Moscow, December 25, 1991

Belyaev and Gorbachev have known each other since they were at Moscow State University together. The documentary maker is deeply appreciative of what his fellow alumnus has achieved in liberalizing the communist state. He is close to Gorbachev and feels “like his ally, that I was helping him.” It occurs to him that they are both part of a lost generation, born too late to become war veterans and too early to become cosmonauts, for whom Gorbachev is “the figurehead, the main representative of our views, of what we essentially are.” He tells Gorbachev that he remembers him as little short of a dissident at university, though the president thinks this is overstating it. “Obviously I was not a dissident at all,” Gorbachev protests, “although I already felt a burgeoning criticism of our reality.”

Gorbachev tells his old friend, “At this important point in history, the most important thing is to overcome it without blood, without reds fighting whites. Society is pregnant with an explosion. If, God forbid, there is political madness and score settling when people are suffering so much, there will be huge consequences.” ¹⁰

Yegor Yakovlev fears that the Belyaev narrative has little chance of being shown on Russian television because the pro-Yeltsin executives at Gosteleradio are highly sensitive to the perils of paying special attention to Gorbachev. “Television is being taken away from me,” Yakovlev complains helplessly to Gorbachev’s aides. “I am no longer master there. Yeltsin’s people are ruling the roost.”¹¹

It was Yegor Yakovlev who recommended that ABC be brought into the heart of the Kremlin in the final days. He advised the president to “pick one foreign network from all those demanding access to a moment of world history.” They settled on ABC Nightline as one of the most respected and influential U.S. television news programs. ABC also has a record of connecting Soviet leaders to American audiences, and Ted Koppel, who speaks Russian, has gotten to know Gorbachev and his aides quite well.

For his part Gorbachev knows how popular he is in the United States and how useful it will be to have the world watching, via the lens of an American television camera, how the transition is being conducted. Who knows how the unpredictable Boris Yeltsin would behave otherwise.

Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, from their different perspectives, see the United States as their ally in the dying days of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev has been cheered on by U.S. President George H. W. Bush, who would prefer the devil he knows—an intact and supplicant Soviet Union—to a chaotic group of new countries, some with nuclear weapons on their territory. Yeltsin is anxious to present the responsible face of the new Russia to the United States, as he needs its assistance to make the historic switch from communism to capitalism. Both are vying to influence American and global opinion for their own purposes and standing.

No one is more surprised than Koppel himself that he has been allowed into the heart of the Kremlin, free to roam around and film in a sanctum of power to which correspondents rarely if ever get access. The chairman of ABC News, Roone Arledge, had sent him to Moscow in mid-December to try to grab an interview with Gorbachev before he resigned, if that was to be his fate. Instead Koppel had been offered exclusive foreign rights to record the last days in office of the Soviet president.

Chernyaev encounters the ABC crew in Gorbachev’s outer office. He thinks how “shameful for us that only foreign television journalists were running around us representing the significance of Gorbachev for the whole world, a significance which the Western public fairly gives him…. If it wasn’t for Yegor Yakovlev bringing in ABC during those last days, who literally lived in the corridors filming everything they came across, there would have been an information blackout up to the very end of his presence in the Kremlin.”¹²

Grachev believes that the president is also very conscious that these last days living in the Kremlin are part of world history and that was why he accepted the argument that it should be recorded for history. The fifty-year-old silver-haired veteran of the Communist Party’s international department has been by Gorbachev’s side since 1985, first as a foreign policy adviser and since the coup in August as his press secretary. He sees a comparison between Koppel and the American communist writer John Reed, who chronicled the 1917 October Revolution in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. According to Grachev, “The intention was that Koppel should be the John Reed of the day. Some seventy-four years earlier Reed witnessed the birth of Soviet Russia from the inside. Koppel came to witness the final hours of that Revolution.”¹³