Moscow, December 25, 1991

Like Chernyaev, the other Yakovlev in the circle has also been hurt over time by Gorbachev’s thoughtlessness. Alexander Yakovlev once confided to Chernyaev that in six years working with Gorbachev he had never heard a single thank you. He complained, “I don’t even feel any gratitude from him for the fact that the idea of perestroika was born in our first conversations in Canada back when I was ambassador.” Their relationship was at times quite fraught and is still complicated. Only a year earlier Gorbachev was told by Kryuchkov that Yakovlev was an agent of the CIA. The president became so paranoid that one day in late summer 1990 he got it into his head that his adviser was planning a coup with other radicals.³ He tracked Yakovlev’s whereabouts to a forest hundreds of miles away, where he was picking mushrooms with his grandchildren. On the telephone he practically charged the flabbergasted Yakovlev with conspiring against him. In the event the diehard conservatives were right to suspect the long-term intentions of Gorbachev’s ally. Three years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Yakovlev asserts that he and Shevardnadze realized full well during the perestroika years that their advice to Gorbachev would lead to the destruction of the system, and he boasts that “we did it before our opponents woke up in time to prevent it.”⁴ The coup opened Gorbachev’s eyes to the machinations of Kryuchkov, but he has never completely got over his mistrust of Yakovlev. He knows that it wasn’t only Yeltsin who relished his humiliation in the Russian parliament after the coup. He noticed some of his own associates gloating, Alexander Yakovlev among them.

Georgy Shakhnazarov also helped destroy the system, though he has often been frustrated by Gorbachev’s vacillations. The sixty-seven-year-old Armenian regularly urged Gorbachev in the late 1980s to convert to social democracy and move towards multiparty politics, which was unthinkable at the time. “As often happens in revolutionary systems,” he would observe later, “there are things which seem banal today but which you couldn’t even mention then.” Gorbachev once suspected him, too, of leaking information—about decisions on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh—and asked Kryuchkov to investigate, but nothing came of it. Twenty-one months earlier it was Shakhnazarov alone who was invited to join Mikhail and Raisa for a private glass of champagne to celebrate his leader’s elevation to the presidency. Now he is here to bear witness to his abdication. Raisa herself has not come for the obsequies. The Kremlin late nights have always been men-only affairs.

For all the perceived slights and injustices in the service of Gorbachev, however, a warmth and sense of camaraderie has returned to the relationship between the dethroned king and his reform-minded courtiers in these final hours. The small group of aides in the empty Kremlin building are at one in believing they serve a historic figure and a great man. This bond unites them and draws them to Gorbachev as December 25, 1991, comes to a close.

The lowering of the Soviet flag from the Kremlin has a profound effect on all of them. Even Alexander Yakovlev, the most radical of the perestroika reformers, feels it tear at his emotions. He, Chernyaev, and Shakhnazarov all fought under the red flag in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler’s armies. Only a year ago Yakovlev had declared that he would defend the revolutionary emblem, “as my father defended it during the four years of the civil war and as I defended it during the Great Patriotic War.”⁵ It is no longer there to defend.

Andrey Grachev regards the day as both a defeat and a tragedy. It signals the defeat of a statesman forced out of office before completing his mission and the tragedy of a reformer forced to abandon his plans before they bore fruit. It occurs to the comparatively youthful spokesman (in this company) that some other friends are missing at the table, but at least no one is present who is not wanted. Judas is not at this last supper, but “even if Judas had been in Gorbachev’s entourage, his betrayal would have already taken place.”⁶