The Last Empire

by Serhii Plokhy

  There was also the business component of the call: Gorbachev and Bush discussed the transfer of control over Soviet nuclear forces from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. Bush would later be surprised to learn that Gorbachev had allowed Ted Koppel and the ABC crew to film the whole conversation from the Moscow side. The presence of television crews in Gorbachev’s office seemed bizarre not only to Bush but also to Gorbachev’s own aide, Pavel Palazhchenko, who later wrote in his memoirs, “It felt a little unreal—while the president was putting the final touches on the text of his address and the decree passing to Yeltsin control of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, American television technicians were coming and going busily, checking their wires and microphones. Who could have thought that this—all of this—were possible just a year ago?”10

  There was a certain symbolism in the fact that Americans were now at both ends of the line. With his telephone call to Bush, Gorbachev was effectively acknowledging the United States as the sole remaining superpower on the face of the earth. Ironically, it was also the Americans who provided Gorbachev with a pen to sign his resignation decrees. As he prepared to sign, Gorbachev discovered that his pen was not working properly. Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, who had led his crew into the Kremlin, offered his own Mont Blanc ballpoint—a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary present from his wife. Gorbachev hesitated. “Is it American?” he asked Johnson. “No, sir, it is either French or German,” came the answer. Gorbachev signed the decrees with a pen produced by a German company founded in Hamburg before World War I. As if to underline the new power of the United States, it was given to a Soviet politician by an American businessman.11

  Gorbachev’s resignation address, which started as planned at 7:00 p.m. Moscow time, was the first of his speeches to be broadcast live not only to a Soviet audience but also to the world at large. The first task was performed by Soviet state television, which had finally shown some interest in Gorbachev; the second, by CNN. Gorbachev’s press secretary, Andrei Grachev, later remembered that Gorbachev’s voice was on the verge of trembling when he began his address, but he soon regained self-control. Cherniaev was happy with his boss’s performance. “He was calm,” noted Cherniaev in his diary. “He did not hesitate to consult the text, and everything turned out right from the start.”

  Cherniaev had special reasons to be happy with Gorbachev’s performance. The text that Gorbachev did not hesitate to consult was largely written by Cherniaev himself. Another version, written by Aleksandr Yakovlev, which Cherniaev regarded as full of bitterness and self-pity, had been rejected. It included the following sentences: “And let it remain on the conscience of those who are now casting stones at me and allowing themselves to engage in vulgarity and insults. Decent people will remind them, I hope, where they would have been if everything had remained the same.” Gorbachev also turned down a version written by his press secretary, Andrei Grachev. It criticized the presidents of the rebellious republics and claimed that without a center, cooperation between the non-Russian republics and Russia would be all but impossible: “An equal political union, for instance, between tiny Moldova and gigantic Russia is impossible in principle. Russia’s obvious economic advantage is a basis for looming Russian imperialism.” Grachev proposed that Gorbachev use the address to go over the heads of the presidents of the newly independent republics and appeal for popular support in reforming the federal state.

  Gorbachev clearly tried to avoid a direct confrontation with Yeltsin. Cherniaev, however, was proud that in the final version of the speech, he had managed to restore some of the boldest parts of it. They included the statement that the USSR should not be dissolved without a referendum, a line that everyone knew would anger Yeltsin and that Gorbachev had initially crossed out during the editing process. What Cherniaev heard later from his own circle convinced him that he had done the right thing. Those close to Cherniaev were telling him that the speech was the very soul of “dignity and nobility.” Aleksandr Yakovlev, whose version of the speech was rejected by Gorbachev, was of a different opinion. “This is the typical delusion of someone devoid of self-analysis,” he commented later. “He did not come out of that psychological cul-de-sac where he put himself, having taking offense with the whole world.”

  “Dear Compatriots and Fellow Citizens!” Gorbachev began his address. “Given the situation that has come about with the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am ceasing my activity in the office of president of the USSR. I am making this decision for reasons of principle.” It was anyone’s guess how resignation because of the liquidation of the Union and the office of its president was to be reconciled with resignation for reasons of principle. No less confusing were the sentences immediately following: “I came out firmly for independence, the freedom of peoples, and the sovereignty of the republics. But at the same time for maintaining the Union state and the integrity of the country.” How one could simultaneously support freedom, sovereignty, and even independence for the republics and unity for the state that tried to prevent them from acquiring sovereignty and independence was probably also beyond the intellectual grasp of the television audience. Along with Cherniaev, Gorbachev was caught up in the political rhetoric of the last years of the Soviet Union, when “sovereignty” was understood as something other than “independence” and neither term meant among the Soviet political class what it did to the rest of the world.

  Gorbachev spoke much more coherently about the accomplishments of his rule: the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of the totalitarian system, the democratization of Soviet politics, and the opening of the country to the world. But few Soviet citizens were prepared to give him credit. Many could no longer endure even the sound of Gorbachev’s voice, as his endless talking throughout his years in power had accompanied a steady decline in their standard of living. Some felt sorry for him, but almost no one wanted him to stay. For Cherniaev, Gorbachev cut a tragic figure. Indeed he was. A visionary and a man of great accomplishment, he changed the world and his country for the better by his actions but failed to change himself. A democrat at heart, he never faced a popular election and outstayed his welcome at the head of the country that was crumbling under his feet.12

  All that remained for Gorbachev to do once his speech was over was to transfer his nuclear briefcase to Yeltsin. The Russian president was supposed to come to Gorbachev’s office in the company of Marshal Shaposhnikov and the officers in charge of the briefcase to complete the transfer. When, after a brief interview with CNN, Gorbachev returned to his office, Shaposhnikov was waiting for him in the anteroom, but there was no sign of Yeltsin. The reason was that Yeltsin had called Shaposhnikov as the latter watched Gorbachev’s resignation speech on television and told him that he would not go to Gorbachev’s office. Yeltsin wanted Shaposhnikov to handle the entire transfer on his own.

  It turned out that Yeltsin was outraged by the content of Gorbachev’s speech, which made no reference to the transfer of power to him and assigned all credit for the Soviet Union’s democratic development to Gorbachev alone. After watching the speech for a while, the enraged Yeltsin turned off the television set. As far as he was concerned, the truce concluded two days earlier had expired. Yeltsin saw no reason to do something he did not want to do in the first place—to pay Gorbachev a visit as president of the Soviet Union. After the negotiations of December 23, he had told his aides that he would never go back to see Gorbachev in his office. Now Gorbachev seemed to have given Yeltsin an excuse to avoid a final show of deference.

  Yeltsin passed on his new offer to Gorbachev: he would meet him, but only on “neutral territory,” in St. Catherine’s Hall. It was all about who would have to come to whom. Gorbachev, whom his aides found redfaced and agitated after his conversation with Shaposhnikov, refused to go to the hall, which was used for the reception of foreign delegations. He would not defer to Yeltsin, and besides, in his mind, the USSR and Russia were not foreign states. Shaposhnikov eventually made arrangements for Gorbachev and Yeltsin to t
ransfer the nuclear codes without seeing each other. The actual ceremony took place in a Kremlin corridor, with one set of officers surrendering the codes and the other set accepting the nuclear briefcase. They saluted one another in the presence of a CNN crew whose cameras were already packed.

  Now that one agreement with Gorbachev had been broken, Yeltsin decided to break another. He ordered the lowering of the red Soviet flag flying over the cupola of the Senate Building in the Kremlin, originally scheduled for December 31, to take place immediately. Gorbachev finished his speech at 7:12 p.m. Less than half an hour later, the flag was taken down. Gorbachev was appalled. “Even in the first minutes after stepping down I was faced with impudence and a lack of courtesy,” he wrote in his memoirs. Gorbachev wanted to keep the Soviet banner taken down from the Senate Building flagpole as a memento, but he was unable to do so. It was taken away by Kremlin custodians who no longer obeyed his orders. After seventy-four years of Soviet rule, the red banner was replaced by the red, white, and blue flag of Russia. The Commonwealth had no flag of its own: if one was going to be adopted, it would have to be raised in Minsk, not Moscow.13

  After the official business of the transfer of nuclear codes was over, Gorbachev and his closest advisers, including Cherniaev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Yegor Yakovlev, marked the occasion with a glass of cognac. Then they moved what was developing into an ad hoc party from Gorbachev’s office to the Walnut Room, where they were joined by Gorbachev’s press secretary, Andrei Grachev. As Grachev would recall later, the ex-president “had his last farewell supper in the Walnut Room in the company of a mere five members of his ‘inner circle,’ having received not one telephone call with an expression, if not of thanks, then at least of support or sympathy from those politicians of the new Russia or the henceforth independent states of the CIS who owed him everything.” The only leaders who had called Gorbachev in the previous few days to convey their good wishes for a life away from presidential office were Westerners: Chancellor Helmut Kohl of a now united Germany, Prime Minister John Major of Britain, and, half an hour before his resignation speech, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister.

  In his own memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev would put a more positive spin on his last supper at the Kremlin: “Together with me were the closest friends and colleagues who shared with me all the great pressures and drama of the last months of the presidency.” What definitely united those drinking cognac and eating cold cuts in the former Politburo meeting room on the last day of Gorbachev’s presidency was their belief in perestroika—the revolutionary changes in society that they all had helped Gorbachev bring about. Andrei Grachev later recalled the mood around the Politburo table as both solemn and sad: “There was something of a feeling of a big thing accomplished. There was a kind of feeling of everyone sharing.” They left the Kremlin after midnight, looking to the future with some hope but mainly with concern. Gorbachev asked Cherniaev to tell his contact in the German publishing industry not to transfer to Moscow Gorbachev’s honorarium for the German translation of his book on the August coup. No one knew what the next day would bring.14

  WHEN GORBACHEV AND HIS AIDES left the Kremlin in the early hours of December 26, it was still Christmas Day in Washington. George Bush, who had taken a telephone call from Gorbachev in the morning at his Camp David retreat, flew to Washington later that day to address the nation from the Oval Office. His live address was scheduled for 9:00 p.m. EST, which was the early morning of December 26 in Moscow. The major television networks hastily canceled or rescheduled some of their programs to accommodate what many expected would be a historic announcement.15

  While everyone had been anticipating Gorbachev’s eventual resignation, which seemed inevitable after the Almaty summit, no one had known exactly when it would come. On December 23, when Yeltsin paid his surprise visit to Gorbachev to arrange the transfer of power, Ed Hewett, the Soviet expert at the National Security Council, and his assistant Nick Burns were putting the finishing touches on a draft of a statement that President Bush was to make in response to Gorbachev’s forthcoming resignation. Hewett, Burns, and others in the administration had wanted Bush to give a speech explaining to the nation the significance of the Soviet collapse, but Bush was reluctant. Burns believed the president did not want to make things even more difficult for Gorbachev than they already were. Then came word from General Brent Scowcroft that indeed there would be no speech, and Hewett and Burns got busy working on a statement intended to pay tribute to Gorbachev’s contribution to history and his role in the peaceful ending of the Cold War.

  The statement praised the Soviet president for “the revolutionary transformation of a totalitarian dictatorship and the liberation of his people from its smothering embrace.” It also paid tribute to Gorbachev’s role in international affairs. He had “acted boldly and decisively to end the bitter divisions of the cold war and contributed to the remaking of a Europe whole and free.” As examples of US-Soviet cooperation on world issues, the statement singled out the Gulf War, the peace settlements in Nicaragua and Namibia, and progress on the Israeli-Palestinian talks. “As he leaves office,” read the text prepared for Bush, “I would like to express publicly and on behalf of the American people my gratitude to him for years of sustained commitment to world peace, and my personal respect for his intellect, vision, and courage.”16

  Burns forwarded the text to Dennis Ross and Tom Niles in the State Department, asking for their comments by 2:00 p.m. that day. “The president would like to issue a statement on the day Gorbachev resigns,” read the cover note. The draft aroused no questions or objections from the State Department or anyone else. Ed Hewett and Nick Burns could look forward to a restful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. But their holiday plans were overturned on Christmas Eve when George Bush, already at Camp David, arranged a teleconference with his advisers, including James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, and pollster Robert Teeter—a sign of the impending presidential campaign—to discuss the administration’s response to Gorbachev’s expected resignation. They approved the statement prepared by Hewett and Burns, but Scowcroft felt that Gorbachev’s resignation, which the latest news from Moscow suggested would happen on Christmas Day, was “too important to kiss off with a statement from Marlin’s office.” He believed that the president should make a televised address to the nation. Bush finally agreed.

  Then came the question of the text of the presidential address. Teeter, who was considering the impact of such an address on public opinion and liked the draft prepared by Hewett and Burns, came up with a solution: “Get those two guys who wrote the statement to turn it into a speech.” Scowcroft and Fitzwater reached Hewett and Burns at home and told them, “Merry Christmas! We need a speech by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” Burns had one thing to do before writing the speech. He and his family—his wife, Elizabeth, and their three young daughters, Sarah, age eight, Elizabeth, five, and Caroline, a year and a half—were ready to celebrate Christmas Eve. They had a tradition of putting milk and cookies out for Santa Claus. Once they had done so, Burns left home and headed for the White House to work on the speech that he wanted the president to deliver and the nation to hear.

  Hewett and Burns worked on the draft speech until 3:00 a.m. on Christmas Day. “I am afraid that the final death throes of communism forced me to work not only on Christmas Eve but also on Christmas Day on the president’s speech that evening,” wrote Burns a few days later to one of his acquaintances. “That was not a popular event with Libby and the girls, but I’ll try to make it up to them!” The telephone began ringing at Burns’s home soon after 8:00 a.m. on December 25. These were calls from Bush’s staff at Camp David. There were revisions to the speech, and revisions to the revisions. He ended up fitting them together and editing the final text, working on it through the rest of the day. He was also a note taker on the telephone call that Gorbachev made to Bush that day. It was hard for anyone in the US government whose Christmas Day was ruined by Gorb
achev’s sudden resignation to credit the notion that he had actually chosen that date because he wanted Americans to spend Christmas Eve in peace.17

  At 9:01 p.m. on Christmas Day, George Bush delivered his address to the nation. It lasted seven minutes. “Good evening, and Merry Christmas to all Americans across our great country,” began Bush.

  “During these last few months, you and I have witnessed one of the greatest dramas of the 20th century, the historic and revolutionary transformation of a totalitarian dictatorship, the Soviet Union, and the liberation of its peoples,” continued the president. “For over 40 years, the United States led the West in the struggle against communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values. This struggle shaped the lives of all Americans. It forced all nations to live under the specter of nuclear destruction. That confrontation is now over. The nuclear threat, while far from gone, is receding. Eastern Europe is free. 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.”18

  While a good part of Bush’s statement on Gorbachev’s resignation, released on the same day, was incorporated into the television address, its interpretation of the meaning of that event was quite different. The change of interpretation, in fact, could hardly have been more profound. In the first statement, the ending of the Cold War was presented as a joint effort, achieved with Gorbachev’s active participation. In the television address, it was his resignation that heralded the end of the Cold War, which had come about through the victory of the United States. An ally in bringing the Cold War to a conclusion was turned into a defeated enemy. Until the last weeks of the existence of the USSR, Bush had resisted its disintegration and tried to keep Gorbachev in power at all costs. But now that Gorbachev had resigned, Bush and his team were ready to take the credit for something they had worked hard to avoid—the loss of a reliable junior partner in the shaping of the post–Cold War world. One of the reasons for this reversal was Bush’s flagging presidential campaign. Another was a sense of jubilation among his aides.