Moscow, December 25, 1991

The man who had presided over the Soviet Union for the previous six years asked about his own immunity from prosecution. “If you are worried about something, confess it now, while you are still president,” said Yeltsin.¹¹ Gorbachev did not take him up on his offer.

Next Gorbachev turned to the question of the foundation he was setting up in Moscow to give him a public service role after his resignation. He had already told his aides it would be “a powerful intellectual center that will initiate the process of establishment in Russia of a really democratic society, and if necessary the center will take the role of a powerful opposition against those dilettantes and self-satisfied mediocrities.”

Here in the Walnut Room, using less provocative language, he explained that the foundation would be a nongovernment organization for the study of economics and politics. He needed a suitable building for what he would call the Fund for Social and Political Research. Yeltsin objected to the phrase “political research.” He did not want a hostile foundation nosing around in Russian government affairs. Gorbachev insisted that it would not be turned into “a breeding ground for the opposition.” The exchange became heated, until Yakovlev came up with a compromise. “Let’s call it the Fund for Social and Political Studies,” he suggested. They eventually agreed on the title: The International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies (The Gorbachev Foundation).¹²

Yeltsin was still leery about Gorbachev’s intentions. “You won’t create an opposition party on the basis of the foundation, will you?” he asked. Gorbachev replied that he would not, and moreover, “I will support and defend the leadership of Russia as long as it conducts democratic transformations.” Satisfied, Yeltsin signed over to Gorbachev the deeds of a marble-fronted, three-story building on Leningradsky Prospekt in northwest Moscow. It had once housed the Lenin School, an academic training ground for members of foreign underground movements.

At six o’clock the Soviet president excused himself. He had scheduled a farewell telephone conversation with John Major.

The British prime minister regarded both Gorbachev and Yeltsin as remarkable men, Gorbachev as a communist who believed communism could be reformed, Yeltsin as an anticommunist who believed it had to be destroyed. At a private dinner in London the previous July, Major had found Gorbachev “a charmer with a self-deprecating wit” who had regaled him with anecdotes, including the story of the man in the vodka line who went off to shoot the general secretary in the Kremlin. Major concluded, however, that Gorbachev was simply unable to grasp the basic essentials of the free market and the merits of competition and that his understanding of privatization was negligible. Nevertheless, the prime minister was sad to see him leave the political stage and was calling to wish him well.

Gorbachev’s translator was summoned from his office to interpret the conversation. Palazchenko found the security post in the corridor approaching Gorbachev’s office manned by an unusually large number of people, who included Yeltsin’s bodyguards. One of them asked for his ID before letting him pass. That hadn’t happened before.

The interpreter saw immediately that the cognac had had an effect on Gorbachev. There was a whiff of liquor on his breath, and he noticed how Gorbachev chose his words carefully, “perhaps partly because he did not want any slips of the tongue caused by the drinks he had had.” Grachev also thought that his boss looked flushed and a little dazed as he lifted the receiver and that he struggled to find the tone of familiarity he used with world leaders, though within a minute or two he had recovered. Chernyaev observed his boss then conduct a conversation with Major that he felt must have stunned the British prime minister with its sincerity.

“Today, dear John,” began Gorbachev, “I am trying to accomplish what is most important: to keep what is happening here from resulting in losses. You know I still feel that the best solution would be a unified state, but there are the republics’ positions to consider.” He reassured Major that the breakup of the Soviet Union would not result in another Yugoslavia. “That’s what matters the most to me—to you too, I would imagine.” Yeltsin and he had been talking for six hours, he said, and had reached “a common understanding of our responsibility to the country and the world.” He added diplomatically, “I ask you to help the Commonwealth and Russia in particular.” Glancing over at Grachev, as if to confirm their earlier agreement about the timing of his resignation, Gorbachev confided, “Sometime in the next two days I will make my position public.”

He added a comment that betrayed his unwillingness, even then, to accept the finality of his situation. “I don’t want to say my farewells yet,” he told Major, “because any turn of events is still possible, even a reversal.”