Moscow, December 25, 1991

The presidential Zil is waiting for Gorbachev when he leaves the Senate Building and steps out into Kremlin Square after bidding emotional farewells to his comrades. The driver takes the exhausted ex-president through the deserted streets of the city center, across the Moscow River bridge, along Kutuzovsky Prospekt to Rublyov Highway, and finally into the driveway of the dacha. It is turning colder, and the headlights reflect off ice crystals on the frozen snow piled up by the tarmac. The driver does not park the Zil in the garage, as he normally does, but turns and heads off into the night.

There is a shock for Gorbachev when he enters the presidential residence. Clothes, shoes, books, framed pictures, and personal souvenirs are piled on the floor or crammed into boxes and crates, ready for moving to their new home. It is not a night for a relaxing midnight walk with Raisa around the paths. Besides, he is feeling the symptoms of influenza.

Igor Belyaev brings to his Moscow apartment the tapes he has made of the president holding talks with officials and diplomats during his last days. The documentary maker has some unique shots of Gorbachev taking care of outstanding business, such as releasing Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s KGB file. Belyaev admires his fellow alumnus from Moscow University. He wants him to be loved by the Russian people while he is still alive and appreciated as a person whom Russia has failed to understand. Knowing of Belyaev’s devotion, Yegor Yakovlev had put him in overall charge of the project by ABC and Gosteleradio to record Gorbachev’s departure. As he expects, the filmmaker finds that there is extreme sensitivity at the television center about any attention being paid to Gorbachev. Other than the actual resignation broadcast and the Soviet-American film, hardly anyone in television headquarters in Moscow wants to be involved in a positive program on Gorbachev’s contribution to the world.

Belyaev stores the reels under a sofa, where they remain for a decade before they are retrieved. He is not able to show his documentary on Russian television until the tenth anniversary of Gorbachev’s resignation, in December 2001.

In another part of the Kremlin, Yeltsin is also staying late rather than returning home. But as Gorbachev is downing cognac, it is Yeltsin this evening who is the sober one. The Russian president is chastened by his new responsibility as supreme commander in chief of the armed forces, with legal control of the nuclear suitcase. When Shaposhnikov comes to his office to complete the business of transferring the chemodanchik, he finds Yeltsin in a subdued mood.¹¹ As has happened before, an outburst of petulance has been followed by self-doubt and feelings of remorse.

An hour ago there were two presidents of two different political entities resident in one city. Now Yeltsin is on his own and must play by new rules. His rapture on seizing absolute power, he admits later, is quickly replaced by “a bad case of the jitters.”

Yeltsin is intrigued by the communications screen, authorization buttons, and telephone system in the case. Shaposhnikov observes how he thoroughly familiarizes himself with the equipment and how it works, talks to the officer-specialists, and resolves all questions of their accommodation, their routine, their personal life and work procedures. “After that I stayed with Yeltsin for another hour, and we talked in detail about the problems of the armed forces.”

The problems are overwhelming. Since 7 p.m., when the last Soviet leader signed the decree resigning as commander in chief, the 3.8 million-strong Soviet military has ceased to exist. The country to which they all swore an oath of allegiance is no more. Its nuclear forces are in four republics but are now subordinate to the Russian president. As defense minister and commander, on paper, of the armed forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Shaposhnikov has new responsibilities. He expresses grave concern to his political chief about the chaos that may follow after the vast military machine is broken up.

The collapse of the communist superpower has left units of the Soviet army, navy, and air force in newly independent countries. The marshal must oversee the withdrawal of conventional forces of Russian nationality and all nuclear weapons from Russia’s neighbors. Before the fall of the USSR the operational area of Moscow’s armed forces extended across 8.65 million square miles, from the Pacific to Western Europe. It has been reduced to the 6.6 million square miles of Russian territory, which shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea.