Moscow, December 25, 1991

Pugo, Boris, Soviet interior minister, committed suicide after August coup

Putin, Vladimir, aide to St. Petersburg mayor, later president and prime minister of Russia

Redkoborody, Vladimir, KGB officer in charge of presidential security

Revenko, Grigory, aide to Gorbachev

Rostropovich, Mstislav, cellist and supporter of reform

Rutskoy, Alexander, vice president of Russia, 1991–1993

Ryzhkov, Nikolay, Soviet prime minister, 1985–1990

Sakharov, Andrey, physicist and human rights campaigner

Shakhnazarov, Georgy, adviser to Gorbachev

Shakhrai, Sergey, Yeltsin aide, drafter of Belovezh accord

Shaposhnikov, Yevgeny, air force general, appointed Soviet defense minister after August coup

Shatalin, Stanislav, radical economist

Shenin, Oleg, Communist Party Central Committee secretary, putschist

Shevardnadze, Eduard, Soviet foreign minister, elected leader of Georgia in 1992

Shushkevich, Stanislau, elected chairman of Belarus parliament in 1991

Silayev, Ivan, last Soviet prime minister

Sobchak, Anatoly, pro-reform mayor of St. Petersburg

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, former political prisoner and writer

Stalin, Joseph, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1922–1952

Sukhanov, Lev, assistant to Yeltsin

Suslov, Mikhail, Soviet ideologist in Brezhnev era

Tarasenko, Sergey, aide to Shevardnadze

Tretyakov, Vitaly, pro-reform editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta

Tsipko, Alexander, Gorbachev speechwriter

Varennikov, Valentin, army general, putschist

Vlasov, Alexander, Communist candidate defeated by Yeltsin in election for chairman of Russian Supreme Soviet

Vorontsov, Yury, USSR/Russian ambassador to United Nations

Yakovlev, Alexander, diplomat, close adviser to Gorbachev, inspiration for perestroika

Yakovlev, Yegor, pro-reform editor of Moscow News, later head of state television

Yanayev, Gennady, vice president of Soviet Union, putschist

Yaroshenko, Viktor, aide to Yeltsin

Yavlinsky, Grigory, radical economist

Yazov, Dmitry, Soviet minister of defense, putschist

Yeltsin, Boris, Moscow party boss, 1985—1987, chairman of Russian Supreme Soviet, 1990–1991, president of Russia, 1991–1999

Yeltsina, Naina, wife of Boris Yeltsin

Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, far right Russian politician

PREFACE

This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city. The day is Wednesday, December 25, 1991. The city is Moscow. It is the day the Soviet Union ends and the red flag comes down from the Kremlin. It is witness to a deeply personal and politically charged drama, marked at the highest levels (and out of sight of the public) by shouts, tears, reminiscences, and melodrama. It climaxes in a final act of surrender by Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin, two extraordinary men who despised each other and whose interaction shaped modern Russia.

In reconstructing the events of this midwinter day, I have combined my interviews and my own research in television and newspaper archives with material from over a hundred memoirs, diaries, biographies, and other works that have appeared since the fall of the Soviet Union in English and Russian. I have also drawn on my experience observing Gorbachev and Yeltsin up close in the last four years of Soviet rule, when I was a correspondent based in Moscow. During this period I frequented the Kremlin and the Russian White House, where the fight between the two rivals played out. I hung around parliamentary and party meetings, grabbing every opportunity to question the two leaders when they appeared. I interviewed Politburo members, editors, economists, nationalists, Communist Party radicals and hard-liners, dissidents, striking coal miners, and countless people just trying to get by. I was a face in the crowd at pro-democracy rallies, at Red Square commemorations, and at the barricades in the Baltics. I traveled around Russia, from Chechnya to Yakutsk, and to the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, observing the changes sweeping the USSR that would lead to the denouement on Christmas Day 1991. And since then I have returned to Russia regularly, for both professional and personal reasons.