Moscow, December 25, 1991

Liu Heung Shing gets the picture he wanted to capture the finality of the occasion for the Associated Press. “Gorbachev was looking rather grim the whole evening and was coming to his last page of the speech,” he said. “I picked up my camera, pointed, and shot the frame showing him [closing] the folder containing the speech.”⁷

A few seconds after he pressed the shutter, Liu felt a fist thumping into his kidneys from behind the tripod. Tom Johnson saw the security man hit Liu from behind just as Gorbachev was taking off his glasses and closing his file. He mouthed the question, “Are you all right?” Liu nodded. He urgently needed to get his picture developed as quickly as possible at the AP bureau across town in Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The same guard was blocking the door. “All I could do was to plead, ‘Please! Please! Please!’ At last, he opened the tall and thick door, I rushed down the red carpet runner, turned the corner, and continued to run as fast as I could at the end of the corridor. All the awaiting Western and Russian journalists and cameramen were startled to see me running out all by myself. Some showed me their middle fingers in the air.

“By the time I came out of the darkroom with the color negative film, I took a deep breath as I realized the frame of Gorbachev was pin sharp and the speech folder was blurred as I had wished. Next day, it fronted virtually every newspaper in the world, including the New York Times. It reminded me of an earlier experience of Beijing 1989, when I transmitted the frame of a man in front of the tanks by Jeff Widener.” Liu Heung Shing publishes the picture of Gorbachev in his book USSR. The Collapse of an Empire, along with other AP photos that earn the agency the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.

Many of Gorbachev’s supporters are immensely moved by his address on television, though in the British embassy across the river from the Kremlin, Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite considers Gorbachev’s address to be “dignified, adequate, but no more.”

Fyodor Burlatsky, editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, perceives his farewell as a grandiose and tragic exit of Shakespearean dimensions and thinks of the line from Hamlet: “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

Lev Kerbel watches the speech on a small TV in the kitchen of his Moscow apartment. The seventy-four-year-old Soviet-realistic sculptor, born on the day of the Bolshevik Revolution and famous for his marble statues of Lenin and the enormous Karl Marx monument in Karl Marx Stadt in the former East Germany, makes tea, adds cognac, and tells John Kampfner, who has dropped by to see him, “We fought fascism, we fought for the Soviet Union, and now we are told it’s no longer there.” For Kampfner, correspondent of the Daily Telegraph of London, the biggest frustration this Christmas is that his newspaper, like most of his rivals, does not have a Boxing Day issue, and he has to “witness one of the most momentous days of postwar history without being able to write about it.” ⁸

Yegor Gaidar watches Gorbachev’s resignation speech in his office in Old Square, where he is working late on a policy statement called the Memorandum of Economic Policies in conjunction with the IMF and the Central Bank. Though he helped engineer his downfall, he is sorry for Gorbachev to some degree. “I think he was well meaning as a politician. The very good thing about him was that he literally did not want to use force to retain the power of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. So his going is not a surprise, but a thing accomplished.” For Gaidar three key dates marked the end of the Soviet Union. “The first is the twenty-first of August, when the coup collapsed. The second is the eighth of December, when we had Belovezhskaya Pushcha. The third is the twenty-fifth of December, when Gorbachev resigns.”⁹

President Bush follows Gorbachev’s address on television at Camp David. It is still only 11 a.m. on a balmy winter morning on the East Coast of the United States when the last Soviet president starts speaking. “The finality of it hit me pretty hard; it was Christmas time, holiday time,” Bush recalls. He feels “a tremendous charge” watching “freedom and self-determination prevail as one republic after another gained its independence.” He was always confident that in the end, given the choice, the people of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would put communism aside and opt for freedom. But without Gorbachev and Shevardnadze the Cold War would have dragged on, and the fear of impending nuclear war would still be with them. “We all were winners, East and West,” he notes later. “I think that was what made much of the process possible—that it did not come at the expense of anyone.”¹⁰