Moscow, December 25, 1991

The marshal calls Yeltsin, who has calmed down after his outburst. He agrees to the compromise. Shaposhnikov witnesses Gorbachev’s signature on the transfer agreement. An officer leaves with the papers, along with the decree of the USSR president transferring supreme command over the armed forces to the president of Russia. After a few minutes Yeltsin’s office calls to say the Russian president accepts that the documents are in order. The transfer can take place.

One of the colonels unlocks the black metal chemodanchik. Gorbachev checks the equipment inside. Everything is in its place. He shakes hands with the two men on duty who have accompanied him around the globe, thanks them for their work, and says good-bye. The brace of colonels leave the office with the nuclear device. Shaposhnikov stays behind for a final few words with his former commander in chief.

In Gorbachev’s anteroom, Chernyaev tries to make sense of the military uniforms coming and going. He sees Shaposhnikov leaving, “smiling as usual and saying ‘Hello!’” and “clearly embarrassed” about the whole affair.

He and the two Yakovlevs go in and sit at the oval table with Gorbachev. They find him red-faced and clearly upset over the way Yeltsin has behaved. They help calm him down and prepare him for the television cameras once more.

During the verbal artillery between the two Kremlin buildings, Ted Koppel of ABC has been standing by with his crew to film the ceremonial handover of the nuclear suitcase from the Soviet to the Russian president. Just before 8 p.m. he is invited back into the presidential office. Gorbachev has recovered his composure. He greets the ABC personnel with smiles. The nuclear suitcase is already with Yeltsin, he informs them, as if nothing untoward has happened. “Now it is Yeltsin who holds his finger on the nuclear button.” All that remains for him “is to clear out some personal effects, some papers.”

But Boris Yeltsin has not finished tormenting his rival.

Mikhail Gorbachev, like everyone else, expects that the Soviet flag will continue flying over the Senate dome until December 31. Russian and world media were told specifically by Yeltsin’s press secretary Pavel Voshchanov, on December 17: “On New Year’s Eve, the hammer-and-sickle flag of revolutionary red that has flown for seventy-four years over the Kremlin, the medieval brick fortress on the Moscow River, will be lowered, marking the formal end to the Soviet era.” The Russian flag would then be raised triumphantly, in a blaze of fireworks, to herald the new year and a new era, he said.

The red flag is this evening still hanging from the flagpole above the illuminated green dome as Gorbachev delivers his valedictory address, visible to the usual small crowds of strollers and tourists in Red Square. But twenty minutes after Gorbachev finishes, two workmen emerge from a trapdoor on the roof of the Senate Building and climb up metal steps on the curved side of the dome to a circular platform with a waist-high railing at the top. From there they pull down the twenty-foot-by-ten-foot flag from the tall mast. As it comes to the bottom of the pole, one of the men gathers it up, as a waiter would remove a tablecloth in a restaurant. The men then attach the white, blue, and red flag of prerevolutionary Russia to the rope and hoist it up the mast. They hold the end of the large expanse of fabric until it reaches the top, then release it so that the flag billows out triumphantly in a southwesterly breeze, helped by jets of compressed air hissing from a tube inside the flagpole.

Few people in Red Square notice what is happening. No one has alerted the public or the foreign media to expect such an act of historical significance this evening—the switching of emblems over the building where Lenin and Stalin exercised their power. Only Russian television was tipped off by Yeltsin’s aides to have a crew in position to record the event. Serge Schmemann of the New York Times recalls, “I was back in the bureau writing a piece about Gorbachev resigning; I don’t think there were any other reporters there.” However, his wife, Mary, and children, Anya, Alexander, and Natasha, were nearby. “They happened by chance to be in Red Square when the red Soviet flag came down for the last time over the Kremlin and the white, blue, and red Russian flag rose in its stead. My children noted the exact time, 7:32 p.m., and called me.”⁴