Moscow, December 25, 1991

Bush said after putting down the receiver, “Yeah, Gorbachev is kind of a pathetic figure at this point.”²¹

The chief “highwayman” boasted that Gorbachev would be gone soon. Yeltsin told his team in the White House that he had given Mikhail Sergeyevich a deadline, the end of December, or at latest January, when they would finish with one era and transition to another.

Gorbachev suggested two options to his aides. He could resign or else continue to offer his services to the republics as commander in chief and holder of the nuclear suitcase. Chernyaev and Alexander Yakovlev looked blankly at their leader. “Why are you sitting like that,” snapped Gorbachev. “Make notes, you will have to write this up.” Privately Chernyaev thought to himself: “Nobody today is going to offer him any position. So the second option is an illusion.”²² Already Gosbank, the Soviet Union’s Central Bank, had told Gorbachev that it could no longer make payments to serving members of the Soviet armed forces and Union civil servants. The Russian government stopped all Soviet-sourced payments “to the army, officials, to us sinners,” complained Chernyaev in his diary. “We are without salaries now.” Historian Roy Medvedev reckoned that by then the power of the president did not extend further than the buildings of the Kremlin.

It was at this point that the Americans got word that Gorbachev and his aides were desperately worried about an attempt to discredit them by Yeltsin’s supporters to deflect criticism for what they had done. It came via a circuitous route.²³

Pavel Palazchenko invited Strobe Talbott of Time magazine and American historian Michael R. Beschloss to lunch in his Moscow apartment on Saturday, December 14. The two Americans were in Russia working on a book on the end of the Cold War. After asking his wife to leave the room, the Kremlin interpreter told his guests to write down a message and deliver it to the Bush administration—without revealing that he was the source. The message asked that the leaders of the United States impress upon Yeltsin that Gorbachev be treated with dignity. It warned: “Some people are fabricating a criminal case against him. It is important that Yeltsin not have anything to do with that.”

In his memoirs Palazchenko claimed his information came from an (unnamed) former member of the Communist Party Central Committee who had approached him in a Kremlin corridor to whisper that efforts were afoot to fabricate a case against Gorbachev. The source alleged that a shadowy team was searching frantically for compromising material to show that Gorbachev was secretly part of the August coup, and insisted that Palazchenko pass this on to the Americans, who might be able to use their influence on Yeltsin to get the effort stopped.

Palazchenko insisted he was not acting at Gorbachev’s prompting to secure American protection. “Nothing could be further from the truth or more out of character for Gorbachev.” The Americans, however, were skeptical. They believed Palazchenko was following a careful script that was intended to preserve the Soviet leader’s deniability. Nevertheless, Talbott agreed to pass on the message.

The request was conveniently timed. James Baker and State Department official Dennis Ross arrived the next day in Moscow for talks with the Russian leaders. Talbott went to see them in the Penta Hotel on Olympic Boulevard. He gave the message to Ross, who showed it to Baker.

The U.S. secretary of state met Yeltsin on the following day, December 16, in the St. Catherine Hall in the Kremlin. This was the first time Yeltsin had commandeered the sumptuous chamber where Soviet leaders had historically welcomed important guests. Marshal Shaposhnikov sat next to him, a strong signal of where the military’s loyalty lay. “Welcome to this Russian building on Russian soil,” trumpeted Yeltsin at the start of a four-hour conversation.

Baker delicately raised the rumors of possible criminal proceedings being taken against Gorbachev. Such action would be a mistake that would not be understood by the international community, he told the Russian leader. “Many people will be watching what’s going to happen to Gorbachev.” The United States hoped the transfer of power could be done “in a dignified way—as in the West.”

Yeltsin responded as if he expected the approach. “Gorbachev has done a lot for this country,” he said. “He needs to be treated with respect and deserves to be treated with respect. It’s about time we became a country where leaders can be retired with honor.”