicitly criticizes Yeltsin for “controversial, superficial, and biased judgments” and for the way the Commonwealth of Independent States was created without the “popular will.” And he promises to do everything in his power “to ensure that the Alma-Ata agreements bring real unity to our society”—as if he had any role in ensuring anything any more!
As Gorbachev proceeds to justify his actions in office, Yeltsin snaps, “Switch it off. I don’t want to listen any more.” He tells Gennady Burbulis to bring him a transcript. Grachev sends the text over to Burbulis after Gorbachev has finished. As Yeltsin reads through it, he expresses exasperation at what he considers to be a self-serving political manifesto rather than a farewell to politics. Gorbachev is taking credit for all the political and spiritual freedoms Russian people now enjoy. He does not once mention Boris Yeltsin by name or even by title. He gives Yeltsin no credit for the defeat of the attempted coup against him in August. Nor does he wish the Russian president well as his successor. Perhaps he should have ordered Gostelradio to pull the plug on the broadcast as he had been tempted to do.[264]
Now, as so often in the past, the touchy Siberian allows pique to dictate his actions. He refuses to go to Gorbachev’s office to receive the nuclear suitcase as agreed two days ago. It must be brought to him, he blusters.
Yeltsin picks up the telephone and calls Marshal Shaposhnikov, who is waiting in an office on the second floor of the Senate Building for the summons to proceed to Gorbachev’s cabinet for the historic transfer. With him are a number of generals, gathered to witness and facilitate the important and symbolic exchange.
“Yevgeny Ivanovich,” says Yeltsin, “I can’t go to Gorbachev. You go by yourself.”
“Boris Nikolayevich, this is a very delicate matter,” the marshal protests. “It would be desirable that we go together. What is more, I’m not sure if Gorbachev will transfer all the [nuclear] property to me by myself.”
“If there are complications, call me,” says Yeltsin. “We will discuss other options for the transfer.”
Shaposhnikov is not altogether surprised. He, too, is exasperated by Gorbachev. Watching the farewell address, he found himself reflecting that the president has overstayed his welcome and that he should have resigned after the coup.[265] How much hope there had been for the Soviet Union when Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985! “He was young, modern, energetic, with many advantages over his colleagues. He introduced perestroika, glasnost, democratization, all human values. But the further it went the more doubts there were, and disillusions. The main thing—life was not becoming better. The economy continued to deteriorate, and the political situation was developing at such speed that the whole system started to fall apart.” Having defeated the putschists without Gorbachev, he believes the citizens of the USSR simply stopped responding to him. Many people don’t want the Soviet Union to fall apart, he knows. Shaposhnikov’s wife certainly does not want new borders created. She has been worrying that they will have to go abroad in future to visit their daughter who lives in Odessa, now in independent Ukraine. But they are all sick of the Soviet system, and they just don’t want Gorbachev anymore.
The marshal takes his briefcase with the transfer documents, mounts the stairs to the floor above, and enters Gorbachev’s suite. He waits ten minutes in the cramped reception room, along with the two colonels who are assigned to accompany the nuclear suitcase and who are perched side by side on the sofa, so ubiquitous and inscrutable that some of Gorbachev’s staff have stopped noticing them. Their gift for looking inconspicuous has frequently impressed Palazchenko, who remembers them sitting almost always silently but with an oddly inexpressive yet dignified look.
When Gorbachev calls him in, Shaposhnikov sees that the
