Moscow, December 25, 1991

“You must understand me,” Gorbachev explained to Chernyaev. “I can’t let this lousy, rabid dog off the leash. If I do that, all this huge structure will be turned against me.”¹⁵ He had to keep the colossus of conservatism under control, or it would overthrow perestroika. The alternatives were to cooperate with the power-hungry Yeltsin in administering a dose of shock therapy to the economy, which would involve giving the republics more freedom and risk a coup by empire loyalists, or to throw in his lot with the conservatives and try to coerce the Soviet republics into the kind of submission that Stalin had achieved. Whatever option he chose, it was clear that the USSR was in deep crisis.

The Soviet president was also painfully aware of the problem in having so many nationalities to govern. He once cited to Margaret Thatcher the well-known quip by Charles de Gaulle about the difficulty of governing a country with more than one hundred and twenty different kinds of cheese. How much harder it was to run a country with one hundred and twenty different nationalities, Gorbachev said. “Yes, especially if there is no cheese,” ad-libbed one of his aides.¹⁶

Gorbachev wanted to proceed slowly, bringing the hard-liners with him. He summoned newspaper editors for a private meeting at which he blasted the radicals in the Congress, singling out Yeltsin by name and referring with contempt to their program of “a multiparty system, the right to leave the USSR, a market economy, free press, everyone doing whatever they please.” Such concepts, less than two years before they all came to pass, were still unthinkable, even outrageous, to rank-and-file members of the party. “We are knee deep in kerosene,” Gorbachev warned the editors. “And some people are tossing matches.”¹⁷

Chapter 12 DECEMBER 25: EARLY AFTERNOON

Alone with Andrey Grachev in his Kremlin office, and with just over four hours before he is to deliver his resignation speech, Mikhail Gorbachev takes a pen and begins rehearsing it aloud.¹ He asks his aide for his opinion as he goes through it, marking points where he has last-minute queries about the precise wording. Since his appointment as presidential spokesman in September, Grachev has become one of the small inner circle around Gorbachev. The president has grown to appreciate his sure touch and smooth, sophisticated approach to public relations.

Gorbachev cannot bring himself to say he is resigning. He decides to insert instead, “I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

Having gone through several rewrites, the speech is a balance between a justification of the policies Gorbachev pursued and a statement of his dismay at how history has played out. It betrays just a little of the bitterness he feels about the way Yeltsin and the republic presidents trumped him in the political games of the last few weeks. But he has indicated to Yeltsin he will not use the occasion to make an outright attack on him or what he has done. It would not in any case be dignified to do so.

Nevertheless, Gorbachev makes one substantial amendment to prick his opponent. In the text he notes that it is vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements of the last few years, “and they are not to be abandoned, whatever the circumstances, and whatever the pretexts.” It can be taken as a warning that Yeltsin and his successors might seek undemocratic ways to consolidate their power. The final version also contains a small segment from an earlier draft that Gorbachev dropped and then decided to put back in. It states that the decisions made by Yeltsin and his fellow conspirators “should have been made on the basis of popular will.” That too is likely to irritate Yeltsin.

The bulk of the 1,200-word address is the final contribution to the Gorbachev presidency of Anatoly Chernyaev, who has drafted practically every important speech delivered by the Soviet leader. He has been working on the valediction since Gorbachev asked him to start drafting a text two weeks back. That was when the president acknowledged for the first time that the end might be near. Other aides provided drafts, but they were for the most part rejected. Four days ago Chernyaev thought he had completed his task, but Gorbachev twice went back to the basic text, and twice got his adviser to completely rework it. Even now the president is still tinkering. Alexander Yakovlev produced his own draft, which was conciliatory to Yeltsin and contained frank admissions of mistakes. Gorbachev was tempted to adopt much of Yakovlev’s apologia, but Chernyaev categorically rejected it as “a capitulation and a whining,” and the president in the end agreed.