Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev learned the result while reclining in one of the leather seats of the blue and white Soviet presidential airliner midway across the Atlantic, en route to Ottawa and a summit meeting in Washington with President Bush. His aides drafted a conciliatory telegram of congratulations, acknowledging, “You have shown yourself to be a real fighter.” Gorbachev rejected it, saying Yeltsin didn’t need that kind of backhanded compliment.¹¹ Though he conceded that they were now going to have to negotiate with Yeltsin, he didn’t congratulate the winner for a week.

In the United States, President Bush received Gorbachev at the White House, and they traveled together by helicopter the fifty miles to Camp David. They were hemmed in by two plainclothes officers: an American air force major with a metallic Zero Halliburton briefcase in a black leather casing strapped to his wrist and a Russian colonel with a little black suitcase also attached to his forearm—the respective doomsday devices for the two presidents to launch nuclear war against each other.

At Camp David Gorbachev drove Bush around in a golf cart. His driving was on a par with Yeltsin’s: He almost overturned it to avoid a tree, as the colonels careened along behind them. Over a lunch of hot sorrel soup, Bush asked Gorbachev about Yeltsin’s new role in Soviet politics. Yeltsin is not a “serious person,” retorted the Soviet president. “He’s become a destroyer.” ¹²

The destroyer was meanwhile enjoying his spoils. After his election as chairman of the Russian parliament, Yeltsin and his loyal sidekick, Lev Sukhanov, took the lift to the fifth floor of the Russian White House to occupy the office of the previous titleholder. They were amazed to find it was as big as a dance hall. “I have seen many an office in my life,” Yeltsin related, “but I got a pleasant tingle from the soft modern sheen, all the shininess and comfort.” Sukhanov said in wonderment, “Look Boris Nikolayevich, what an office we’ve seized!” Yeltsin had a subversive thought that frightened him. “We haven’t just seized an office. We’ve seized an entire Russia!” His campaign against perks notwithstanding, he soon took over for his own use a well-staffed mansion previously used as a vacation retreat of the Russian Council of Ministers in Arkhangelskoye.

On settling into work, Yeltsin dismissed the KGB guards assigned to the office and installed his ex-KGB pal Alexander Korzhakov at the head of a new security unit. For the first few days the corridors outside his vast office were strangely quiet. The staff of the old administration went into hiding, expecting that Yeltsin would fire them too and put in his own people. Yeltsin called the employees together and told them he would keep them on if they wished. Most stayed.

There was a whiff of cordite in the air as the confrontation with Gorbachev sharpened. Yeltsin and his staff began acquiring weapons for personal protection, helped by sympathizers in the Soviet defense and interior ministries. Within a year, he later reckoned, his security directorate had collected sixty assault rifles, a hundred pistols, two bulletproof jackets, and five Austrian walkie-talkies.

Though leader of a country almost twice the size of the United States, Yeltsin had little power. He could not raise taxes. He had no army. He was unable to speak to the people on state television, which was still controlled by the Kremlin. Glasnost had not advanced to the point at which political opponents of the USSR leadership could command time on the airwaves. The Russian Supreme Soviet remained what it had always been—a decoration, part of a Soviet-era fiction that republics governed themselves, whereas in reality they had no control over people or resources.

Yeltsin and his deputies were determined to change that. They hoped to take some power away from the center and establish enough sovereignty to get Russia out of its economic crisis. He proposed that Russia’s laws should be made superior to Soviet laws and take precedence in the territory of Russia, a popular move even with the conservative Russian deputies. “There were numerous options,” Yeltsin recounted, “but we had only one—to win!”

On June 12, 1990, the parliament adopted a Declaration of Sovereignty of the RSFSR by a vote of 907 votes to 13 against and 9 abstentions. The vote was greeted by a standing ovation. The date would be celebrated in the future as Russia Day. Yeltsin would reflect in time that “as soon as the word sovereignty resounded in the air, the clock of history once again began ticking and all attempts to stop it were doomed. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.”