Moscow, December 25, 1991

There was no copier at the lodge, and the officials had to pass papers through two fax machines to make extra copies. Gaidar wrote out the final texts containing fourteen articles in longhand. At 4 a.m. Kozyrev trudged off through the snowdrifts to bring the sheets of paper to the typist’s room. There was one stenographer at the lodge, Evgeniya Pateychuk, a terrified young woman who worked for the forestry director and who had been fetched by the Belarus KGB at short notice, without even being given enough time, as she recalled, to comb her hair.² Unwilling to wake her up, Kozyrev put the documents under the locked door of the business office. There was consternation in the morning when the typist said that she found no papers. It was some time before they realized a cleaning lady had put them in a trash can. When they were eventually extracted by Korzhakov from a bag of rubbish, Pateychuk found she could not decipher much of Gaidar’s handwriting, and he had to dictate a lot of it over again.

While this was going on, Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich gathered for breakfast of fried eggs, black bread, ham, and cheese. The Russian president was in fine fettle. Kravchuk found him stone cold sober. “I don’t exaggerate! He was in good form, vigorous, he had ideas.” The three leaders received their copies of Gaidar’s handiwork in late morning, typed at speed by Ms Pateychuk on the East German-made Optima electric business typewriter she had brought with her. They agreed to the idea of a commonwealth as a fig leaf for a divorce. Everything was inevitable now. They made some minor amendments to the draft paragraphs, toasted each completed article with a sip of cognac, and sent the pages off for retyping. The documents were passed through the two fax machines and the final versions clipped into three red hard-backed folders.

Meanwhile workers carried a long marble-top table into the foyer of the Viskuli hunting lodge. Officials placed the folders in front of miniature flags for Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Five journalists, cold and hungry after having spent the night in a nearby village waiting for they knew not what, were ushered in to report the ceremony.

Kravchuk, Shushkevich and Yeltsin entered and took their places along the table, with their top aides standing behind them. Shushkevich sat in the middle, as the host, with Yeltsin on his left and Kravchuk on his right. They opened the folders, titled “Agreement on the Creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States.” The contents spelled out the new reality. After seven decades the USSR was finished in all but name, and its 293 million people destined to be separated among the constituent republics. The new entity would have its headquarters in Minsk. It would have no flag, no ministry of foreign affairs, no parliament, no citizenship, no tax-raising powers and no president. There was, however, a commitment to set up a single military control over nuclear weapons. Other republics would be invited to join.

Suddenly a voice was heard, with a swear word: “Where are the pens?” There were no writing instruments available to sign the Soviet Union’s death warrant. Everyone standing around began producing ball points, felt tips, and fountain pens from their pockets. Valery Drozdov, deputy editor of the Belarus newspaper Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), was among those who handed his pen to the trio at the table. ³

In a profound silence the three leaders signed the documents in the red folders. Only Drozdov took note of the exact time on his watch, which ironically bore the symbol of the USSR, the hammer and sickle, on its face. It was 2:17 p.m., on Sunday, December 8, 1991.⁴

Waiters began bustling around with trays bearing glasses of champagne, and the high-ceilinged foyer echoed to the clinking of glasses. Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich posed for the cameras, the Ukrainian president smiling like a cat with cream.

“I well remember how a sensation of freedom and lightness suddenly came over me,” wrote Yeltsin in his account of the moment. “In signing this agreement Russia… was throwing off the traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world,’ of armed conflict with Western civilization, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts.”

Others reacted differently. Shakhrai felt as if they were burying a relative. Gaidar recalled, “We all had a heavy burden in our hearts.”

Drozdov did not get his pen back. “One of the three put it in his pocket out of force of habit,” he recalled. “I believe it was Yeltsin.”

Evgeniya Pateychuk, the typist, stepped out into the fresh air with her boss, forestry official Sergey Balyuk. It was already twilight and a light snow was falling. “So, Sergey Sergeyevich, what have we done!” she said. Years later she would protest: “I typed what I was given; understanding came later, in a day or two.” In her village of Kamenyuki twelve miles away, she became known as the woman who destroyed the Union.