Moscow, December 25, 1991

Just as the session is starting, five Kremlin workers, two in fur hats, two bareheaded and one in a ski cap, appear at the entrance doors to the building. They unscrew the matching four-feet-by-three-feet brass plates on each side that proclaim, “Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR,” and carry them off to a storeroom.

Anuarbek Alimzhanov, chairman of the Congress’s Council of Republics, takes his seat at the large, wood table on the stage, flanked by seven flags representing fewer than half the former Soviet republics. He claims enough deputies have registered to form a quorum to vote on a resolution winding up the USSR, though the few Russian and Belarusian parliamentarians there are attending only as observers.

Their predecessors “spoke of great things, of world revolution, of social equality, of socialism, of the dream of advancing to communism,” declares Alimzhanov. “Now our country is returning to capitalism in its wildest form…. We understand perfectly well what we have lost. We don’t know what we have gained.” He chides journalists for “dancing around the lion that has not yet been slain” but acknowledges that the red flag has come down, their president has resigned, and this is their last meeting.

Hard-line communist Vladimir Samarin steps up to fulminate against Yeltsin’s “coup d’etat.” He uses such demagogic and offensive terms that the secretariat stops taking notes for the official record. Samarin complains that events have brought the congress to its knees, an image famously countered by anticommunist deputy Ilya Zaslavsky with the words, “This congress was never off its knees in the first place.” Zaslavsky argued at a previous session that while the Bolsheviks disbanded the last elected prerevolutionary assembly in January 1918 on the pretext that deputies should leave as the guards were tired, “This time it’s not the guards who are tired; it’s the people who are tired.” Deputy Viktor Giblin from the Archangelsk region announces that he will have to take up a job as street cleaner. Other deputies exchange views on whether the end of the Soviet Union is a tragedy or a comedy.

Liu Heung Shing, the Associated Press photographer whose picture of Gorbachev’s resignation is reproduced today on front pages all over the world, wanders around the near empty chamber with his camera. “There was only one Soviet lawmaker in the empty hall,” he recalled. “He was yawning as a speaker at the podium announced the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Alimzhanov brings the proceedings to an end after less than an hour. “Now that the president has resigned and the red flag has been lowered over the Kremlin it is time for us to take our leave,” he says. The deputies vote to consign the USSR to history. The motion states: “Relying on the will expressed by the top elected bodies of state power of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, the House of the Republics announces the dissolution of the USSR,” as soon as each republic has ratified the Alma-Ata agreements. Their final act is to dismiss the chairmen of the USSR Supreme Court, the Prosecutor’s Office, and the State Bank, institutions that no longer exist.

The deputies leave in Chaika and Volga sedans laden with belongings and files, sparking rumors that they are stripping the building of televisions, computers, and other official property. Ivan Boiko, head of the department for the security of property of the government of Russia, later denies that any looting took place, though there was a brazen attempt by an official to take out 127,000 rubles from the Committee of Constitutional Control in a suitcase. It is, however, a last opportunity to remove and destroy files that might prove embarrassing or dangerous in future. Similar action is going on in many official buildings across Moscow. Quoting Russian presidential sources, TASS reports that some of the top brass at the new supersecurity ministry combining the KGB and the interior ministry are fast destroying files on corrupt senior police officers.

The USSR deputies elected from Russian districts are allowed to keep half their annual salaries, thanks to a resolution of the Russian parliament in the White House. This concession was not unanimous. Sergey Baburin, a thirty-two-year-old Afghan veteran and extreme nationalist—he is a friend of Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic—recommends bitterly that they should be awarded thirty pieces of silver for their treacherous role in failing to protect the Soviet Union.