Moscow, December 25, 1991

Though at the time still officially president and commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces, Gorbachev was not invited to give his views to the leaders of those countries that have formed the commonwealth—namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. (The four remaining former republics of the disintegrating USSR—Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Georgia—want nothing to do with the commonwealth and are looking instead to the West for future alliances.) Nor did the gathering of presidents pay any attention to a letter Gorbachev sent them offering to play a role. They have no time for their former overlord now, or for his delusions and conceits.

There is applause for Yeltsin’s announcement to the Russian congress. He has many opponents in the assembly, some of them staunch communists, some vociferous critics like his own vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, who deeply regret the demise of the great superpower in which they were born, but everyone realizes that a point has been reached where practically every single republic believes it will be better off on its own.

Vladimir Isakov from Yekaterinburg, one of the few Russian parliamentarians who openly supported the failed putsch in August, is among the small minority who voice opposition to the agreement. He rises on a point of order. He points out that when Yeltsin was elected president of Russia, he swore an oath to the constitution of the Soviet-era Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). He has now “high-handedly violated it.” Yeltsin signed the documents in Alma-Ata as the president of the Russian Federation, but it is still legally the RSFSR, he protests. Therefore the agreement is illegal.

There is consternation. Yeltsin and his followers ceased using the Soviet title after the coup but had not got around to formally altering the name. They look completely nonplussed and a brief silence falls until the dilemma is solved by the parliament’s speaker. “Well, before the president answers the question, how about we change the name now?” suggests Ruslan Khasbulatov, an academic of Chechen descent who made his name by bravely defending the White House at Yeltsin’s side in August. “A congress will later establish whether it indeed conforms to the text of the new constitution.”

Khasbulatov proposes a motion changing the title of the assembly to which they were elected from the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation (Russia). The measure is carried on a roll-call vote. Izvestia’s reporter Ivan Yelistratov, watching from the gallery, sees only two votes against.

The deputies in the hall burst into applause as the Soviet republic created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 as the biggest and most powerful constituent member of the USSR, an enormous territory consisting of 6,592,800 square miles and covering more than a ninth of the earth’s land surface, ceases to exist as a legal entity. Other republics of the Soviet Union have already made similar changes in their designations, but the Russian Federation is the last to dump socialism from its official title. Shortly afterwards an excited newsreader on Radio Moscow reports that the removal of the words “Soviet” and “Socialist” reflects the official demise of the Soviet Union.

Yeltsin has another cause for satisfaction this day. Outside the chamber several deputies rush to a conference room after hearing that a “sensational” press conference—as a reporter from Sovetskaya Rossiya describes it—is being given by an expert from a parliamentary commission investigating the August coup. The expert, Alexander Kichikhin, confirms what everyone suspected: Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the tiny Liberal Democratic Party, who often rambles round the White House corridors showering listeners with spittle during half-crazed rants about the evils of Russia’s enemies, ranging from Jews to the CIA, is a stooge of the KGB.² His phony party has no branches and was recruited solely to oppose Boris Yeltsin in Russia’s first ever presidential election in June. To Yeltsin’s satisfaction Zhirinovsky had got only 8 percent of the vote, despite the support of much of the official media.

The Russian president returns to his fifth-floor cabinet and wolfs down a quick lunch. He regularly has meat pies and apples delivered from the self-service cafeteria. Out of his window he can see the wide Moscow river as it begins a loop southwest like a horseshoe, past the Kievsky Railway Station, around Luzhniki sports stadium, back northeast by Gorky Park, and around the ramparts of the Kremlin two miles distant, where Mikhail Gorbachev is also grabbing a quick lunch and fighting fatigue and the onset of influenza as he prepares for the speech that will mark his transition from presidential to civilian life.