Moscow, December 25, 1991

A week ago, when Eduard Shevardnadze was asked to come to the Kremlin and provide input, he also took issue with Yakovlev’s version. The Georgian was in a foul temper when he arrived and was in no mood for making any concessionary gestures or for kowtowing to Yeltsin. He had just been told brusquely by a clerk in the foreign ministry building in Smolenskaya-Sennaya Street that Yeltsin had liquidated the Soviet foreign ministry and claimed its personnel and assets for Russia. Shevardnadze had to leave his seventh-floor minister’s office immediately, as Russian foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev wanted to move in.

Yeltsin’s people are cynical and ill-mannered, he complained in his thick Georgian accent. “Their main purpose is to get armchairs; they all look at each other and boast about the offices they got in Smolenskaya-Sennaya.”² He never liked Kozyrev, the nondescript but ambitious Russian foreign minister called the “Whisperer” behind his back because of his soft voice. Shevardnadze resents that neither Yeltsin nor Kozyrev had the decency to tell him to his face that his ministry was being whipped out from under his feet. He and his closest aide, Sergey Tarasenko, are also fearful for their lives and those of Gorbachev and other Kremlin officials. “We don’t know who is going to shoot whom,” Tarasenko confided to Jim Garrison, the former Esalen executive now heading the International Foreign Policy Association, an organization sponsored by former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz and Shevardnadze to mobilize aid for Soviet children, and who happened to be visiting Shevardnadze the day he was ejected from his office.

Shevardnadze had glumly forecast to Gorbachev’s aides that there would be a new putsch and an explosion of violence and repression on a mass scale as a result of Yeltsin’s actions in dismantling the Soviet Union. Alexander Yakovlev echoed his pessimism. He predicted that, “dai Bog” (please, God), Yeltsin wouldn’t last longer than the spring.³

The final version of the farewell address, Chernyaev notes, is “born of Gorbachev’s suffering through this excruciating December.” In the place of Yakovlev’s “whining” he has made sure that it includes a measure of defiance and self justification and that it blames Yeltsin by implication for ending the Soviet Union. The draft portrays Gorbachev as the principled player in the political drama taking place, though he has no control over the fast-moving events now. It proclaims that he has fulfilled the historical task of leading a totalitarian country towards democracy. It includes a passing acknowledgment by Gorbachev of his own failings, though he distances himself from self-blame by using the royal “we,” with the formula, “We certainly could have avoided certain errors.”

As the final draft of the address is being typed up, Pavel Palazchenko comes to the anteroom of Gorbachev’s office. He reminds Chernyaev that George Bush expects a final call from President Gorbachev. “Well I guess today is the day,” Chernyaev tells him.

But it is Christmas Day in the Western world, and everyone is on vacation. When Palazchenko calls the American embassy in Moscow to request a connection to Washington, no one is there to take the call. The embassy is closed. A voice on the answering machine gives only the number of the marine on duty in case of an emergency concerning an American citizen. He could turn for help to the foreign ministry in Moscow, which has the capacity to organize a call to the American president through the embassy in Washington, but these diplomatic assets are in the hands of Yeltsin’s team, whose members are not to be trusted.

The interpreter goes through his notebook and finds the Moscow home number of Jim Collins, the U.S. deputy head of mission, to whom he explains his predicament. Collins gives him the number in Washington of the State Department operations desk, which Palazchenko calls on an open line through the Moscow operator. At the State Department, the duty officer advises him that President Bush is spending Christmas Day at Camp David. He patches Palazchenko through to the marine on duty at the forest retreat. The U.S. president is still asleep—it is early morning in America—but the officer says Bush will take the call after he wakes up. They fix a time for the connection: 5 p.m. in Moscow, 9 a.m. in Washington.⁴

Fully recovered from his after-lunch bout of depression, Gorbachev invites Ted Koppel and Rick Kaplan into his office to continue filming their historical record for ABC television. He makes a point of emphasizing the peaceful nature of the transition and that nothing like this has ever happened in Russian history. “The process, after all, is a democratic one.”