Moscow, December 25, 1991

Yeltsin is aware that to rule from the Kremlin will give the world reason to suspect his “great power” ambitions and that many of his colleagues will question whether a democratically elected leader should occupy the centuries-old citadel of imperial and totalitarian rule. Some regard the White House, the scene of Yeltsin’s heroic stand in August, to be the state symbol of Russia, rather than the fortress of the tsars on Red Square.

The Russian president has no patience, however, for suggestions that the Kremlin should be turned into a museum of history and culture after the departure of the last Soviet ruler. The Kremlin is an artistic gem, he acknowledges, but it is also the most important government compound in Russia. “The country’s entire defense system is hooked up to the Kremlin, the surveillance system, all the coded messages from all over the world are sent here, and there is a security apparatus for the buildings, developed down to the tiniest detail.” The Kremlin is, moreover, the symbol of “stability, duration and determination in the political line to be followed.”

It also was Gorbachev’s bailiwick, and it is now his for the taking.

One drawback for Yeltsin is that by moving to the Kremlin and bequeathing the White House as a kind of independent territory to the elected deputies, he is exacerbating the division between parliament and presidential rule and has left the White House with its squabbling parliamentarians to become a staging post for a future revolt against him.

Unable to use the ransacked presidential office on the third floor, Gorbachev descends to the second floor and proceeds to the office of the head of his apparatus, Grigory Revenko, to keep his appointment with the Japanese journalists.

He tells them, “You know what, I consider I have fulfilled my task.” He points out that the totalitarian system is no more and society has been transformed. “The main thing is that the people have changed. Now that they have tasted freedom I hope nothing will force them back to the status of before.”[301]

Another Japanese media company makes contact with his staff to offer $1 million for a televised interview in the Kremlin the next day.[302] Gorbachev at first says he will accept but is talked out of it by Chernyaev, who points out that it is shameful to come back to the Kremlin where Yeltsin is having fun, and it would be more shameful to be looking for somewhere else to do the interview. Revenko scolds Chernyaev for turning down such an offer, but Gorbachev tells Chernyaev he has the flu and is not really feeling up to it. There will be many more lucrative media opportunities in the future.

Gorbachev leaves the Senate Building at midday, ducks into his borrowed Zil, and departs from the Kremlin through the Borovitsky Gate, never to return so long as Boris Yeltsin is president of Russia.

Early in the afternoon Yeltsin comes back to the Senate Building to occupy what is now his office, this time accompanied by a Russian camera crew. He instructs them to film his first act as master of the Kremlin. This is the signing of a decree providing for Russian jurisdiction over the Soviet Union State Television and Radio Company, Gosteleradio. Sitting at the desk vacated by Gorbachev, the Russian president puts his signature to an order transforming Soviet television into the Ostankino Russian State Television and Radio Company. He also decrees that Yegor Yakovlev should supervise the changeover and remain at its head, prompting a tongue-in-cheek headline in Izvestia: “Yegor Yakovlev Is Ordered to Turn Over All-Union Television and Radio Company to Yegor Yakovlev.”[303]

The state broadcasting station that smeared him when he led the opposition to Gorbachev, and that tried to gag him nine months ago, is at last fully under Yeltsin’s control. Yakovlev announces an increased output of news, with a new current affairs program called Itogi (Wrap-up) to be hosted by popular broadcaster Yevgeny Kiselyov. As his administration still controls the second national channel, the Russian president commands both TV channels beamed out to the Russian public—though he mandates Ostankino to shed its dependency on the state within a year and become independent through the issue of shares.

Yeltsin starts his reign as absolute leader in a flurry of activity. After dealing with the future of television he issues an order stripping his rebellious vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, of control over five state committees he had been chairing. He signs a decree for the privatization in the coming weeks of stores, restaurants, workshops, vodka distilleries, pharmaceutical plants, and baby food factories. Banks, railways, and airlines will come later. Collective farms must transfer land to their members and end the state monopoly on 637 million acres of territory. The decree repeals a 1918 Bolshevik ruling that all private ownership of land, mines, waters, forests, and natural resources “is abolished forever.”

While the increasingly conservative Russian parliament cannot do anything to stop Yeltsin issuing decrees, it can thwart the new ruler in other ways. That afternoon it turns down an application from prosecutor Valentin Stepankov for the arrest of General Vladislav Achalov, the deputy minister of defense at the time of the August coup, on a charge that he was actively involved. Among many deputies, outrage against the coup plotters is giving way to sympathy for their motives. Thirteen conspirators arrested in August remain in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison awaiting trial, but their conditions have been improved.

Coincidentally, on this day Valery Boldin is released from jail because of deteriorating health. In his four months in captivity for his part in the coup, Gorbachev’s fifty-six-year-old ex-chief of staff has lost none of his contempt for his former master. He is adamant that the junta sought nothing but prosperity and peace for the country, with no desire for power, and that the coup failed because they were too scrupulous and decent to use harsh methods. To Boldin its defeat was not a victory for the United States, as many are saying, but a rout of the disorganized units of a great power by its internal opponents.

Meanwhile, some one hundred presidents of large American companies arrive in Moscow for a Kremlin meeting on stimulating trade. They were invited by the Soviet government which no longer exists. The meeting goes ahead, with Yeltsin’s people, two days later, to the relief of the somewhat bewildered executives.

With the end of the Soviet Union, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago move the hands of the Doomsday Clock back to seventeen minutes before midnight. Six years before, when Gorbachev took office, the big hand stood at three minutes to Armageddon. (In January 2010, with new tensions among the world’s nuclear nations and in light of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the hands are moved forward again to six minutes to midnight.)

Freed from presidential responsibilities, Mikhail Gorbachev helps Raisa in the evening to put their new homes in order. “We were forced to move to different lodgings within twenty-four hours,” complained Gorbachev bitterly.[304] Yeltsin’s security men left all their personal belongings strewn around. These have to be gathered up and packed. For both of them it is a humiliating intrusion on their domestic privacy. Raisa is intensely private and has always been determined to keep personal affairs away from the prying eyes of strangers. One day not long after returning from Foros, Gorbachev came home to find her in tears. She was destroying a bundle of fifty-two letters that the young Gorbachev had written to her when on business trips and that she had kept carefully all her life. She was terrified of another coup and couldn’t bear someone reading them. “She said, ‘We can’t have other people poking their noses into our life,’ and she threw the letters into the fire,” related Gorbachev years later. “She was crying and throwing them in the fire…. I burned twenty-five of my notebooks. Not my personal diaries but my working notes, with all the nuances, characteristics and plans. I burned them thinking I was somehow helping her by doing this.”[305]

The Gorbachevs and their daughter, Irina, sort through all kinds of papers that have accumulated over the years—notes, letters, telegrams, photographs, and documents. They insist on packing everything themselves, rather than asking for help. Chernyaev is outraged that not only do Yeltsin’s people evict the Gorbachevs so soon, but “for a long time they refused to send a lorry to take away their things.”[306]

There are hundreds of books to be stored in cardboard boxes: volumes on Russian history by Solovyev, Kluchevsky, and Karamzin; a ten-volume edition of Pushkin’s works; books of verse by Lermontov, the Romantic poet of the Caucasus, and by Mayakovsky, the lyricist of the Bolshevik Revolution; rows of the leather-bound writings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; individual favorites like a wellthumbed copy of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, which Gorbachev maintains helped turn him into an opponent of the totalitarian system; a memoir by Sakharov that Gorbachev bought abroad; an antique copy of Vanity Fair by Thackeray presented to Raisa by Margaret Thatcher; and a beautifully bound volume of The Kobza- Player by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, whose lines Raisa likes to quote: “My thoughts, my thoughts, what pain you bring! / Why do you rise up at me in such gloomy rows?”

As her own librarian and filing clerk, Raisa takes care to arrange the books properly and not get them mixed