Moscow, December 25, 1991

Yeltsin himself became a different person through his exposure to the radical reformers who gathered around him in the Kremlin foyer. Andrey Sakharov especially made a strong impression. Sakharov did not like Yeltsin, but he saw in him a leader for the emerging democrats, one who had a level of support among the proletariat to which members of the intelligentsia could not aspire. The Congress marked the real start of Yeltsin’s political evolution from communist “stormer” to anticommunist democrat.

Gorbachev noted how unhappy his Politburo comrades were about the whole exercise. “How could it be otherwise, when it was already clear to everybody that the days of party dictatorship were over!”¹¹

From his exile in Vermont, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the chronicler of the gulag, saw a flicker of hope for his native land. “Russia lies utterly ravaged and poisoned; its people are in a state of unprecedented humiliation, and are on the brink of perishing physically, perhaps even biologically,” he noted. Now, however, “having lived through these seventy lethal years inside communism’s iron shell, we are crawling out, though barely alive.”¹²

When he went for his summer vacation at Foros on the Black Sea, Mikhail Gorbachev mused aloud to Raisa about his future, wondering whether he should step aside. Now that people had got such a great measure of freedom, let others show that they know how to use it, he suggested. He was not serious, but Raisa was, perhaps sensing what lay ahead. “It’s time, Mikhail Sergeyevich,” she said, “to devote yourself to private life, to retire and write your memoirs. You’ve done your job.”¹³

Chapter 10 DECEMBER 25: MIDDAY

In the Kremlin, after his lunch of small open-faced salami sandwiches and cottage cheese with sour cream, Mikhail Gorbachev is overwhelmed with tiredness and the enormity of what he has to do in a few hours.¹ At the back of his office, behind the work table, is a door leading to a small resting room. Inside are a bed and washing facilities. Gorbachev goes in, shuts the door, and lies down to rest.

Anatoly Chernyaev and Andrey Grachev find the president’s office empty when they enter shortly afterwards with a sheaf of farewell letters for him to sign. They have been dictated by Gorbachev and are addressed to foreign presidents, prime ministers, and royalty. The recipients comprise an A list of current and former world leaders whom he has met and befriended during his years in office: George H. W. Bush, Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand, John Major, Giulio Andreotti, Bria n Mulroney, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the heads of the governments of Korea, Finland, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Iran, and Norway. Gorbachev has worked hard to get the tone and content of the letters right. The warm relationship with his counterparts abroad is most important to the Soviet president. It is a measure of his international standing, a recognition of what he has achieved in reforming the Soviet Union, and an assurance of global approval for lessening world tensions, reversing the nuclear arms race, allowing the Berlin Wall to fall, and letting Eastern European countries have their freedom.

Chernyaev knocks on the door of the resting room. It takes Gorbachev five minutes to compose himself and come out. He looks fresh and fit, but his eyes are teary. Grachev notes a slight redness, caused either by lack of sleep or perhaps the shedding of a few tears provoked by the tension of the final days. The president settles into his high-backed leather chair and carefully reads the letters one by one before signing each with a felt pen. Chernyaev leaves to have them dispatched.

Grachev takes the opportunity to show Gorbachev the front page of Moskovsky Komsomolets. It has a headline from an 1836 verse by the poet Alexander Pushkin, “Exegi Monumentum”: “I shall not wholly die.” Gorbachev’s eyes light up. He finishes the quotation triumphantly: “In my sacred lyre, my soul shall outlive my dust and escape corruption.”² In common with most Russians, Gorbachev can recite Pushkin and other national poets at length. A few days ago he had recalled for some American visitors a narrative by the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in which one of his characters didn’t like the United States and wanted to close it down. Gorbachev was making the point that the Soviet republics had no right to say the USSR was dead.³ When he is in a mellow mood after a good dinner, he is known to entertain guests by declaiming the lines of Mayakovsky in a quiet voice—though it is some time since he quoted the famous phrase “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, and Lenin will live” from the poet’s elegy “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.”