Moscow, December 25, 1991

Baker saw Gorbachev separately, in the same ornate hall and with Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze at his side. Gorbachev’s face was flushed, and he had difficulty speaking, as if he were having an attack of high blood pressure. Baker sensed, as they chewed Velamints that the secretary of state handed around, that these were three men at the end of their political rope. As with the British, Gorbachev called the Belovezh Agreement “a kind of coup,” carried out by people acting like highway robbers. The conversation trailed off inconclusively. Shevardnadze had nothing positive to say: He knew the game was up. In a telephone call with a contact in the United States, Jim Garrison, he had confided, “The Soviet Union is falling apart. My job is to preside over its collapse.”

Gorbachev went that evening in a heavy snowstorm to a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, his refuge from depression during Russia’s darkest hours. The symphony’s funereal trumpet solo was like a requiem for his career.

Yeltsin called President Bush the next day and assured him the transfer of power would take place in a friendly manner. Bush reminded him of the high regard in which Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were held for what they had done for peace. “I do guarantee, and I promise you personally, Mr. President, that everything will happen in a good and decent way,” Yeltsin promised. “We will treat Gorbachev and Shevardnadze with the greatest respect. Everything will be calm and gradual with no radical measures.”²⁴

The White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, would later claim that the U.S. president not only convinced Yeltsin of the need for a peaceful transition but also told him to be good to Gorbachev and to give him a car, give him a house, and treat him well. He related that Bush then called Gorbachev and said, “You’ve got to be praising Yeltsin, or at least don’t be criticizing him in public. Don’t be tearing him down and picking a fight.”

Gorbachev’s aides were still concerned that something unpleasant was in store for them. Alexander Yakovlev confided to Chernyaev that he thought Yeltsin was fearful of opposition from people like himself and Shevardnadze and would try to liquidate them. They were alone in Gorbachev’s office at the time—the president had stepped out to make one of his regular calls to Raisa—and he lowered his voice in case of listening devices. “I think they will kill me,” he whispered to Chernyaev. “I will ask Gorbachev to send me somewhere, maybe Finland, as ambassador. Yeltsin will have to agree, I am too dangerous for him here.” Chernyaev, also wary of surveillance, responded with a complicit smile.

But these worries were set aside when, on Wednesday, December 18, Gorbachev at last conceded to Yeltsin that it was over, and agreed that at the end of the year, on December 31, the Soviet Union and its governing structures would cease to exist. As to when he would resign as president of the Soviet Union, he wrote a note to himself, “After the twenty-first—probably; after the new year—possibly.”

The first to be told, outside the Kremlin circle, that he would be gone before the end of the year was an American, Shevardnadze’s contact Jim Garrison. As head of the International Foreign Policy Association, Garrison was visiting Moscow that day as part of his task to mobilize aid for the children of the Soviet Union. Alexander Yakovlev brought him into Gorbachev’s office for a chat. “Gorbachev was ebullient, upbeat, smiling,” recalled Garrison, who would be the last foreign guest to visit Gorbachev while he was still president.²⁵ “Under the circumstances I was surprised he had time for the likes of me.” Garrison told him how he had organized a load of food supplies to be brought to Russia two days earlier on an Antonov transport plane, the biggest plane in the world, and that at a press conference, the American copilot had said with tears in his eyes, “All my life I have practiced flying to the Soviet Union, but I thought I would be flying with a payload of warheads.”

As Garrison got up from the table, Yakovlev put an arm around him and said, “You should know we are resigning in one week. Tell no one.” Garrison was shocked. “Are you serious?” he asked. “All options are closed,” replied Yakovlev. “What, is there anything I can do?” asked the American. “Yes,” replied Gorbachev. “Can you bring another Antonov? Can you bring some meat? Moscow is running out of meat.” On leaving the Kremlin Garrison made a call to Donald Kendall, the former chairman of PepsiCo, which then owned Pizza Hut, and arranged for him to send a planeload of canned beef to Russia in a C-5A Galaxy troop carrier.