Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev’s military options evaporated two days later. Hoping to make a case for the Soviet armed forces remaining a cohesive force throughout USSR territory, come what may, he asked Shaposhnikov to arrange for him to address an assembly of top commanders from all over the Soviet Union on December 10. Their reaction to his plea was a stony silence. The majority of generals distrusted him and knew that he no longer controlled the purse strings. The next day Yeltsin conducted his own, two-hour meeting with the same officers, who reacted more positively to his direct style and to his promise of a 90 percent pay increase.

To James Baker these moves were the stuff of geopolitical nightmare: “Two Kremlin heavyweights jockeying for power, calling on the army to follow them, and raising the specter of civil war—with nuclear weapons thrown in.”¹⁷

Shaposhnikov later told Baker how serious it was. Some hotheads among the generals wanted to give an ultimatum to the president, demanding that he defy Yeltsin, he said. It would be the August coup all over again. Rumors of military adventures continued to circulate in Moscow. Shevardnadze was alarmed to receive a warning from General Konstantin Kobets, who had organized the defense of the White House in August, that conservative elements in the military were still strong and secretly organizing. On December 11, Vitaly Tretyakov, the editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, came to tell Gorbachev that Moscow was full of gossip about a new coup. Some newspapers were repeating the rumors about Kremlin barricades. All this is invented, Gorbachev told him.

By December 12 the parliaments of the three Slavic states had endorsed the Belovezh Agreement. In the Russian parliament the vote—188 for, 6 against, and 69 abstentions—was greeted with applause. In Shakhrai’s opinion the deputies realized the agreement had saved the nation from a civil war. And even some hard-liners shared Yeltsin’s goal to see off the unpopular occupant of the Kremlin. Communist deputy Sevastyanov urged his comrades to vote in favor, “so that we can get rid of Gorbachev.”

“Such petty people,” stormed Gorbachev when he heard of the remark. “The era of Gorbachev is only beginning!”¹⁸ At a press conference he waved the secret memo Burbulis had given to Yeltsin in Sochi and said its thrust was that the “cunning Gorbachev” must be stopped before trapping Yeltsin into a new union. Burbulis denied that the Russian leaders killed off the Soviet Union to get rid of its president. It was already dead, he said. The declaration in the Belarusian forest was a “medical diagnosis.”¹⁹

The tone of Yeltsin’s accomplices grew insulting. Information chief Poltoranin said condescendingly that the Soviet president need not worry, that he would not suffer the same fate as Erich Honecker. His foreign minister, Kozyrev, told the German newspaper Das Bild, “Gorbachev is not a leper. We will find plenty of work for him to do.” Grachev encountered Kozyrev after that and told him to get lost.

The clock was nevertheless ticking loudly for Gorbachev. Nazarbayev had no choice but to accept the fait accompli of the deal in the forest. Kazakhstan, the three Slav republics, and the seven other republics still nominally in the Soviet Union agreed they would meet to discuss dumping the union and joining the Commonwealth of Independent States. They set the date and place: December 21 in Alma-Ata.

Gorbachev still found it hard to accept the reality that the USSR was finished, though he took the precaution of having crates of Politburo archives removed from the Kremlin in army trucks to General Staff military headquarters in Znamenka Street in the Arbat district. He continued to give almost daily interviews and briefings to journalists, ambassadors, and foreign politicians, pouring out a torrent of words as if he could somehow conjure up a compromise by talking about constitutional propriety and restraining the opportunists. When British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite and visiting UK government official Len Appleyard called on Gorbachev in the Walnut Room, Gorbachev stretched out his hand with a grin, saying, “So what—are you here to find out what country you are in and who I am now?” The president was in bouncing form, with his usual tan, bubbling with verbose and hectic charm, observed Braithwaite. Gorbachev spent half an hour extolling the merits of a union state, while making withering remarks about the “highwaymen,” “hairy faces,” and “inexperienced populists” who ruled the roost. As Gorbachev built his “castles in the air,” the ambassador noticed Alexander Yakovlev looking on more and more gloomily and Chernyaev taking notes, “with deadpan determination.”²⁰

On December 13 Gorbachev told George Bush in a telephone call that the agreement between the three presidents was but a draft, a sketch, an improvisation, and the statement that the Soviet Union was dead was facile and bullying.