Conor O'Clery - Moscow, December 25, 1991

There are three nuclear suitcases in total. One is with Mikhail Gorbachev, another is with the minister for defense, and a third is assigned to the chief of the general staff. Any one of the devices is sufficient to authorize the launch of a missile, but only the president can lawfully order a nuclear strike. So long as Gorbachev possesses the chemodanchik, he is legally the commander of the country’s strategic forces, and the Soviet Union remains a nuclear superpower.

This all changes on December 25, 1991. At 7:00 p.m., as the world watches on television, Mikhail Gorbachev announces that he is resigning. The communist monolith known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is breaking up into separate states. He has no further role. Immediately afterwards, Boris Yeltsin, the president of newly independent Russia, is scheduled to come to his Kremlin office to take formal possession of the suitcase, whereupon the two colonels will say their good-byes to Gorbachev and leave with Yeltsin. This will be the final moment in the disintegration of the superpower that has been ruled by Gorbachev since 1985 and that dominates a land mass stretching over eleven time zones and half the globe. Thereafter Russia, the largest of the fifteen republics, will be the sole nuclear power. Boris Yeltsin will acquire the legal capacity to destroy the United States several times over. It is an awesome responsibility. The Soviet arsenal consists of 27,000 nuclear weapons, of which 11,000 are on missiles capable of reaching the United States. [2] 2 Woolf, Nuclear Weapons in the Former Soviet Union. One of these warheads alone can destroy a city.

The handover is to be the final act in a drama of Shakespearean intensity. Its major players are two contrasting figures whose baleful interaction has changed the globe’s balance of power. It is the culmination of a struggle for supremacy between Mikhail Gorbachev, the urbane, sophisticated communist idolized by the capitalist world, and Boris Yeltsin, the impetuous, hard-drinking democrat perceived as a wrecker in Western capitals.

The ousted president and his usurper behave in a statesman-like manner before the cameras. Yet rarely in world history has an event of such magnitude been determined by the passionate dislike of two men for each other. Some years earlier, when at the pinnacle of his power, Gorbachev humiliated Yeltsin publicly. The burly Siberian has never forgotten, and in December 1991 the roles are reversed. Gorbachev is the one who is denigrated, reduced to tears as he and his wife Raisa are hustled out of their presidential residence. Even the carefully choreographed arrangements for the transfer of the nuclear communications and codes are thrown into disarray at the last minute through Yeltsin’s petulance and Gorbachev’s pride.

Nevertheless the malevolence of Yeltsin and the vanity of Gorbachev do not stand in the way of something akin to a political miracle taking place. On December 25, 1991, a historical event on a par with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 or the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 occurs without a foreign war or bloody revolution as catalyst. Communist Yugoslavia disintegrated in flames, but the Soviet Union breaks up almost impassively as the world looks on in disbelief. The mighty Soviet army relinquishes an empire of subject republics without firing a shot. It all happens very quickly. Few politicians or scholars predicted, even as the year 1991 began, the scale and scope of the historic upheaval at year’s end.

The Soviet Union was born in the civil war that followed the 1917 October Revolution, when the Bolshevik faction led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin seized control over most of the old Russian Empire. Industrialized with great brutality under Josef Stalin, it repulsed invading Nazi forces in World War II and emerged as one of the world’s two superpowers. The subsequent Cold War between East and West shaped international politics and assumptions for almost half a century.

But Lenin’s great socialist experiment faltered. The economy stagnated and then collapsed. The center lost control. On December 25, 1991, the country that defeated Hitler’s Germany simply ceases to exist. In Mikhail Gorbachev’s words, “One of the most powerful states in the world collapsed before our very eyes.”

It is a stupendous moment in the story of humankind, the end of a millennium of Russian and Soviet Empire, and the beginning of Russia’s national and state renaissance. It signals the final defeat of the twentieth century’s two totalitarian systems, Nazi fascism and Soviet communism, which embroiled the world in the greatest war in history. It is the day that allows American conservatives to celebrate—prematurely—the prophecy of the philosopher Francis Fukuyama that the collapse of the USSR will mark the “end of history,” with the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Mikhail Gorbachev created the conditions for the end of totalitarianism, and Boris Yeltsin delivered the death blow. But neither is honored in Russia in modern times as a national hero, nor is the date of the transfer of power formally commemorated in Moscow. Contemporary leaders discourage any celebration of December 25, 1991. What happened that day is viewed by many in Russia as, in Vladimir Putin’s words, a “great geopolitical catastrophe.” It is a reminder that the fall of their once-mighty superpower was celebrated in the United States as a victory in the Cold War, rather than as the triumph of a people who peacefully overthrew a totalitarian system to embrace democracy and free-market economics. As a former Russian presidential chief of staff, Alexander Leontiyev, put it not long afterwards, “Americans got so drunk at the USSR’s funeral that they’re still hung over.”

Indeed what is remarkable is the number of Americans who gather around the deathbed for the obsequies for communist power. Never before or since are Russian and American interests so intertwined. The distrust and enmity of the long Cold War dissolves into a remarkable dalliance between the competing nuclear powers. Americans from the International Monetary Fund and from the Chicago School of Economics are to be found in Moscow collaborating with Russian policymakers on a new direction for the Russian economy. Their guiding hands are at the elbow of Yeltsin’s ministers as they embark on a mission unprecedented in economic history: the dismantling of the communist model and its substitution with the raw capitalism of neoliberal economics.

During a visit to Russia just days before Gorbachev’s resignation, U.S. secretary of state James Baker marvels at how, in all his meetings, one theme is uniform: “the intense desire to satisfy the United States.” [3] 3 Baker with DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy, 583. With each of the new republics trying to establish positive relations with America, he reckons that “our ability to affect their behavior” will never be greater than at this time. American president George H. W. Bush observes that the behavior of the new states is “designed specifically to gain US support for what they had done.” [4] 4 Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 555. The deference to the United States is such that all the emerging new countries declare their adherence to a list of democratic principles laid down by the Bush administration for diplomatic recognition.

In the dying days of the Soviet Union, American diplomats and Russia’s political figures enjoy such close relations that they consult each other almost on a daily basis. Gorbachev addresses the U.S. ambassador as “Comrade.” James Baker and his opposite number, Eduard Shevardnadze, dine in each other’s homes and gossip about world affairs. Friendly contacts take place between the top agents of the CIA and the KGB, who have spied on each other for decades. American evangelists show up in Moscow to rejoice and proselytize. A score of Christian leaders visit the Kremlin in the dying days of Soviet communism, and the most ardent cleric among them tells Gorbachev, “You are the person most prayed for in American churches, you are an instrument of God.” [5] 5 Grachev, Final Days , 87. The Kremlin corridors echo during the last twenty-four hours with American accents, as U.S. television personnel crowd into the president’s office to record the final hours. The only televised interviews given by the great Russian rivals are to U.S. news channels.