Moscow, December 25, 1991

The two colonels with the nuclear suitcase have, as always, followed the president into the reception room attached to his office. They place the black object with sharp metal corners on a table so that it is in view. If there is a nuclear alert, a light will flash. This has never happened since the chemodanchik was invented in 1983, in the final phases of the Cold War, to provide Soviet leaders with a remote communications system to minimize reaction time should a missile be detected heading towards the USSR. The device has never left Gorbachev’s side since 1985. In an emergency the top leaders can converse with each other and with the strategic forces command center at Chekhov, a small town outside Moscow linked to the Kremlin by a secret KGB subway known as Moscow Metro II. If one leader should be incapacitated by a nuclear strike, two others can authorize retaliatory action.

Occasionally the colonels have taken Gorbachev through the procedure, showing how in an emergency the president can monitor the trajectory of a suspect missile on a screen inside the case linked into the Soviet Union’s command and control network, Kazbek, and converse with the defense minister and strategic command center by satellite telephone. The system was designed to respond to the U.S. Pershing medium-range ballistic missile, which has a sevenminute trajectory. By pressing one of a row of buttons inside the suitcase, the president can approve different kinds of reactions, from a limited reprisal to nuclear Armageddon.

Contrary to popular belief, the three nuclear suitcases do not contain the codes necessary to unlock the safety mechanisms on nuclear missiles. The president can authorize access to these codes, however. If all the briefcase holders are killed in an attack, officers of the general staff have codes to launch counterstrikes on their own initiative.

Andrey Grachev notes that besides the two colonels, the normally bustling anteroom is strangely empty. Not a single visitor is present, other than the Americans from ABC television. The appointments diary is blank.

Gorbachev’s English-language interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, finds the Kremlin corridors “hushed, even more quiet than usual” as he arrives and walks along the corridor to his cubicle-sized office filled with dictionaries. The interpreter, whose bald head and moustache are often seen over Gorbachev’s shoulder at international gatherings, senses an air of inevitability about what is happening in the Kremlin, where he has never felt at home since Gorbachev moved his presidential staff here from party headquarters in Old Square some months ago.

Palazchenko also senses something hostile in the building. It is as if, he feels, “the environment itself is trying to eject us.”

Chapter 5 THE STORMING OF MOSCOW

Less than a year after he took office, Mikhail Gorbachev summoned Communist Party leaders from all over the Soviet Union to a great congress in the Kremlin. As Moscow city boss, Boris Yeltsin saw to it that the streets of the capital were decorated with red banners for the occasion.

The day of the conference, February 25, 1986, was clear and bitterly cold, with the temperature hovering around zero. Inside the conference hall the new general secretary got a warm reception from the 5,000 delegates. They expected much from the dynamic new leader after the stagnation of the previous two decades.

At this, the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, Gorbachev launched his ambitious reform program to revitalize the Soviet economy. He called it perestroika, or restructuring. Its aim was to renew Soviet-style socialism through greater freedom for initiative and to liberalize society through glasnost, or openness.

Gorbachev had worked on his speech to the congress for several days at his holiday dacha in Pitsunda, with the help of his close collaborator, Alexander Yakovlev. A heavy-jowled, balding man in his late sixties, with large plasticrimmed glasses and his left knee stiff from a war wound, Yakovlev provided much of the intellectual drive for perestroika. Gorbachev had met him in May 1983, when he visited Canada, where Yakovlev was semi-exiled as Soviet ambassador after speaking out against Russian chauvinism.

In fact perestroika could be traced back to a long and frank discussion Gorbachev and Yakovlev held in the backyard of a farm in Amherstburg, Ontario.¹ The ambassador told him there how the Canadian system was superior because openness and democracy acted as a check on corruption. Yakovlev so impressed Gorbachev as a liberal but loyal party theoretician that he had him brought back to Moscow and made a candidate member of the Politburo. Behind the scenes the former ambassador urged his comrade to think dangerous thoughts, like splitting the party in two, holding elections, and lifting censorship on the press.