Moscow, December 25, 1991

All over the USSR in the weeks that followed, other republics took their cue from Russia and proclaimed their sovereignty in a wave of nationalism. In many republics the campaign for greater independence was supported not just by nationalists but by hard-line members of the communist nomenklatura, who fretted about Gorbachev’s reform policies and aimed to grab power for themselves.

Gorbachev’s perestroika had by now created a situation in which the USSR could be preserved only by a new union treaty or by military force.

The immensity of what was happening gave Yeltsin “a bad case of the shakes.” The system could no longer crush him openly, he believed, but “it was quite capable of quietly eating us, bit by bit.” It could sabotage his actions, and him. Gorbachev still controlled the KGB, the interior ministry, the foreign ministry, the Central Bank, state television, and other instruments of control. He was commander of the armed forces, the ultimate arbiter in a physical struggle for power.

But Gorbachev was losing the people. By mid-summer 1990, most Russians had stopped paying heed to his speeches. Life was not improving. After five years waiting for a “crucial turning point” that was never reached, people were dismissing his lectures as mnogo slov (“so many words,” “a lot of hot air”). Behind his back party secretaries were calling him Narciss, the Narcissist. (Gorbachev’s secretaries termed Yeltsin “Brevno,” or The Log, the Russian equivalent of “thick as a plank.”)¹³ The shops and liquor stores were still empty.

When Gorbachev made a typically long-winded address to the Twenty-eighth Congress of the Communist Party in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on July 2, 1990, almost nobody was listening. “There are voices which say that in all our failures perestroika is to blame—this is simply rubbish,” he said, his eyes glinting behind steel-rimmed spectacles as he surveyed the rows of fidgeting party officials and hard-jawed military generals among the delegates. “The abandoned state of our farms… the massive ecological problems… the national and ethnic problems… have not arisen yesterday but have their roots in the past…. We must continue with perestroika.” He got five seconds of desultory applause.

It was Gorbachev’s turn to sit stone-faced as Yegor Ligachev, Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov—whom Gorbachev had appointed in the belief that he was a reformer—won thunderous applause as one after another they denounced “antisocialist elements” in the party. Their real target was Gorbachev himself, who privately admitted to Shakhnazarov not long before that he was “close to social democracy.”¹⁴ For communists, there was nothing worse than a social democrat.

The most “antisocialist element,” Boris Yeltsin, instinctively knew that power was draining away from the ruling party. He staged yet another dramatic démarche. He went to the podium to declare that as chairman of the Russian parliament he preferred “to bow to the will of all the people” rather than follow the instructions of the party. He was therefore suspending his membership. He made a show of turning in his red cardboard party card, Number 03823301, issued by the Sverdlovsk party committee on March 17, 1961. To shouts of “Shame!” Yeltsin strode from the hall. He was convinced he had inflicted a severe blow against Gorbachev, who watched his “ostentatious exit” from the platform.

The Russian leader was followed out by several radicals, including Anatoly Sobchak, soon to be mayor of Leningrad, whose staff included the future president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Still at that time an officer of the KGB, Putin would not turn in his party card for another year and a half.

Gorbachev had few illusions about the caliber of the party hacks left behind after the walkout or of their hatred of him. Following a meeting with regional party secretaries, he privately cursed the “self-interested scum that don’t want anything except a feeding trough and power.” But he resisted the urging of Alexander Yakovlev and Anatoly Chernyaev to resign as general secretary and follow Yeltsin out of the party, fearing this could split society and risk civil war. As Chernyaev later put it, “Only Yeltsin, with his animal instinct, heard the distant thunder of history.”