Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev’s farewell address came too late for the deadlines of the Russian morning dailies, leading Chernyaev to conclude that “not a single newspaper carried the full text of the appeal as everybody is afraid of Yeltsin.” Much of the coverage is critical of the outgoing president. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the organ of the Russian parliament (which next day does carry the full text), prints a page 1 commentary headlined: “The West Believes Gorbachev; The Russians Believe Yeltsin.” The paper’s senior columnist Vladimir Kuznechevsky accuses the United States of wanting to keep the Soviet Union intact and Gorbachev as leader. “Gorbachev showed convincingly he was at one with major international leaders. With Yeltsin it is a completely different story. He has no interests apart from the interests of Russia, and is satisfying those interests by integrating Russia into the general historical stream.” The paper cites a poll showing that 63 percent of Russians are happy to see Gorbachev leave office, and 66 percent are convinced that the Union will be maintained in some form under the commonwealth.

More worrying for Gorbachev and his aides, who are concerned that there will be attempts to discredit them, another commentator in the same daily, Gennady Melkov, calls for an open trial of the main leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Under the headline “Ghost of Nuremberg” he points out that not every German was guilty of crimes under Nazism but that the leadership should take moral responsibility for what they had done. Fifty million people died during the history of the Communist Party, he writes, and no other party in the world killed so many of its own people.

The negative coverage rankles with Gorbachev’s accomplices. Alexander Yakovlev tells a reporter, “I’m really hurt by the ingratitude towards Gorbachev which many people are falling over themselves to express.”

Several newspapers do, however, express sympathy and appreciation for the fallen president. Izvestia, the former mouthpiece of the Soviet government, is indignant at the manner in which Gorbachev has been dumped, declaring on its front page, “He left his high position looking at us directly and frankly in the eyes. He did all he could.” The paper’s columnist Gayaz Alimov criticizes the absence of a proper farewell ceremony. “This is a question of our own dignity as a nation, as a people, and of the honor of the current political leaders. We will be ashamed of this some time later; even now some of us already feel bad about it.” A colleague, Inna Muravyeva, points out that Gorbachev freed the press, removed fear, and “opened the valve” of their self-respect. “He bequeathed to Russia inflation, beggars in the street, millionaires, and 80 percent of people living on the poverty line, but also Andrey Sakharov and the realization of the value of a person as a proud human being.”

Vitaly Korotich, editor of Ogonyok, muses that “Gorbachev took this country like my wife takes cabbage. He thought that to get rid of the dirt, he could just peel off the top layer of leaves. But he had to keep going until there was nothing left.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda, the radical youth newspaper, acknowledges that while Gorbachev was unable to change the living standards of the people, he changed the people. “He didn’t know how to make sausage, but he did know how to give freedom. And if someone believes that the former is more important than the latter, he is likely never to have either.”

“Finita la commedia!” declares Pravda, which was shut down after the August coup but has been relaunched by a team of pro-communist journalists and taken over by a family of Greek entrepreneurs, the Yannikoses. The former organ of the Communist Party, with its trademark masthead of Order of Lenin medals, is daily harassed by Yeltsin’s officials. A few days back, its electricity supply was cut off, its telephones were disconnected, and militiamen loyal to the Russian Federation sealed off the editorial offices on the tenth floor of its office building. Nevertheless, Pravda’s editor in chief, Alexander Ilyin, manages to produce the paper every day. He cautions against the temptation to gloat over Gorbachev’s dismissal, saying, “This is not the time to throw stones at the back of the person who is leaving.”

The retrograde communist newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya declares a plague on both houses. It publishes a cartoon on its front page showing Gorbachev and Yeltsin standing over a pile of smoldering ashes with Gorbachev saying, “Now I think we can say that perestroika has been completed.”