Moscow, December 25, 1991

The inauguration of President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin as the first freely elected leader in Russia’s thousand-year history took place on July 10, 1991, in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, beneath a giant replica of a double-headed eagle. The pompous ceremony was designed to evoke the color and majesty of prerevolutionary Russia and boost Yeltsin’s national credentials and his political legitimacy. President Gorbachev was in attendance as the red RSFSR flag, with hammer and sickle and blue stripe, was hoisted into the azure summer sky over the building. When Yeltsin made his appearance, a fanfare of trumpets rang out, and the chimes of the Spassky Tower played the national anthem. Yeltsin had wanted a twenty-four-gun salute and a giant screen on Red Square to relay the scene to the masses, but Gorbachev, still master of the Kremlin, vetoed this as over the top. Patriarch Alexey II of Moscow and all Russia, resplendent in jeweled cloak and crown, made a sign of the cross over Yeltsin, the first occasion on which the Orthodox Church had given a Russian leader its blessing since the time of the tsars. A full chorus performed the “Glory” chorus from Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar.

“Great Russia is rising from its knees,” declared Yeltsin. “We shall surely transform it into a prosperous, law-based, democratic, peaceful and sovereign state.” In front of the television cameras Gorbachev reached out to shake Yeltsin’s hand. The new Russian president deliberately stayed back, forcing Gorbachev to walk towards him.

After the ceremony Gorbachev assigned Yeltsin a ceremonial office in the Kremlin. It was located in the neoclassical mansion, Building 14, erected by Stalin in the 1930s on the site of a convent and a small palace. It was a cobblestone’s throw across a narrow courtyard from the much superior two-hundred-year-old Senate Building, listed as Building 1, where Gorbachev had his own suite of presidential offices. Gorbachev joked that there were two bears inhabiting the same den.⁴ That was when he thought the arrangement would endure.

Ten days later Yeltsin used his authority as elected president to make a bold move. He banned all political parties—there was only one—from organizing cells in farms, factories, colleges, military units, and state bodies on the territory of Russia. Yury Prokofyev, first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party, rushed to Gorbachev’s Kremlin office in a panic to demand he issue a decree countermanding Yeltsin. Gorbachev declined, partly to avoid a fight that would scupper the talks on a union treaty. In a single stroke, the Communist Party ceased to have a role in the Russian workplaces it had dominated for most of the century. By then Moscow had elected a radical Congress deputy, Gavriil Popov, as mayor, and the days when a party official ran the city, as Yeltsin once had, were at an end.

Observing what was going on, Gorbachev’s doctrinaire aide, Valery Boldin, concluded that by letting Yeltsin get away with it, Gorbachev had like a coward abandoned and betrayed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of which he was still general secretary. In truth the great monolith created by Lenin was a fastdiminishing political force. Membership had declined by a quarter through resignations in the previous year, and the Politburo met only every few weeks, no longer a ruling body since Gorbachev had assumed the USSR presidency and chosen to rule by presidential decree from his Kremlin office.

The prospect of a new union treaty that would weaken the Soviet Union threw the revanchist forces in the USSR Supreme Soviet into a panic. They were on the brink of losing power. There was concern that Gorbachev was planning a party congress in the autumn of 1991 to create a new party of democratic socialism. On June 17, while Gorbachev was at Novo-Ogarevo and Yeltsin was absent in Washington, a small group of Gorbachev’s disloyal ministers had made their first move to turn back the tide. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov put forward a resolution in the USSR Supreme Soviet to transfer many of Gorbachev’s powers to himself, supposedly to deal with the critical economic situation. He demanded the authority to impose a ban on strikes, mobilize students and workers to save the harvest, and end moves to a market economy.

Stunned at his audacity, the parliament went into a brief private session. Behind closed doors, KGB chief Kryuchkov warned deputies that Western intelligence agents, planted inside the Kremlin and helped by Harvard economists, were plotting to destabilize the Soviet Union. Thus alarmed, the deputies continued their debate in open session for four days in an atmosphere of growing crisis. Gorbachev was nowhere to be seen, nor did he designate anyone to oppose this threat to his authority.