Moscow, December 25, 1991

“That son of a bitch! What’s to be done about him?” cried Gorbachev to his advisers when he got a report of Yeltsin’s remarks. They listened in silence, aghast at the turn of events. Chernyaev later composed an anguished, 2,000-word letter of resignation, saying he was tortured by burning shame over events in Lithuania. “You’ve told me and others many times that the Russian people would never permit the destruction of the empire. But now Yeltsin is impudently doing just that—in the name of Russia! And very few Russians are protesting,” he wrote. “As a result, you chained yourself to policies that you can only continue by force.”⁸ He did not deliver the letter, however, and stayed on with Gorbachev, as he saw no proof of his boss’s complicity in planning the bloodshed. He confided to diplomats that General Valentin Varennikov, commander of land forces in the USSR and an admirer of Stalin, had ordered in the troops on his own initiative. Chernyaev also concluded that Gorbachev genuinely believed misleading reports from Kryuchkov and Pugo that people in the Baltics were being intimidated by a minority of separatists. In private, however, the loyal aide berated Gorbachev for allowing the military to send in the tanks, saying, “This is the demise of your great undertaking!” Gorbachev protested that “I couldn’t simply dissociate myself from the army and express my disapproval after all the insults there to soldiers, officers, their families [calling them] occupiers and pigs.”

Outside the Kremlin, the Russian capital was in uproar. Muscovites took to the streets to show that they had had enough of totalitarian methods. Some carried placards insulting the president as Gorbaty, the Hunchback. The nonstate media gave graphic accounts of the killings.

Yegor Yakovlev, the editor who had toed the Gorbachev line in Moscow News and taken his side in the power struggle with Yeltsin, was deeply disillusioned. The journal’s thirty directors, a who’s who of the liberal Russian intelligentsia, expressed their bitter loss of faith in the president and announced they were quitting the party. All signed their names to a devastating editorial accusing “a regime in its death throes” of committing a criminal act. “After Bloody Sunday in Vilnius, what is left of our president’s favorite topics of ‘humane socialism,’ ‘new thinking’ and ‘our European home’—virtually nothing!”

This charge from intellectuals whom he had encouraged and protected would rankle with Gorbachev for years. Infuriated, he demanded the Supreme Soviet suspend a recently adopted law on press freedom—which he had promoted—and assign a censor to each media organization. Even conservative deputies found this too much in the face of public outrage.

On Sunday, January 20, Yeltsin addressed a Moscow protest rally of 100,000 people. He warned that the danger of dictatorship had become a reality. International leaders harbored similar fears. Several days later, after Soviet black berets in Latvia’s capital of Riga shot dead two militiamen, a television cameraman, and two civilians, President Bush put off a summit meeting with Gorbachev scheduled for mid-February. The United States, Canada, and the European Parliament delayed implementing aid programs.

Under such internal and international pressure, and with his own innate revulsion for bloodshed, Gorbachev pulled back. He adopted a more conciliatory tone to the Baltics. He went on television on January 22 to say that he was deeply moved by the bloodshed, declared the use of armed force inadmissible, and denied that the military activity was a prelude to direct rule. Belatedly Gorbachev would claim that the hard-liners’ plan was “to establish a blood bond with me, to subordinate me to a kind of gangster’s mutual protection society.”⁹

But the damage had been done. Making things worse, no one was ever punished for the slaughter in Vilnius. In July 1991 Gorbachev’s chief law officer, Soviet prosecutor Nikolay Trubin, exonerated Soviet forces, finding, grotesquely, that all the casualties were shot by Lithuanian nationalists.

In the Kremlin Gorbachev continued to rage about the “illogical” behavior of Yeltsin, who was “infatuated with sovereignty.” He telephoned his minion in state television, Leonid Kravchenko, and instructed him to close down Radio Rossiya, the voice of Yeltsin’s parliament, which had been granted a frequency in December. It had carried factual reports from Lithuania that infuriated Mikhail Gorbachev personally, according to Yeltsin’s radio controller, Oleg Poptsov. Kravchenko protested that shutting it down would cause a scandal. Gorbachev insisted that it be restricted then to a much weaker frequency, in “the back of beyond.”