Goodbye our Red Flag.
You slipped down from the Kremlin roof
not so proudly
not so adroitly
as you climbed many years ago
on the destroyed Reichstag
smoking like Hitler’s last fag.
Goodbye our Red Flag.
You were our brother and our enemy.
You were a soldier’s comrade in trenches,
you were the hope of all captive Europe,
But like a Red curtain you concealed behind you
the Gulag
stuffed with frozen dead bodies.
Why did you do it,
our Red Flag?
... I didn’t take the Tsar’s Winter Palace.
I didn’t storm Hitler’s Reichstag.
I’m not what you call a “Commie. ”
But I caress the Red Flag
and cry
.

—Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Goodbye Our Red Flag”

RUSSIAN/SOVIET DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Afanasyev, Viktor, editor of
Pravda,
1976—1989

Afanasyev, Yury, historian, pro-Gorbachev deputy

Akayev, Aksar, elected president of Kyrgystan in 1990

Akhromeyev, Sergey, marshal of the Soviet army, putschist

Alksnis, Viktor, army officer, campaigned against Gorbachev

Andropov, Yury, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1982—1984

Bakatin, Vadim, pro-reform minister, last chairman of the KGB

Baklanov, Oleg, head of Soviet military-industrial complex, putschist

Belyaev, Igor, documentary maker, friend of Gorbachev

Bessmertnykh, Alexander, Soviet minister for foreign affairs, fired after August coup

Boldin, Valery, Gorbachev’s chief of staff, putschist

Bonner, Yelena, widow of Andrey Sakharov

Bovin, Alexander, USSR/Russia ambassador to Israel

Brezhnev, Leonid, first, then general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1964—1982

Burbulis, Gennady, close associate of Yeltsin

Burlarsky, Fyodor, pro-reform editor of
Literaturnaya Gazeta

Chernenko, Konstantin, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1984—1985

Chernyaev, Anatoly, close associate of Gorbachev

Chubais, Anatoly, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, responsible for privatization

Gaidar, Yegor, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, responsible for shock therapy

Gamsakhurdia, Zviad, elected president of Georgia in 1991

Gerasimov, Gennady, Soviet foreign affairs spokesman

Gorbachev, Mikhail, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1995—1991, president of the Soviet Union, 1990—1991

Gorbacheva, Irina, daughter of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev

Gorbacheva, Raisa, wife of Mikhail Gorbachev

Grachev, Andrey, Gorbachev’s press secretary

Grachev, Pavel, army general, sided with Yeltsin in August coup

Grishin, Viktor, Moscow party chief, 1967—1985

Kalugin, Oleg, KGB dissident

Karimov, Islam, elected president of Uzbekistan in 1990

Khasbulatov, Ruslan, chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, 1991—1993

Khrushchev, Nikita, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,1953—1964

Komplektov, Viktor, USSR/Russian ambassador to the United States

Korotich, Vitaly, pro-reform editor of
Ogonyok
, 1986—1991

Korzhakov, Alexander, Yeltsin’s security chief

Kozyrev, Andrey, Russian minister of foreign affairs

Kravchenko, Leonid, head of central television, fired after August coup

Kravchuk, Leonid, elected president of Ukraine in 1991

Kryuchkov, Vladimir, chairman of KGB, putschist

Kuznetsov, Alexander, Yeltsin’s personal cameraman

Lebed, Alexander, army general, sided with Yeltsin in August coup

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, founder of Soviet Union

Ligachev, Yegor, conservative member of Politburo

Lukyanov, Anatoly, chairman of USSR Supreme Soviet, 1990—1991, putschist

Luzhkov, Yury, mayor of Moscow, 1992—2010

Moiseyev, Mikhail, army general, supported August coup

Murashev, Arkady, liberal Moscow police chief

Nazarbayev, Nursultan, elected president of Kazakhstan, 1990

Nenashev, Mikhail, head of state television until 1990

Palazchenko, Pavel, interpreter for Gorbachev

Pankin, Boris, Soviet minister for foreign affairs after August coup

Pavlov, Valentin, Soviet prime minister, putschist

Petrov, Yury, aide to Yeltsin

Petrushenko, Nikolay, army officer, campaigned against Gorbachev

Plekhanov, Yury, KGB general who held Gorbachevs prisoner during August coup

Poltoranin, Mikhail, ex-editor, Yeltsin press secretary

Popov, Gavriil, mayor of Moscow, 1990—1992

Primakov, Yevgeny, director of foreign intelligence service after August coup

Pugo, Boris, Soviet interior minister, committed suicide after August coup

Putin, Vladimir, aide to St. Petersburg mayor, later president and prime minister of Russia

Redkoborody, Vladimir, KGB officer in charge of presidential security

Revenko, Grigory, aide to Gorbachev

Rostropovich, Mstislav, cellist and supporter of reform

Rutskoy, Alexander, vice president of Russia, 1991—1993

Ryzhkov, Nikolay, Soviet prime minister, 1985—1990

Sakharov, Andrey, physicist and human rights campaigner

Shakhnazarov, Georgy, adviser to Gorbachev

Shakhrai, Sergey, Yeltsin aide, drafter of Belovezh accord

Shaposhnikov, Yevgeny, air force general, appointed Soviet defense minister after August coup

Shatalin, Stanislav, radical economist

Shenin, Oleg, Communist Party Central Committee secretary, putschist

Shevardnadze, Eduard, Soviet foreign minister, elected leader of Georgia in 1992

Shushkevich, Stanislau, elected chairman of Belarus parliament in 1991

Silayev, Ivan, last Soviet prime minister

Sobchak, Anatoly, pro-reform mayor of St. Petersburg

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, former political prisoner and writer

Stalin, Joseph, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1922—1952

Sukhanov, Lev, assistant to Yeltsin

Suslov, Mikhail, Soviet ideologist in Brezhnev era

Tarasenko, Sergey, aide to Shevardnadze

Tretyakov, Vitaly, pro-reform editor of
Nezavisimaya Gazeta

Tsipko, Alexander, Gorbachev speechwriter

Varennikov, Valentin, army general, putschist

Vlasov, Alexander, Communist candidate defeated by Yeltsin in election for chairman of Russian Supreme Soviet

Vorontsov, Yury, USSR/Russian ambassador to United Nations

Yakovlev, Alexander, diplomat, close adviser to Gorbachev, inspiration for perestroika

Yakovlev, Yegor, pro-reform editor of
Moscow News
, later head of state television

Yanayev, Gennady, vice president of Soviet Union, putschist

Yaroshenko, Viktor, aide to Yeltsin

Yavlinsky, Grigory, radical economist

Yazov, Dmitry, Soviet minister of defense, putschist

Yeltsin, Boris, Moscow party boss, 1985—1987, chairman of Russian Supreme Soviet, 1990—1991, president of Russia, 1991—1999

Yeltsina, Naina, wife of Boris Yeltsin

Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, far right Russian politician

PREFACE

This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city. The day is Wednesday, December 25, 1991. The city is Moscow. It is the day the Soviet Union ends and the red flag comes down from the Kremlin. It is witness to a deeply personal and politically charged drama, marked at the highest levels (and out of sight of the public) by shouts, tears, reminiscences, and melodrama. It climaxes in a final act of surrender by Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin, two extraordinary men who despised each other and whose interaction shaped modern Russia.

In reconstructing the events of this midwinter day, I have combined my interviews and my own research in television and newspaper archives with material from over a hundred memoirs, diaries, biographies, and other works that have appeared since the fall of the Soviet Union in English and Russian. I have also drawn on my experience observing Gorbachev and Yeltsin up close in the last four years of Soviet rule, when I was a correspondent based in Moscow. During this period I frequented the Kremlin and the Russian White House, where the fight between the two rivals played out. I hung around parliamentary and party meetings, grabbing every opportunity to question the two leaders when they appeared. I interviewed Politburo members, editors, economists, nationalists, Communist Party radicals and hard-liners, dissidents, striking coal miners, and countless people just trying to get by. I was a face in the crowd at pro-democracy rallies, at Red Square commemorations, and at the barricades in the Baltics. I traveled around Russia, from Chechnya to Yakutsk, and to the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, observing the changes sweeping the USSR that would lead to the denouement on Christmas Day 1991. And since then I have returned to Russia regularly, for both professional and personal reasons.

I was privileged to experience the last days of the Soviet Union and what came after not just as a foreign observer but as a member by marriage of a Russian-Armenian family. The Suvorovs live in Siberia, where they experienced the excitement, hardships, and absurdities of those turbulent years and taught me the joys of summer at the dacha. My philologist wife Zhanna was a deputy in a regional soviet, and later, when we moved to Washington, she worked for the International Finance Corporation on the post-1991 project to privatize Russia. My father-in-law, Stanislav Suvorov, a shoemaker now in his eighties and still working in a Krasnoyarsk theater, suffered under the old system. He served five years in jail for a simple act of speculation—selling his car at a profit. He later prospered by providing handmade shoes for top party officials. My mother-in-law, Marietta, a party member, welcomed the free market that came with the transition from Gorbachev to Yeltsin with the comment, “At least now I don’t have to humiliate myself to buy some cheese.” Nevertheless, I saw the pernicious effect on the family of economic and social chaos. My cousin-in-law Ararat, a police officer, was shot dead by the mafia in Krasnoyarsk. Marietta’s savings disappeared overnight with hyperinflation. My sister-in-law Larisa, director of a music school, went unpaid for months in the postcommunist economic chaos and one day received, in lieu of salary, a cardboard box of men’s socks. All this, and an attempt by the KGB to compromise me by trying (and failing) to intimidate Zhanna into working for them shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, has given me a fairly unique insight into what was going on in the society that threw up Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and how it all came to a head.

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