a couple of drivers and guards. Gorbachev’s press secretary finds the corridors and offices on the third floor deserted. He locates Gorbachev in the Walnut Room, sitting at the oval table with his closest aides. For once his boss has called him not to work but to socialize. A bottle of Jubilee cognac has been opened and glasses passed around.
Gorbachev is in a melancholy mood. He is despondent about the casual manner in which he has been dispatched from office, without even a farewell ceremony, “as is the custom in civilized countries.” He is hurt that not a single one of the leaders of the republics—former communists with whom Gorbachev has had comradely relationships over the years—has called to thank, congratulate, or commiserate with him on the termination of his service. He ended repression, gave people freedom of speech and travel, and introduced elections that put them in power, but they stay silent. They are all in a state of euphoria, busily dividing up their inheritance, thinks Gorbachev bitterly. “Yesterday hardly anyone had heard of them, but tomorrow they will be heads of independent states,” he says. “What did it matter what fate they were preparing for their nations?”
Chernyaev feels only scorn for the ungracious leaders who owe their political careers to Gorbachev, a number of them highly corrupt satraps who had switched from communism to nationalism solely to retain power. “Neither Nazarbayev, nor Karimov, nor Niyazov, not to mention Kravchuk or other second-raters, bothered to call Gorbachev to say even official words ‘appropriate to the occasion,’” he notes in his diary, referring to the presidents of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine. “What can you do! Homo Sovieticus is the biggest, most difficult problem remaining for the fledgling democracy that Gorbachev created.” [274]
Grachev concludes they are so fearful of incurring Yeltsin’s displeasure that “not one of them found the moral force to make a personal gesture to Gorbachev, who was becoming a pariah.” (It is more than five years before one of the new leaders in the republics speaks to Gorbachev again. After President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan, an old friend of Yeltsin, welcomes Gorbachev to his capital, Bishkek, in 1996 and fetes him at a public event, Yeltsin refuses to shake Akayev’s hand for a year, and chides him when they next meet, saying, “Askar, how could you?”[275])
The ex-president toasts his small group of advisers in the half-lit Walnut Room, where Zhenya the Kremlin waiter has left out some salad and meat dishes before going off duty. The gathering includes Gorbachev’s most intimate associates and favorites. There is Grachev, who has made the best of a hopeless case in briefing the world’s media on his behalf during the final days. Also there are Yegor Yakovlev, head of state television; Alexander Yakovlev, who helped him launch perestroika; Anatoly Chernyaev, his loyal aide; and Georgy Shakhnazarov—all of them his most progressive and honest advisers through good times and bad.
Chernyaev is Gorbachev’s closest confidant, most blunt critic, and most prolific chronicler. The septuagenarian with the complicated private life is also the guarantor of Gorbachev’s good name. Having been at Foros during the three days of the coup, he has testified to the truth of Gorbachev’s account of his temporary imprisonment. His integrity and sterling reputation—even Valery Boldin regards him highly—ensures that no one will ever take too seriously the damaging theory, doing the rounds in Moscow and in some Western academic circles, that Gorbachev was secretly complicit in the conspiracy of the hard-liners. But they have not always had an easy relationship. When Gorbachev cracked down on the Baltics, Chernyaev wrote a letter of resignation, but after much agonizing, he did not deliver it. He now believes his decision was correct.
Working together as commander and aide-de-camp, Gorbachev and he have been through great campaigns together, and there is a devotion, in spite of everything. He has often interpreted events more astutely than Gorbachev. He privately considers that Yeltsin, for all his gaucheness and his mediocrity as a person, is the chieftain Russia requires at this moment in history. Gorbachev, as the product of an impermanent entity created by Lenin, never really understood Russia or its place in history. A year previously Chernyaev confessed in his diary that he was beginning to dislike working for Gorbachev. “He’s never once said that he appreciates me, never said, ‘Thank you,’ not even when it would be useful to him to mention my contribution.” Boldin, who has nothing good to say about his former boss, echoes this complaint in his memoir, alleging that Gorbachev’s relations with his staff lacked human warmth and mutual respect, and that “it was galling to see him treat them like servants.”
Gorbachev for his part allowed himself to harbor doubts about Chernyaev in the days when he was under the influence of the conspiratorial Kryuchkov. He confided once to his chief of staff that Chernyaev was not to be trusted, as he could be the source of information leaks, and he instructed Boldin that the range of secret information reaching Chernyaev should be limited.
Yegor Yakovlev has been in the Kremlin all day mainly because he feels he should be with the president at this emotional time. He is a member of the “first generation” of perestroika, the intellectuals who believed in Gorbachev from the start and rallied enthusiastically to the cause of reforming the system. The son of Vladimir Yakovlev, the first head of the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, he transformed the
Like Chernyaev, the other Yakovlev in the circle has also been hurt over time by Gorbachev’s thoughtlessness. Alexander Yakovlev once confided to Chernyaev that in six years working with Gorbachev he had never heard a single thank you. He complained, “I don’t even feel any gratitude from him for the fact that the idea of perestroika was born in our first conversations in Canada back when I was ambassador.” Their relationship was at times quite fraught and is still complicated. Only a year earlier Gorbachev was told by Kryuchkov that Yakovlev was an agent of the CIA. The president became so paranoid that one day in late summer 1990 he got it into his head that his adviser was planning a coup with other radicals.[276] He tracked Yakovlev’s whereabouts to a forest hundreds of miles away, where he was picking mushrooms with his grandchildren. On the telephone he practically charged the flabbergasted Yakovlev with conspiring against him. In the event the diehard conservatives were right to suspect the long-term intentions of Gorbachev’s ally. Three years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Yakovlev asserts that he and Shevardnadze realized full well during the perestroika years that their advice to Gorbachev would lead to the destruction of the system, and he boasts that “we did it before our opponents woke up in time to prevent it.”[277] The coup opened Gorbachev’s eyes to the machinations of Kryuchkov, but he has never completely got over his mistrust of Yakovlev. He knows that it wasn’t only Yeltsin who relished his humiliation in the Russian parliament after the coup. He noticed some of his own associates gloating, Alexander Yakovlev among them.
Georgy Shakhnazarov also helped destroy the system, though he has often been frustrated by Gorbachev’s vacillations. The sixty-seven-year-old Armenian regularly urged Gorbachev in the late 1980s to convert to social democracy and move towards multiparty politics, which was unthinkable at the time. “As often happens in revolutionary systems,” he would observe later, “there are things which seem banal today but which you couldn’t even mention then.” Gorbachev once suspected him, too, of leaking information—about decisions on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh—and asked Kryuchkov to investigate, but nothing came of it. Twenty-one months earlier it was Shakhnazarov alone who was invited to join Mikhail and Raisa for a private glass of champagne to celebrate his leader’s elevation to the presidency. Now he is here to bear witness to his abdication. Raisa herself has not come for the obsequies. The Kremlin late nights have always been men-only affairs.
For all the perceived slights and injustices in the service of Gorbachev, however, a warmth and sense of camaraderie has returned to the relationship between the dethroned king and his reform-minded courtiers in these final hours. The small group of aides in the empty Kremlin building are at one in believing they serve a historic figure and a great man. This bond unites them and draws them to Gorbachev as December 25, 1991, comes to a close.
The lowering of the Soviet flag from the Kremlin has a profound effect on all of them. Even Alexander Yakovlev, the most radical of the perestroika reformers, feels it tear at his emotions. He, Chernyaev, and Shakhnazarov all fought under the red flag in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler’s armies. Only a year ago Yakovlev had declared that he would defend the revolutionary emblem, “as my father defended it during the four years of the civil war and as I defended it during the Great Patriotic War.”[278] It is no longer there to defend.
