Moscow, December 25, 1991

The ex-president toasts his small group of advisers in the half-lit Walnut Room, where Zhenya the Kremlin waiter has left out some salad and meat dishes before going off duty. The gathering includes Gorbachev’s most intimate associates and favorites. There is Grachev, who has made the best of a hopeless case in briefing the world’s media on his behalf during the final days. Also there are Yegor Yakovlev, head of state television; Alexander Yakovlev, who helped him launch perestroika; Anatoly Chernyaev, his loyal aide; and Georgy Shakhnazarov—all of them his most progressive and honest advisers through good times and bad.

Chernyaev is Gorbachev’s closest confidant, most blunt critic, and most prolific chronicler. The septuagenarian with the complicated private life is also the guarantor of Gorbachev’s good name. Having been at Foros during the three days of the coup, he has testified to the truth of Gorbachev’s account of his temporary imprisonment. His integrity and sterling reputation—even Valery Boldin regards him highly—ensures that no one will ever take too seriously the damaging theory, doing the rounds in Moscow and in some Western academic circles, that Gorbachev was secretly complicit in the conspiracy of the hard-liners. But they have not always had an easy relationship. When Gorbachev cracked down on the Baltics, Chernyaev wrote a letter of resignation, but after much agonizing, he did not deliver it. He now believes his decision was correct.

Working together as commander and aide-de-camp, Gorbachev and he have been through great campaigns together, and there is a devotion, in spite of everything. He has often interpreted events more astutely than Gorbachev. He privately considers that Yeltsin, for all his gaucheness and his mediocrity as a person, is the chieftain Russia requires at this moment in history. Gorbachev, as the product of an impermanent entity created by Lenin, never really understood Russia or its place in history. A year previously Chernyaev confessed in his diary that he was beginning to dislike working for Gorbachev. “He’s never once said that he appreciates me, never said, ‘Thank you,’ not even when it would be useful to him to mention my contribution.” Boldin, who has nothing good to say about his former boss, echoes this complaint in his memoir, alleging that Gorbachev’s relations with his staff lacked human warmth and mutual respect, and that “it was galling to see him treat them like servants.”

Gorbachev for his part allowed himself to harbor doubts about Chernyaev in the days when he was under the influence of the conspiratorial Kryuchkov. He confided once to his chief of staff that Chernyaev was not to be trusted, as he could be the source of information leaks, and he instructed Boldin that the range of secret information reaching Chernyaev should be limited.

Yegor Yakovlev has been in the Kremlin all day mainly because he feels he should be with the president at this emotional time. He is a member of the “first generation” of perestroika, the intellectuals who believed in Gorbachev from the start and rallied enthusiastically to the cause of reforming the system. The son of Vladimir Yakovlev, the first head of the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, he transformed the Noscow News from a Communist Party propaganda sheet into a standard bearer for glasnost, going as far as he thought Gorbachev was prepared to tolerate. They fell out when Gorbachev temporarily sided with the hard-liners a year earlier, but three months ago, when everything changed in the aftermath of the coup, Gorbachev appointed him head of state broadcasting and a member of his political consultative council. He is taking a risk aligning himself so closely with Gorbachev. The president of Russia is in control of state television, and he will know tomorrow if he will be kept on.