Moscow, December 25, 1991

Otherwise Gorbachev was deliberately coy for days about when he would step down. On December 20, in a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he insisted his departure was not imminent, as the transfer of power must be done in a constitutional manner. But the eviction notices were piling up. That afternoon the presidential account in the State Bank was closed on Yeltsin’s orders, leaving Gorbachev unable to authorize expenses for himself or his personal staff. Another Yeltsin decree placed the elite KGB Alpha Group under the sole control of the president of Russia.

On Saturday, December 21, in Alma-Ata, Yeltsin and the heads of state from ten other republics of the original fifteen signed on to the Commonwealth of Independent States. They ignored a long letter from Gorbachev offering to play a unifying role. The eleven presidents signed documents declaring that the Commonwealth was not a state or a quasi-state entity. Moscow News correspondent Viktor Kiyanitsa reported that the figure of Gorbachev loomed over the proceedings like a mute reproach. The other person on their minds was James Baker, “who had been flying round the country in search of the nuclear button” and who by insisting on his five conditions for international recognition had “knocked together the new Commonwealth, whether he knew it or not.”

Yeltsin arrived back in Moscow the next day and told reporters that they had discussed Gorbachev’s future. In the past leaders had been removed from politics and society, consigned to oblivion, and then either reburied after death or vilified, he said. But they were above that. They would allow Mikhail Sergeyevich to continue to play an active role in society, and they would give him financial security.

Gorbachev was furious when he was told the republic leaders had acted so condescendingly. “For me, they have poisoned the air, they have humiliated me,” he fumed.²⁶ The former general secretary of the Communist Party, who once had tsar-like powers over the republics, declared himself “shocked by the treacherous behavior of those people, who cut the country in pieces in order to settle accounts and establish themselves as tsars.” Gorbachev’s contempt for the republics’ leaders was shared by his aides. Alexander Yakovlev growled that their intellectual level was so low that “you yourself become dumber talking to them.”²⁷

Yeltsin called President Bush once more, to inform him that the Commonwealth had been created, “so the center will simply cease to exist.” Bush immediately telephoned Gorbachev again.

He found the Soviet president in a foul mood, furious at Yeltsin and the way events were rushing past him. Yeltsin had done a deal behind his back to dismantle the Soviet Union, he said bitterly. “In politics anything can happen, especially when one deals with such politicians.” The American president calmed him down. “I am thinking of you professionally and personally,” Bush assured him. He thought Gorbachev was “stunned about what was happening to him as a person and as the president of the Soviet Union…. His authority was slipping away.”

Chernyaev was exasperated with Gorbachev for clinging to the Kremlin and furious with Yeltsin for the way he was treating Gorbachev. “Nicholas II at least received a delegation from the Duma with a request for him to resign,” he wrote in his diary. “He had the courage to give up the crown after three hundred years of dynasty. Gorbachev was simply rudely toppled.”²⁸ Alexander Yakovlev marveled at how Gorbachev continued to nurse for so long the forlorn hope that he could rescue the Soviet Union. “The train had left and Gorbachev was running after it, as if he didn’t notice that history was going the other way.” Yakovlev himself knew well how happy the republics were to break away from the center. One president had told him crudely, “It is better to be the head of a fly than the arse of an elephant.” But Gorbachev couldn’t imagine they would think this way. Was he being too critical? Yakovlev asked himself. No. Both felt deep pain at their many unrealized hopes.

“Criticism can only be fair,” he concluded, “if it recognizes that Gorbachev was at the forefront of one of the biggest events in the history of Russia.”²⁹

Chapter 22 DECEMBER 25: EVENING

With ten minutes to go before Mikhail Gorbachev’s address to the now almost extinct empire he inherited more than six years back, his stylist and makeup artist comes to his office to prepare him for the cameras. She expertly dabs powder on his birthmark, the vascular malformation on his bald dome that is commonly referred to as a port-wine stain because of its purplish color. The first official portraits of Gorbachev were issued with the birthmark airbrushed out. That was before the communist leader introduced glasnost.