It is 7:12 p.m. when Gorbachev ends his address. He looks up to the camera and adds, “I wish all the best to everyone.”
On Russian television, announcer Yelena Mishina declares, “A new day in a new state.” Seconds later the television channels revert to their normal schedules. One cuts back to a puppet show, another to a documentary on baby care.
Some of Gorbachev’s aides and staff have tears in their eyes, having watched their chief complete the final act of his presidency. Chernyaev perceives him suddenly as a tragic figure, “even though I who was used to seeing him in everyday life find it difficult to apply this term to him, by which of course he will be known in history.”
2
Grachev feels certain that for many people watching, an unpardonable and irreparable error is being committed, as the country and the world look on.
For Alexander Yakovlev, standing partly hidden behind one of the cameras, it is a seminal moment, the end of the road on which he embarked with Gorbachev nearly seven years ago. At the same time it is yet another occasion when Gorbachev ignored his advice. Hardly any of his suggestions for the speech appeared in the final draft, which was mostly Chernyaev’s work. He feels Gorbachev couldn’t find the strength or the courage to critically analyze and understand what has happened, especially in these final days. The speech in the end demonstrates how his comrade lost touch with reality in the four months since the coup. It is a laborious attempt to defend himself, to justify himself and save face. “This is the typical delusion of someone devoid of self-analysis,” reflects Yakovlev. “He did not come out of that psychological cul-de-sac where he put himself, having taken offense with the whole world.”
3
With all eyes on Gorbachev, Palazchenko finds himself thinking that perhaps someone is watching him too, “wondering where I would be a couple of weeks later.” The next day he and his colleagues will go their own ways, with their labor record books stamped “Discharged from his post due to the liquidation of the office of the president of the USSR.”
CNN’s Russian interpreter, Yury Somov, is in fact watching his Kremlin counterpart and thinking that “Gorbachev was the biggest catch of Palazchenko’s career, and now Gorbachev is going down.”
4
Somov does not share the teary emotions displayed by Gorbachev’s aides. He notes that half of the CNN crew are Russian and believes none of them give a damn. “There was no feeling among us that it was a momentous event. It was just a power struggle. It wasn’t affecting us.” Far from being awed by the downfall of an empire, he believes that everything collapsed a long time previously. “What was emerging was years of chaos and theft,” he explains years later. “I knew at the time that was what was going to happen.” Somov was not given to empathizing with politicians. He was of the opinion that “you can’t be a good interpreter without being jaded and cynical and you can’t be a good interpreter if you are emotional.”
He does, however, feel professional pride in the accomplishment of CNN. “We were patting ourselves on the back. It had never been done before on the network, getting an interview with the leader of a nation on the same night he resigned!”
CNN producer Charlie Caudill reckons Gorbachev’s “emotional and passionate address” to be the most painful speech he has ever heard. “The room was full of melancholy, and after the broadcast Gorbachev looked beaten, sad—the adrenalin had drained away, gone.” He finds himself thinking back to the day in 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for a second term, an event Caudill witnessed as a White House correspondent. “President Johnson was conducting a war in Vietnam that had lost popular support and had been, like Gorbachev, clearly repudiated by the people, and, like Gorbachev, he had fought as long as he could and then came to terms with reality.”
Tom Johnson was assistant press secretary in the LBJ White House that same day. He, too, is keenly aware of the similarities between Gorbachev’s resignation and the former U.S. president’s decision not to seek reelection. “I really felt a sense of sadness on both occasions, a sense that each man had tried in his own way to leave the world a better place, but that each had been swept aside by forces each had unleashed.”
5
Gorbachev waits to make sure the television cameras are no longer rolling. He gives a sigh and sits back. There is a brief silence; then people start moving around again.
Claire Shipman and Steve Hurst pull up chairs in front of the desk for their scheduled CNN interview. Caudill insists that hangers-on leave the room. “I mean we’re doing the world here—we’re not just doing local.”
“Can we make this short?” pleads Gorbachev, suddenly drained. He has only a few minutes before the scheduled handover of the nuclear suitcase to Boris Yeltsin in his office. Grachev tells CNN there is time for four questions only.
In the interview, which is broadcast live around the world—except for Russia—Gorbachev says he hopes that, as life improves for the people, they will look back at this time as hard, but necessary. “We had to begin, and it is good that we began. Now I will have to recover a little bit, relax, take a rest.” Asked how Raisa and other members of his family are taking his resignation, he answers, “Bravely.”
Gorbachev seems to Shipman weak, defeated, exhausted, and melancholy, as if the energy was sapped out of him and he is still puzzling how it all came to pass. She feels as if they have intruded on a very private moment. “I almost felt bad being there. It was almost like going to a funeral.” Hurst is struck by how somber the atmosphere is. “There was sadness in his eyes and none of the ebullience .”
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Central Television in Moscow carries the interview two hours later, after producers at TV headquarters satisfy themselves there is nothing in it that will offend Boris Yeltsin.
As Gorbachev gets up from his desk, he picks up the Mont Blanc pen and with a reflex movement slips the shiny black object into his breast pocket. Tom Johnson thinks fast. He must not let Gorbachev disappear into the corridor with his precious writing instrument, which is now of some historical significance. During Gorbachev’s address the CNN president had whispered to Caudill, “What do you think I should do about the pen?” Caudill had muttered, “Get it back!” When Gorbachev pauses to shake his hand on the way out, the CNN president says, “Sir, my pen!” Palazchenko translates. “Oh yes!” says Gorbachev, his face breaking into a smile. He hands over the pen and leaves.
Shipman is taken aback that Gorbachev has no understanding at all of the importance of the instrument. “I was looking at Tom and Charlie and thinking, this is crazy. We are going to have the pen he signed away the Soviet Union with.”
One of Gorbachev’s aides does make a halfhearted attempt to persuade CNN to leave the pen behind. The response is “No way!” (In 2008 Johnson donated the pen to the Newseum in Washington.)
Liu Heung Shing gets the picture he wanted to capture the finality of the occasion for the Associated Press. “Gorbachev was looking rather grim the whole evening and was coming to his last page of the speech,” he said. “I picked up my camera, pointed, and shot the frame showing him [closing] the folder containing the speech.”
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A few seconds after he pressed the shutter, Liu felt a fist thumping into his kidneys from behind the tripod. Tom Johnson saw the security man hit Liu from behind just as Gorbachev was taking off his glasses and closing his file. He mouthed the question, “Are you all right?” Liu nodded. He urgently needed to get his picture developed as quickly as possible at the AP bureau across town in Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The same guard was blocking the door. “All I could do was to plead, ‘Please! Please! Please!’ At last, he opened the tall and thick door, I rushed down the red carpet runner, turned the corner, and continued to run as fast as I could at the end of the corridor. All the awaiting Western and Russian journalists and cameramen were startled to see me running out all by myself. Some showed me their middle fingers in the air.
“By the time I came out of the darkroom with the color negative film, I took a deep breath as I realized the frame of Gorbachev was pin sharp and the speech folder was blurred as I had wished. Next day, it fronted virtually every newspaper in the world, including the
New York Times.
It reminded me of an earlier experience of Beijing 1989, when I transmitted the frame of a man in front of the tanks by Jeff Widener.” Liu Heung Shing publishes the picture of Gorbachev in his book USSR.
The Collapse of an Empire,
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
Literaturnaya Gazeta,
perceives his farewell as a grandiose and tragic exit of Shakespearean dimensions and thinks of the line from Hamlet: “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
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
Telegraph
of London, the biggest frustration this Christmas is that his newspaper, like most of his rivals, does not have a Boxing Day issue, and he has to “witness one of the most momentous days of postwar history without being able to write about it.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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!