Moscow, December 25, 1991

Next they settled on provisions for Gorbachev’s inner circle. They agreed to set up a bilateral commission headed by Revenko and Petrov to find jobs for Gorbachev’s displaced staff. The Soviet president asked Yeltsin to allow his associates Ivan Silayev and Shakhnazarov to buy their state dachas at reasonable prices. Silayev was the last prime minister of the Soviet Union, an office that had been defunct since the coup, and Shakhnazarov had been by Gorbachev’s side throughout the last turbulent years. The Russian president agreed. Turning to Yakovlev, he offered him the same deal. Yakovlev declined. He regretted his decision in years to come, as property prices in Moscow soared.

The terms Yeltsin agreed to with Gorbachev were on a par with legislation passed by the USSR Supreme Soviet over a year earlier. This provided for a pension and state-owned dacha with the necessary staff, bodyguard, and transport for the president on leaving office. They were also remarkably similar to those granted in 1964 to Nikita Khrushchev, the only other Soviet leader to be ousted from power. Khrushchev, another would-be reformer, was sacked by the Politburo for alleged policy failures and erratic behavior. He was given a pension and was allowed to remain in his general secretary’s mansion and his city apartment for a year after his departure, before moving to a smaller state mansion. But Khrushchev was made a nonperson. He simply disappeared from public view. His name did not appear again in Moscow newspapers until he died seven years later. This distressed him deeply. He spent days weeping bitterly. Asked once what Khrushchev did in retirement, his grandson replied, “He cries.” Gorbachev would not become a nonperson, but he too would shed a tear before the day was out.

The two adversaries, Yakovlev recalled, managed up to this point to conduct a very business-like and mutually respectful meeting. “They argued sometimes but without any rancor. I was very sorry they did not start cooperating at that level of mutual understanding before.” He thought whisperers on both sides had helped poison the atmosphere between them.

At one o’clock Zhenya delivered lunch to the three men. They helped themselves to salads and salami, potato and cabbage pies, and bottles of fizzy mineral water. When the waiter emerged with his empty cart, aides to both presidents quizzed him about how they were getting on. He told them the meeting seemed to have got off to a civilized start.

With the material terms of the transition agreed, Revenko and Petrov left. Only Yakovlev would witness what transpired next.

Gorbachev produced for Yeltsin a certificate giving him control over the Archives of the General Secretary. This was a collection of between 1,000 and 2,000 files that contained secret documents passed on by Soviet leaders from the time of the founding of the state by Lenin. They were known to senior Soviet officials as the Stalinskiye Arkhivy, the Stalin Archives.

Though many of the crimes of past communist leaders had been acknowledged for the first time under Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, the top secret documents still held proof of criminal actions at the highest levels of Soviet power, most of which had never been admitted publicly. They implicated recent Soviet leaders in the cover-up and denials of the Stalin terror, and many other bloody episodes that would sustain charges that, in the past, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a vast criminal conspiracy and was implicated in international terrorism.

Every general secretary received the archives on taking office. They all knew, or could find out, what secrets they concealed.

One of the files handed over by Gorbachev detailed a plan to send a ship with arms to the left-wing Official Irish Republican Army at a time when the illegal group was conducting a campaign of bombing and killings in Northern Ireland. Called “Operation Splash,” it was approved by Politburo member and KGB chief Yury Andropov in response to a request from Irish Communist Party leader Michael O’Riordan, who claimed he was in secret contact with the Official IRA. A memo signed by Andropov on August 21, 1972, authorized the submerging of a consignment of captured German weapons, including two machine guns, seventy automatic rifles, ten Walther pistols, and 41,600 cartridges, in the Irish sea off the Northern Ireland coast, to be hauled up later by the “Irish friends” in a fishing boat. A reconnaissance ship, Reduktor, had already picked the spot and sounded the depths, Andropov noted. Yeltsin was later unable to say if Operation Splash succeeded but concluded that quite possibly “our ‘friends’ once again made themselves known with their trademark explosions and murders, causing the whole world to shudder.”⁶