Conor O'Clery - Moscow, December 25, 1991

The state broadcasting station that smeared him when he led the opposition to Gorbachev, and that tried to gag him nine months ago, is at last fully under Yeltsin’s control. Yakovlev announces an increased output of news, with a new current affairs program called Itogi (Wrap-up) to be hosted by popular broadcaster Yevgeny Kiselyov. As his administration still controls the second national channel, the Russian president commands both TV channels beamed out to the Russian public—though he mandates Ostankino to shed its dependency on the state within a year and become independent through the issue of shares.

Yeltsin starts his reign as absolute leader in a flurry of activity. After dealing with the future of television he issues an order stripping his rebellious vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, of control over five state committees he had been chairing. He signs a decree for the privatization in the coming weeks of stores, restaurants, workshops, vodka distilleries, pharmaceutical plants, and baby food factories. Banks, railways, and airlines will come later. Collective farms must transfer land to their members and end the state monopoly on 637 million acres of territory. The decree repeals a 1918 Bolshevik ruling that all private ownership of land, mines, waters, forests, and natural resources “is abolished forever.”

While the increasingly conservative Russian parliament cannot do anything to stop Yeltsin issuing decrees, it can thwart the new ruler in other ways. That afternoon it turns down an application from prosecutor Valentin Stepankov for the arrest of General Vladislav Achalov, the deputy minister of defense at the time of the August coup, on a charge that he was actively involved. Among many deputies, outrage against the coup plotters is giving way to sympathy for their motives. Thirteen conspirators arrested in August remain in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison awaiting trial, but their conditions have been improved.

Coincidentally, on this day Valery Boldin is released from jail because of deteriorating health. In his four months in captivity for his part in the coup, Gorbachev’s fifty-six-year-old ex-chief of staff has lost none of his contempt for his former master. He is adamant that the junta sought nothing but prosperity and peace for the country, with no desire for power, and that the coup failed because they were too scrupulous and decent to use harsh methods. To Boldin its defeat was not a victory for the United States, as many are saying, but a rout of the disorganized units of a great power by its internal opponents.

Meanwhile, some one hundred presidents of large American companies arrive in Moscow for a Kremlin meeting on stimulating trade. They were invited by the Soviet government which no longer exists. The meeting goes ahead, with Yeltsin’s people, two days later, to the relief of the somewhat bewildered executives.

With the end of the Soviet Union, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago move the hands of the Doomsday Clock back to seventeen minutes before midnight. Six years before, when Gorbachev took office, the big hand stood at three minutes to Armageddon. (In January 2010, with new tensions among the world’s nuclear nations and in light of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the hands are moved forward again to six minutes to midnight.)

Freed from presidential responsibilities, Mikhail Gorbachev helps Raisa in the evening to put their new homes in order. “We were forced to move to different lodgings within twenty-four hours,” complained Gorbachev bitterly. [304] 9 Gorbachev, Memoirs, 866. Yeltsin’s security men left all their personal belongings strewn around. These have to be gathered up and packed. For both of them it is a humiliating intrusion on their domestic privacy. Raisa is intensely private and has always been determined to keep personal affairs away from the prying eyes of strangers. One day not long after returning from Foros, Gorbachev came home to find her in tears. She was destroying a bundle of fifty-two letters that the young Gorbachev had written to her when on business trips and that she had kept carefully all her life. She was terrified of another coup and couldn’t bear someone reading them. “She said, ‘We can’t have other people poking their noses into our life,’ and she threw the letters into the fire,” related Gorbachev years later. “She was crying and throwing them in the fire…. I burned twenty-five of my notebooks. Not my personal diaries but my working notes, with all the nuances, characteristics and plans. I burned them thinking I was somehow helping her by doing this.” [305] 10 Muratov, “Mikhail Gorbachev.”

The Gorbachevs and their daughter, Irina, sort through all kinds of papers that have accumulated over the years—notes, letters, telegrams, photographs, and documents. They insist on packing everything themselves, rather than asking for help. Chernyaev is outraged that not only do Yeltsin’s people evict the Gorbachevs so soon, but “for a long time they refused to send a lorry to take away their things.” [306] 11 Chernyaev, 1991, diary entry for December 27, 1991.

There are hundreds of books to be stored in cardboard boxes: volumes on Russian history by Solovyev, Kluchevsky, and Karamzin; a ten-volume edition of Pushkin’s works; books of verse by Lermontov, the Romantic poet of the Caucasus, and by Mayakovsky, the lyricist of the Bolshevik Revolution; rows of the leather-bound writings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; individual favorites like a wellthumbed copy of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, which Gorbachev maintains helped turn him into an opponent of the totalitarian system; a memoir by Sakharov that Gorbachev bought abroad; an antique copy of Vanity Fair by Thackeray presented to Raisa by Margaret Thatcher; and a beautifully bound volume of The Kobza-Player by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, whose lines Raisa likes to quote: “My thoughts, my thoughts, what pain you bring! / Why do you rise up at me in such gloomy rows?”

As her own librarian and filing clerk, Raisa takes care to arrange the books properly and not get them mixed up. On their bookshelves there was always a note saying, “Friends—please arrange these alphabetically.” [307] 12 Gorbacheva, I Hope, photograph.

Raisa also has a large collection of photographs to pack. Among them is one of a deferential party apparatchik handing her a bunch of carnations with an elegant and polite bow. It is Boris Yeltsin. The year was 1985.

On New Year’s Eve fewer than 3,000 people turn up in Red Square to lay to rest the corpse of the Soviet Union and welcome the first year of capitalist, independent Russia.

In the crowd there are a considerable number of U.S. citizens, some of them evangelists carrying religious symbols. A line of militiamen stand between a few communists gathered near Lenin’s Mausoleum and a group of jeering Americans.

The midnight chimes ring out from the clock on the Savior Tower, prompting the greatcoated sentinels to goose-step off, jerking their elbows high in the air as always. Fireworks burst in the skies above Red Square, and the small crowd applauds. No members of the government are present to mark the occasion, no church leaders, no dignitaries to say good-bye to seven decades of Bolshevik rule. It is mostly foreigners who are cheering. Even the fireworks are not Russian. They are set off by a German television company to make the occasion a bit more festive for the cameras. [308] 1 Martin, “Oleg Looks for the Old Order.”

In a New Year’s message Yeltsin tells the people of Russia that they have inherited a devastated land, but not to despair. “Life is now hard for all of us,” he says. “Our citizens are at times overwhelmed by a sense of bitterness toward their country. But it is unfair to speak about Russia only in gloomy, deprecatory tones. It is not Russia that has suffered a defeat, but the communist idea, the experiment to which Russia has been subjected.”