Meanwhile, the CNN crew become the sole witnesses of the exchange of the nuclear suitcase some ten minutes later, after they have dismantled their equipment and are assembling in the Kremlin corridor.
“At 7:56 we were waiting in the hallway outside the green room for all of our party to assemble before we could leave,” said Loory. “At the other end of the corridor, near the entrance to Gorbachev’s working office, a man appeared carrying a cloth-covered suitcase with a protruding antenna. He disappeared into a doorway. We were watching the nuclear codes passing from Gorbachev’s control to Yeltsin’s.” Charlie Caudill recalled, “We are being led out by handlers down a very long corridor. All of a sudden a side door opens twenty-five feet in front of us. Armed soldiers come out. They block the way and make us halt. A door on the left opens up. A high-ranking military guy comes up, box under his arm. The opposite door opens, same looking kind of dude. He snaps to attention. They salute each other. The officers exchange the object.” The television cameras have been packed away, and an opportunity is lost to make a video record of the historic moment.
Stu Loory alone witnesses another little piece of history. He goes ahead of the CNN crew to make sure the rental vans are in place outside. “I walk around closer to where the trucks are. A Kremlin worker comes towards me holding the flag folded up in a rectangle under his arm.” Loory stops the man and takes a photograph, and thereby secures the only picture of the last flag of the USSR to fly over the Kremlin as it is carried away. He immediately regrets not offering to buy it. Tom Johnson later tries to acquire the emblem from a Kremlin official, but the offer is politely yet firmly refused.
As he leaves the Senate Building with the television crew, Johnson waves his Mont Blanc in the air and calls out, “How much do you think I can get for this?” The technicians and engineers cheer and slap each other on the back. “We did it! We did it!” cries Johnson.
They have pulled off a remarkable feat. Mikhail Gorbachev abdicated on television with an inscription in the lower right-hand corner of the screen informing 153 countries of the world that they are seeing it courtesy of CNN. “In the annals of competitive journalism, this was an unprecedented victory,” claimed Loony.
6
In Washington President Bush’s aides show him the text of a statement they have drafted praising Gorbachev for liberating the Soviet people from the smothering embrace of a totalitarian dictatorship. After looking it over, the president holds a conference call with his advisers on whether this is a proper response. Scowcroft suggests that Gorbachev’s resignation is too important “to kiss off with a statement” from the press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater.
7
Bush decides to take Marine One from Camp David to Washington and address the nation from the Oval Office on the historic significance of what has just happened in the Kremlin. The networks and cable television companies suspend their scheduled programs at 9 p.m. EST on Christmas Day to allow the president to make his own television address from the Oval Office. While sparing Gorbachev’s sensitivities by not declaring outright that the fall of the Soviet Union is a victory for the United States in the Cold War—for two years he prohibited his staff from depicting events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as a triumph for the United States—Bush uses the word “victory” a number of times, clearly implying that America is the winner. The nuclear threat is receding, he says, Eastern Europe is free, and the Soviet Union itself is no more. “This is a victory for democracy and freedom. It’s a victory for the moral force of our values. Every American can take pride in this victory.”
After paying tribute to Gorbachev, the U.S. president acknowledges the new reality. He announces that the United States recognizes and welcomes the emergence of a free, independent, and democratic Russia, “led by its courageous president, Boris Yeltsin.” He declares that the U.S. embassy in Moscow will in future be the embassy to Russia. He says he supports Russia’s assumption of the USSR’s seat as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. And from today America will recognize the independence of Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan. Bush had delayed formal recognition of Russia until after Gorbachev resigned as a personal courtesy to his deposed friend and his partner in ending the Cold War. His administration has already recognized Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the Baltic republics that completed the makeup of the original Soviet Union.
“This is a day of great hope for all Americans,” concludes President Bush. “May God bless the people of the new nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States. And on this special day of peace on earth, good will toward men, may God continue to bless the United States of America. Good night.”
Now that the Soviet Union is history, White House officials feel free to express the opinion that Gorbachev clung on too long to power. Gorbachev “is leaving at a level that’s a lot lower than he would have had a month ago,” an administration official tells the
New York Times.
“He’s taken away from his own currency and cost himself a bit of his place in history by letting events pass him by. It’s sad to see a man of such stature and historical importance misjudge events that way.”
8
The anonymous spokesman claims that Bush privately wrote off Gorbachev after the Middle East conference in October in Madrid, at which the penniless Soviet delegation had to ask the Spanish government to pick up their hotel bills.
Current and former world leaders shower Gorbachev with praise. In London John Major notes that it was given to very few people to change the course of history, but that was what Gorbachev has done, and whatever happens today, his place in history is secure. Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, which achieved unity under Gorbachev’s watch, expresses the view that his place in the history of the century will not be challenged by anyone. NATO secretary-general Manfred Wörner says that Europe is grateful to Gorbachev for his essential contribution toward a Europe whole and free. Ronald Reagan declares that Gorbachev will live forever in history, and Margaret Thatcher expresses gratitude to him for doing “great things for the world . . . without a shot being fired.”
One of the few discordant notes comes from the People’s Republic of China, which is ruled by the Communist Party of China, now the largest single political party in the world. China’s communist leaders have dealt with their own people’s demands for democracy and the end of corruption by massacring hundreds of students and workers in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. China’s foreign ministry acknowledges that the demise of the Soviet Union heralds the end of the East-West conflict and the dawn of a new multipolar age. But seeking to justify the bloody path the Chinese party has taken to remain in power, it complains that Gorbachev got it wrong. Gorbachev’s “new thinking, glasnost, and political pluralism,” states the Chinese government, “have brought only political chaos, ethnic strife, and economic crises.”
9
In Minsk, Stanislau Shushkevich does not watch Gorbachev’s final address on television. He has better things to do. Late in the evening the Belarus leader hears that the red flag has come down and the Soviet Union he helped dismantle has come to an end, almost a week before its official sell-by date of New Year’s Eve. Asked twenty years later what was his reaction when he was told, Shushkevich replies with one word:
“Pravilno!”
Translated roughly it means “Just right!”
10
CHAPTER 26
DECEMBER 25: LATE NIGHT
It is nine o’clock in the evening and a ghostly silence has descended on the Kremlin. Andrey Grachev returns there from his interview with French television studios in Gruzinsky Lane. He has received a call on his car phone telling him Gorbachev wants him back in the Kremlin as soon as possible. Outside the Senate Building there are only 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.”
1
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?”
2
)
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
Noscow News
from a Communist Party propaganda sheet into a standard bearer for glasnost, going as far as he thought Gorbachev was prepared to tolerate. They fell out when Gorbachev temporarily sided with the hard-liners a year earlier, but three months ago, when everything changed in the aftermath of the coup, Gorbachev appointed him head of state broadcasting and a member of his political consultative council. He is taking a risk aligning himself so closely with Gorbachev. The president of Russia is in control of state television, and he will know tomorrow if he will be kept on.