Conor O'Clery - Moscow, December 25, 1991

The concerns of the populace are reflected in stories about shortages and imminent price rises. A headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda says simply, “Meat has arrived in Odessa.” At least it is more positive than “No Bread in Krasnoyarsk” on Pravda’s front page.

There is little in the skimpy newspapers to indicate that this will be a momentous day in the political history of the country, or indeed of the world. There is a clue, however, in Pravda. In a single paragraph on page one, the Communist Party newspaper notes, without comment, that President Mikhail Gorbachev will make a major announcement, live on state television, before the day is out.

The heavy snow on the spruce and fir trees that screen the large dacha west of Moscow has melted a little during the mild winter night. Water drips from the pine needles and trickles out of the snow piled high along the driveway, giving the tarmacadam a dark sheen.

In an upstairs room, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the armed forces, puts on a starched, white, single-cuff shirt and a single-breasted navy wool suit with muted stripes, handmade by his tailors on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He selects from his collection of silk ties a particular neckpiece, black with a red floral paisley design, which he often wears on important occasions.

Small in stature, with magnetic hazel eyes and silver hair that has long since receded to expose the purple birthmark on his head, Gorbachev this morning is exhausted and slightly hungover. He came home late the night before and is now succumbing to the early stages of influenza. His duties as president are almost finished, but last night he lingered for a long time in his Kremlin office to reminisce with Moscow’s police chief, Arkady Murashev, who called out of the blue to wish him well. Very few people have been taking the trouble to do that in the dying days of his reign, and on an impulse he had invited Murashev, a former political opponent, to join him for a glass or two of cognac. With the nuclear suitcase sitting an arm’s length away on the table, the last Soviet president took great pains to impress upon his visitor that he had not made any mistakes in his quest to reform the Soviet Union. It was not his fault that it was falling apart. [11] 1 Murray, A Democracy of Despots, 136.

There is nothing unusual in Gorbachev’s staying late at the Kremlin. Work has always kept him in the office until ten or eleven o’clock. On arriving home he and his wife, Raisa, have made it a practice to go for a walk together in the dark before retiring to bed. He tells her of the events of the day as they stroll along the paths around the dacha. He holds nothing back. He once caused a scandal among Russians by saying publicly that he even discussed matters of state with his wife. Gorbachev numbers the world’s leading politicians as his friends, but his only really close ally in life is his companion and soul mate of thirty-eight years. They have always “rejoiced at the successes and suffered the failures of the other,” as he put it once, “just as if they were our own.” [12] 2 Gorbachev’s dacha and the couple’s lifestyle are described in Gorbacheva, I Hope; Gorbachev, Memoirs; Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev; Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin ; and Boldin, Ten Years That Shook the World.

After breakfast in the morning—in winter it is always hot cereal, served in the upper-floor living quarters by their servant Shura, who wears a head scarf and no makeup, as Raisa requires of all the female staff—the president crosses the corridor to his library, where glass-fronted bookcases reach to the ceiling. In a space in the rows of bound volumes is a framed black-and-white photograph of Raisa, his favorite, taken when she was a rather prim-looking student at Moscow University. There is another of his father, Sergey, posing in simple military tunic decorated with three medals and two Orders of the Red Star for his service in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. These pictures, and a valuable icon embossed with gold leaf depicting the Archangel Mikhail, which the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexey II, gave Gorbachev for his sixtieth birthday in March, will have to be packed with particular care when they leave.

Off the library is a small wood-paneled study with a desk of Karelian birch on which sit several white telephones and one red telephone beneath a transparent cover—the hotline for national emergencies, which the cleaners are instructed never to touch. Raisa has learned of late to dread these telephones ringing out, “like a gunshot, destroying the peace of the night,” bringing “shouts of despair, entreaties, suffering and, sometimes, death.” [13] 3 Gorbacheva, I Hope, 174.

Petite and attractive at fifty-nine, Raisa too is showing the strain of this period of political upheaval. It has, as she puts it, tested her spirit, her mind, and her will and brought her incurable heartache and sleepless nights. Her health has been poor since she collapsed with a stroke during the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August. The stroke affected her power of speech and the movement in her right arm. The wrinkles on her once porcelain complexion reveal the torment of watching her husband shrink in stature day by day.

To Raisa, Mikhail Gorbachev is a man of destiny. Indeed many superstitious people have interpreted the distinctive birthmark on his head as an omen. But Mikhail and Raisa themselves believe they were once given a sign that he is special. When they were in their twenties, both had the same dream. They were in a deep, black well from which they were trying to get out, and they kept falling back. Finally they succeeded in escaping, and they saw in front of them a wide road and a huge bright sun. Raisa told her husband then, addressing him by his pet name, “Misha, you are destined for greatness.” [14] 4 Shakhnazarov, Tsena Svobody, 493.

Gorbachev has come to see himself as the embodiment of providence. He talks about his mission, of being chosen to carry out perestroika—a task that began as reconstruction of society and has come to mean for him the historic revival of Russia. He sees his forced abdication as the outcome of an epic struggle between good and evil, loyalty and treachery, hope and disillusion, generosity and vengefulness. To him this day of his downfall is a black page in history.

While in his study, the Soviet president has an opportunity to cast his eyes, for the umpteenth time, over his much-annotated resignation speech. It will be one of the most important pronouncements of his career. It will define him and his legacy and put down a marker for the future of the country. He has little influence over that now, of course. He is being forced to transfer power into the hands of incompetent, irresponsible people, ambitious and ruthless political adventurers, who he is firmly convinced are sacrificing the Soviet Union for the sake of their ardent desire to take over the Kremlin and push him out. Less than two weeks ago Gorbachev was telling George Bush on the telephone how confident he was that the Soviet Union would survive. At the time he had reason to believe that he would continue as president and would be residing indefinitely in the state dacha here in Razdory, on the banks of the Moscow River. The successor to Lenin has done everything to keep the Union in existence since it started falling apart after the August coup four months ago and the republics one after another began declaring their intention to break away. He has made himself hoarse trying to convince republic leaders, visiting statesmen, journalists, and anyone else who would listen that the country should not be split up, that it was absurd, that it would lead to famine, civil war, blood.