Moscow, December 25, 1991

Shortly before 5 p.m. Gorbachev leaves his Kremlin office. He is driven in his limousine across the Moscow River to the President Hotel, located in the historic Zamoskvorechye District. The five-star hotel built in 1982 was formerly known as the Hotel Oktyabrskaya, the Hotel October, in memory of the Russian Revolution, when it was used exclusively by the Communist Party to house visiting dignitaries and fraternal delegates.

In the absence of an official state send-off, Andrey Grachev has organized a grand reception in the ballroom for three hundred Russian and foreign media representatives to accord Gorbachev a final salute. He billed it in messages to journalists as “the last briefing by the presidential press service.” Those invited are, in Grachev’s opinion, “the only interlocutors capable of appreciating the true role of Gorbachev, and not embarrassed to express their appreciation.”

The director of the hotel, fearful of incurring the displeasure of the new authorities, has done everything in his power to prevent the event taking place in his establishment. He at first refused to accept the booking, insisting that the presidential account was closed. Even when Grachev got Gorbachev to provide cash from his own pocket, he kept saying no, but his Russian bosses in the end instructed him to take the reservation. Chernyaev notes with some satisfaction that the hotel manager, while no longer answerable to the party, is employed by a joint venture company with Western capitalists, so he had to give in. After all, “There are some uses for privatization!”

The ex-president looks so downbeat and exhausted as he arrives that those close to him fear he is in danger of having a heart attack.

But as he begins to climb the wide, carpeted marble stairway to the ballroom, Mikhail Gorbachev is greeted with a sound that washes over him like balm. At the top of the stairs the large assembly of guests starts applauding. His mood brightens immediately. Here are people who still want to listen to what he has to say. The brilliant sparkle comes back to his eyes as he is surrounded by wellwishers, and he joins in making toasts with glasses of lemon vodka. He hugs several of his friends, champions of glasnost, such as Len Karpinsky of Moscow News and Vitaly Tretyakov of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, and signs autographs for foreign correspondents who have been covering perestroika for years. CNN’s Tom Johnson gets him to sign his diary with the Mont Blanc pen with which the president dissolved the Soviet Union. The journalists also besiege Andrey Grachev, Anatoly Chernyaev, Yegor Yakovlev, Grigory Revenko, and Georgy Shakhnazarov for insider accounts of the final days.

Everyone wants to know what Gorbachev will do next. As he grabs a few sardines from the banquet table, he relates how in his native village of Privolnoye in the North Caucasus, his eighty-year-old mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva, had watched his speech on television and then sent him a message: “Leave everything, and come home.” Gorbachev predicts that when he calls her back, she will say, “Thank God, take a break, and be yourself again.”⁴

He speaks with such bravado about his future participation in the political process that a number of journalists feel he is laying the groundwork for a political comeback. “My role is changing, but I am not leaving the political scene,” he promises. “I have big plans.”⁵

As always in the presence of ardent admirers—though several in the gathering have written very critically of Gorbachev—he is voluble, expansive, and unfailingly charming, masterfully hiding the corrosive effects of the humiliations he has endured in the previous twenty-four hours. The rancor shows only in brief flashes. He complains that Yeltsin opposed everything he did in the last few months and—in an echo of Richard Nixon’s famous remark after an election defeat in 1962 that “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more”—he comments bitterly, “It’s easy to be against Gorbachev all the time. There is no one for them to oppose now. So, let them do what they can.”⁶

He remarks jokingly that there are so many presidents in what was the Soviet Union that losing one is not such a big thing, but losing a country is much more important. Fred Coleman, the Newsweek bureau chief, finds him in top form, relaxed, and composed. Over a glass of champagne, Gorbachev tells him, “A great task fell to my lot, and it was accomplished. Others will come who will perhaps do a better job. I wish them success.”⁷