Moscow, December 25, 1991

The most prominent reformer at Gorbachev’s side as the Cold War ended is missing from the gathering. Eduard Shevardnadze watched the resignation speech in his apartment on Plotnikov Lane, off the Old Arbat, preoccupied with news of a civil war that has broken out in his native Georgia. The former Soviet foreign minister, like the two Yakovlevs, rejoined the presidential team after the coup. Recently he and Gorbachev have spent some late evenings alone together in the Kremlin, just to talk, but they never could rediscover the warmth that marked their relationship when they were achieving great things together on the international stage. Shevardnadze cannot forgive Gorbachev for protecting the Soviet army over the 1989 killings of demonstrators in the Georgian capital Tbilisi and for not speaking out in his defense when he was under attack from hard-liners. He feels that the president never listened to the advice of the people genuinely loyal to him. Moreover, he bears a grudge over Gorbachev’s failure to mention him when accepting the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. He believes that had Gorbachev “done something, said just a couple words, Shevardnadze would have received the Nobel Prize, too.”⁷ He is convinced Gorbachev came to resent his foreign minister’s popularity in the West, concluding that “the world had gotten to know me and trust me and Gorbachev wasn’t pleased about it.” During the coup Shevardnadze publicly raised questions about Gorbachev’s degree of complicity, and Gorbachev later told a press conference that that statement should be on Shevardnadze’s conscience. Shevardnadze would also have liked Gorbachev to acknowledge, in the farewell address, his role in ending the Cold War, but his suggested input to the resignation speech was ignored. Now he feels that returning to his old job was a grave personal mistake.

As the men in the Walnut Room make toasts and refill their glasses, Gorbachev reminisces about his early days as a career communist and the importance in his life of Mikhail Suslov, the ascetic grey eminence who shaped communist thinking in the period between the Stalin and Gorbachev eras. The young Stavropol apparatchik was at one time so in awe of Suslov he took to sporting the same type of fedora he wore. Suslov groomed Gorbachev for stardom, never imagining that his protégé would one day help destroy the party as a would-be reformer. Alexander Yakovlev has only contempt for Suslov. In his research he has identified him as one of the ideologues and directors of a program of mass murders under Stalin. He has established that Suslov took part in organizing arrests, was directly responsible for deporting thousands of people from the Baltic states, and orchestrated the persecution of prominent Soviet artists and scientists. In his opinion, Gorbachev’s mentor deserves to be tried for crimes against humanity. But he says nothing.

Gorbachev recalls how terrified he was when he came to work in Moscow and how his eyes were opened as to how policy was made when he became a candidate member of the Politburo. He informs his comrades that after finishing his memoirs, he intends to write a book explaining how and why the idea of perestroika was born in his head. He asks Chernyaev, by the way, to tell Horst Telchik, the senior aide to German chancellor Helmut Kohl, that money for his book The August Coup, which has just been published in the West, should not be sent to Moscow.⁸ In the uncertain economic and political climate it is better to keep hard currency outside the country for now.

Though he is slow to voice his appreciation for loyalty, Gorbachev is moved by the fact that on this evening of his utmost distress, “together with me were the closest friends and colleagues who shared with me all the great pressures and drama of the last months of the presidency.” These are the people who understand the real meaning of what has taken place. “Many were on duty in the Kremlin around the clock. They were not motivated by professional interests but by sincere feeling. I felt it very deeply, especially as I had conflicts with some of them in the past.”⁹ He believes that only close associates like these could know how great a burden was the historical task he undertook, how hard things were sometimes, and how events often drove him to the point of despair.

The melancholy reformers stay on in the Kremlin until it is approaching midnight, reluctant to accept the fact that the last day of the last Soviet leader has to end—and their careers with it.

“A couple of bottles of cognac were drunk,” recalled Grachev. “The atmosphere was solemn, sad. There was something of a feeling of a big thing accomplished. There was a kind of feeling of everyone sharing.”¹⁰