Moscow, December 25, 1991

Current and former world leaders shower Gorbachev with praise. In London John Major notes that it was given to very few people to change the course of history, but that was what Gorbachev has done, and whatever happens today, his place in history is secure. Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, which achieved unity under Gorbachev’s watch, expresses the view that his place in the history of the century will not be challenged by anyone. NATO secretary-general Manfred Wörner says that Europe is grateful to Gorbachev for his essential contribution toward a Europe whole and free. Ronald Reagan declares that Gorbachev will live forever in history, and Margaret Thatcher expresses gratitude to him for doing “great things for the world… without a shot being fired.”

One of the few discordant notes comes from the People’s Republic of China, which is ruled by the Communist Party of China, now the largest single political party in the world. China’s communist leaders have dealt with their own people’s demands for democracy and the end of corruption by massacring hundreds of students and workers in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. China’s foreign ministry acknowledges that the demise of the Soviet Union heralds the end of the East-West conflict and the dawn of a new multipolar age. But seeking to justify the bloody path the Chinese party has taken to remain in power, it complains that Gorbachev got it wrong. Gorbachev’s “new thinking, glasnost, and political pluralism,” states the Chinese government, “have brought only political chaos, ethnic strife, and economic crises.”⁹

In Minsk, Stanislau Shushkevich does not watch Gorbachev’s final address on television. He has better things to do. Late in the evening the Belarus leader hears that the red flag has come down and the Soviet Union he helped dismantle has come to an end, almost a week before its official sell-by date of New Year’s Eve. Asked twenty years later what was his reaction when he was told, Shushkevich replies with one word: “Pravilno!” Translated roughly it means “Just right!”¹⁰

Chapter 26 DECEMBER 25: LATE NIGHT

It is nine o’clock in the evening and a ghostly silence has descended on the Kremlin. Andrey Grachev returns there from his interview with French television studios in Gruzinsky Lane. He has received a call on his car phone telling him Gorbachev wants him back in the Kremlin as soon as possible. Outside the Senate Building there are only a couple of drivers and guards. Gorbachev’s press secretary finds the corridors and offices on the third floor deserted. He locates Gorbachev in the Walnut Room, sitting at the oval table with his closest aides. For once his boss has called him not to work but to socialize. A bottle of Jubilee cognac has been opened and glasses passed around.

Gorbachev is in a melancholy mood. He is despondent about the casual manner in which he has been dispatched from office, without even a farewell ceremony, “as is the custom in civilized countries.” He is hurt that not a single one of the leaders of the republics—former communists with whom Gorbachev has had comradely relationships over the years—has called to thank, congratulate, or commiserate with him on the termination of his service. He ended repression, gave people freedom of speech and travel, and introduced elections that put them in power, but they stay silent. They are all in a state of euphoria, busily dividing up their inheritance, thinks Gorbachev bitterly. “Yesterday hardly anyone had heard of them, but tomorrow they will be heads of independent states,” he says. “What did it matter what fate they were preparing for their nations?”

Chernyaev feels only scorn for the ungracious leaders who owe their political careers to Gorbachev, a number of them highly corrupt satraps who had switched from communism to nationalism solely to retain power. “Neither Nazarbayev, nor Karimov, nor Niyazov, not to mention Kravchuk or other second-raters, bothered to call Gorbachev to say even official words ‘appropriate to the occasion,’” he notes in his diary, referring to the presidents of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine. “What can you do! Homo Sovieticus is the biggest, most difficult problem remaining for the fledgling democracy that Gorbachev created.”¹

Grachev concludes they are so fearful of incurring Yeltsin’s displeasure that “not one of them found the moral force to make a personal gesture to Gorbachev, who was becoming a pariah.” (It is more than five years before one of the new leaders in the republics speaks to Gorbachev again. After President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan, an old friend of Yeltsin, welcomes Gorbachev to his capital, Bishkek, in 1996 and fetes him at a public event, Yeltsin refuses to shake Akayev’s hand for a year, and chides him when they next meet, saying, “Askar, how could you?”²)