Moscow, December 25, 1991

In contrast to the Kremlin, the Russian White House is already crackling with activity on the morning of December 25, 1991. The imposing ten-year-old edifice of marble and glass, constructed in the shape of a giant submarine with a fourteen-story conning tower, is headquarters of the Russian government. The building has been a symbol of national resistance to totalitarianism since the failed August coup, when Yeltsin stood on a tank outside to defy the hard-line communists attempting to impose emergency rule and keep the Soviet Union intact. It contains the Russian Supreme Soviet, the parliament elected the previous year in the first free vote in Russia since the founding of the USSR. Before that the White House was dismissed by cynical Muscovites as a white elephant, housing a sham government and parliament, whose members were handpicked by the party and who rubber-stamped everything put in front of them. It is now home to a lively, fractious elected assembly that only two weeks ago voted, on Yeltsin’s urging, to take Russia out of the dying Soviet Union by the end of the year.

Visitors climbing the terraced steps are greeted by a magnificent depiction of the imperial two-headed, red-tongued eagle of tsarist Russia rather than, as before, the giant statue of Lenin standing in a recess in the hall, which is still there but which has been shrouded by curtains. In the reception rooms the large pictures of the Soviet founder that were once obligatory have been replaced with reproduction landscapes of silver birch and snow. The Russian tricolor flutters gaily from the roof, and little replica flags adorn the desks of the ministers inside. The cafeteria, so well-stocked in the days before the party system of privileges broke down, still manages to supply deputies and parliamentary staff with bread and sausage. Even in the White House, however, the shortages are evident. The ornate blue-tiled bathrooms on the fifth floor often do not have any lavatory paper; parliamentary deputies are suspected of pocketing the toilet rolls that are installed first thing in the morning and taking them home. ¹

Boris Yeltsin enters from the basement car park and takes the private lift to his spacious office on the fifth floor. There his aide Viktor Ilyushin has laid out on his desk the December 25 editions of the Russian newspapers. A dry apparatchik in his early forties, Ilyushin has been Yeltsin’s assistant since Sverdlovsk days. Over the years he has learned to bear patiently the brunt of his boss’s sometimes petulant outbursts. He always arrives first to prepare the day’s schedule and present Yeltsin with the most important documents.

The broadsheets devote considerable space to a series of fresh presidential decrees signed by Yeltsin the previous day, taking over departments and properties from the defunct Soviet government.

Where the Soviet Union was established by sword and gun, it is being dismantled by decree. In the previous two months Yeltsin has been appropriating Soviet assets simply by signing one decree after another. He undermined the demoralized USSR government by first withholding Russian taxes and then taking ownership of Soviet government ministries and the currency mint. All that Mikhail Gorbachev is left with are titles, a small staff, and the nuclear suitcase.