Moscow, December 25, 1991

Yeltsin.” Much of the coverage is critical of the outgoing president. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the organ of the Russian parliament (which next day does carry the full text), prints a page 1 commentary headlined: “The West Believes Gorbachev; The Russians Believe Yeltsin.” The paper’s senior columnist Vladimir Kuznechevsky accuses the United States of wanting to keep the Soviet Union intact and Gorbachev as leader. “Gorbachev showed convincingly he was at one with major international leaders. With Yeltsin it is a completely different story. He has no interests apart from the interests of Russia, and is satisfying those interests by integrating Russia into the general historical stream.” The paper cites a poll showing that 63 percent of Russians are happy to see Gorbachev leave office, and 66 percent are convinced that the Union will be maintained in some form under the commonwealth.

More worrying for Gorbachev and his aides, who are concerned that there will be attempts to discredit them, another commentator in the same daily, Gennady Melkov, calls for an open trial of the main leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Under the headline “Ghost of Nuremberg” he points out that not every German was guilty of crimes under Nazism but that the leadership should take moral responsibility for what they had done. Fifty million people died during the history of the Communist Party, he writes, and no other party in the world killed so many of its own people.

The negative coverage rankles with Gorbachev’s accomplices. Alexander Yakovlev tells a reporter, “I’m really hurt by the ingratitude towards Gorbachev which many people are falling over themselves to express.”

Several newspapers do, however, express sympathy and appreciation for the fallen president. Izvestia, the former mouthpiece of the Soviet government, is indignant at the manner in which Gorbachev has been dumped, declaring on its front page, “He left his high position looking at us directly and frankly in the eyes. He did all he could.” The paper’s columnist Gayaz Alimov criticizes the absence of a proper farewell ceremony. “This is a question of our own dignity as a nation, as a people, and of the honor of the current political leaders. We will be ashamed of this some time later; even now some of us already feel bad about it.” A colleague, Inna Muravyeva, points out that Gorbachev freed the press, removed fear, and “opened the valve” of their self-respect. “He bequeathed to Russia inflation, beggars in the street, millionaires, and 80 percent of people living on the poverty line, but also Andrey Sakharov and the realization of the value of a person as a proud human being.”

Vitaly Korotich, editor of Ogonyok, muses that “Gorbachev took this country like my wife takes cabbage. He thought that to get rid of the dirt, he could just peel off the top layer of leaves. But he had to keep going until there was nothing left.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda, the radical youth newspaper, acknowledges that while Gorbachev was unable to change the living standards of the people, he changed the people. “He didn’t know how to make sausage, but he did know how to give freedom. And if someone believes that the former is more important than the latter, he is likely never to have either.”

“Finita la commedia!” declares Pravda, which was shut down after the August coup but has been relaunched by a team of pro-communist journalists and taken over by a family of Greek entrepreneurs, the Yannikoses. The former organ of the Communist Party, with its trademark masthead of Order of Lenin medals, is daily harassed by Yeltsin’s officials. A few days back, its electricity supply was cut off, its telephones were disconnected, and militiamen loyal to the Russian Federation sealed off the editorial offices on the tenth floor of its office building. Nevertheless, Pravda’s editor in chief, Alexander Ilyin, manages to produce the paper every day. He cautions against the temptation to gloat over Gorbachev’s dismissal, saying, “This is not the time to throw stones at the back of the person who is leaving.”

The retrograde communist newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya declares a plague on both houses. It publishes a cartoon on its front page showing Gorbachev and Yeltsin standing over a pile of smoldering ashes with Gorbachev saying, “Now I think we can say that perestroika has been completed.”

As Gorbachev deals with his morning correspondence, the Italian journalist Giulietto Chiesa arrives in the Kremlin with colleague Enrico Singer for the first scheduled interview with Gorbachev as a “simple citizen.” The reporters for La Stampa and La Repubblica find the atmosphere strange. “Everything was in disarray, everyone was abandoning their position, and Yeltsin’s men were already there, waiting with impatience,” recalled Chiesa.[287] They note that a red flag is still proudly displayed on a pole behind Gorbachev’s desk, as if the Soviet Union still exists and he is still president. Gorbachev greets the Italians with his usual elegance, but Chiesa perceives his sense of loss.

The former Soviet leader amuses his guests with a story of how, when he vacationed in Sicily with Raisa Maximovna early in his career, he had to show his fist to a French tourist who was coming on too strong to his young wife. “Perhaps he wasn’t French but Italian, and Gorbachev simply wants to be courteous to us,” thinks Chiesa. Gorbachev allows some of his bitterness to show when he talks to them about the way the Union was dismantled. He calls the end of the USSR a putsch and the press conference of the regional presidents after their Alma-Ata summit a cock fight.

“I myself changed as the country did, but I also changed the country,” he boasts. “After all, it’s a rare opportunity to help restore one’s homeland to the world community, to universal values. That’s why I feel that whatever happens, my destiny has been fulfilled.”

When the Italians ask how his family feels about his resignation, he replies tellingly, “I am grateful to my family for having endured all this.” The change in his living conditions doesn’t scare him, he says, referring to his move from a grand state dacha to a slightly less grand one, for use during his lifetime, with state-supplied cars, drivers, security, and servants. “My family and I are not spoiled people.”

And how did he feel seeing the red flag being lowered prematurely from the Kremlin? “The same as all citizens of this country,” he replies. “The red flag is our life. But I don’t want to dramatize this moment out of respect to my compatriots.”

After the Italians leave, Grachev asks his boss to sign a copy of The August Coup, the slender volume Gorbachev wrote about his experience at Foros. The former president writes a message of gratitude to his spokesman, ending with the words “The most important events are still before us. It is noon on the clock of history.” As he reads the inscription in the anteroom, Grachev glances up and sees to his amazement that the hands of the clock stand at noon. Later he learns that the clock has stopped. [288]

Shortly afterwards Jose Cuenca, the Spanish ambassador to the Soviet Union who overnight has become ambassador to Russia, arrives with a letter of condolence from his head of state. Chernyaev seizes the opportunity to take the envoy aside and ask for his help in getting a new job for Andrey Grachev. Knowing that Cuenca is friendly with the director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Chernyaev asks him if he would lobby for a position there for his colleague. The ambassador’s expression changes. “This is not possible, not acceptable,” he splutters. “OK it’s not acceptable, I know that myself,” replies Chernyaev, “but what are you afraid of? Are you afraid of Kozyrev? Are you afraid he will throw you out?”[289]

Elsewhere on the Kremlin grounds, the Soviet Union is going through its death throes. The Supreme Soviet, the working parliament of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, is holding its last session in Building 14 just inside the Spassky Gate. Most of the elected deputies represent communist institutions that are now defunct or republics now independent and have departed for good. There is a single item on the agenda: a declaration disbanding the USSR and recognizing its successor as the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The deputies are intent mainly on making a gesture of protest at the extinction of the Soviet Union and availing for one last day of the well-stocked parliamentary buffet. Waiting for proceedings to start, they lounge around and read newspapers on the wide rows of orange armchair seats, like the early arrivals for a movie in a big-screen cinema. The chamber was actually once the official Kremlin theater, but only nonfictional dramas have been played out here for the last thirty years.

The forlorn lawmakers are almost outnumbered by journalists expecting to see history made, though the reporters themselves are not infused with excitement, as the end of the assembly is such an anticlimax.

Just as the session is starting, five Kremlin workers, two in fur hats, two bareheaded and one in a ski cap, appear at the entrance doors to the building. They unscrew the matching four-feet-by-three-feet brass plates on each side that proclaim, “Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR,” and carry them off to a storeroom.

Anuarbek Alimzhanov, chairman of the Congress’s Council of Republics, takes his seat at the large, wood table on the stage, flanked by seven flags representing fewer than half the former Soviet republics. He claims