Moscow, December 25, 1991

At its close, the colonels say good-bye to Gorbachev and take the little suitcase to its new custodian.

Thus, as many Westerners celebrate Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet Union ceases to exist, Russia escapes from the cul-de-sac into which Lenin led it seventy-four years earlier, and a great country takes its place among the nations of Europe.

Chapter 1 DECEMBER 25: BEFORE THE DAWN

In the first moments of December 25, 1991, the midnight chimes ring out from the clock on the Savior Tower inside the Kremlin. This is the signal for the hourly changing of the honor guard at the great red and black granite cubes that form the Mausoleum, where lies the embalmed body of the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Curious late-night strollers in Red Square, Russian and foreign, gather to watch as the great-coated sentinels goose-step off to the Savior Gate like marionettes, jerking their elbows high in the air. A new shift emerges to take over at what is officially known as the Soviet Union’s Sentry Post Number 1.

Many of the onlookers on this dry, still Wednesday morning are bare-headed. It is mild by midwinter standards in Moscow, about 1 degree above freezing. The bitterly cold spell earlier in December, when the temperature dipped to zero Fahrenheit, ended with a heavy fall of snow three days ago.¹ The vast cobbled square has since been swept clean, but the snow still gleams on the brightly lit onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral and on the swallow-tailed crenellations of the high, brick Kremlin walls.² It fringes the dome of the Senate Building inside the Kremlin, from which flies the red flag of the Soviet Union, with its gold hammer and sickle emblem, clearly visible from Red Square. It has flown there since 1918, when the Russian capital was transferred from Petrograd back to Moscow.

A small group of people have assembled at the northwestern end of Red Square, close by St. Nicholas’s Tower. Many of them hold flickering candles and press close to a group of American clerics who are conducting a midnight service. The minister, a middle-aged man in white robes, reads aloud from a large Bible. The preachers have traveled specially to Russia for this Christmas Day so that they can celebrate Christ’s birthday in Red Square, in what is still officially the godless Soviet Union, something they could not dream of doing in past years.

Near the Arsenal Tower of the Kremlin stands a tall yolka, a New Year’s fir tree. Some foreigners mistake it for a Christmas tree. However, in Russia Orthodox Christmas falls on January 7, in accordance with the old Julian calendar.

Even so, on Little Lubyanka Street, a fifteen-minute walk away, past the yellow neorenaissance façade of the feared KGB’s headquarters, the strains of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in Russian ring out in the night air. More than a thousand worshippers are celebrating midnight Mass in the hundred-year-old Roman Catholic Church of St. Louis, crushed into eighteen rows of wooden pews set among squat stone pillars that obstruct the views of the altar. By the door a notice states: “If you are suffering, if you are tired of life, know that Christ loves you.” A priest conducting the service enthuses about the historical nature of the day and “the return of our government to a normal, Christian world.”

The congregation used to consist mainly of foreigners, says Sofia Peonkova, a regular attendee, but she has noticed that in the last two years many Russians have started coming.³ Yulia Massarskaya, age eighty-two, tells a visitor that this is her first time in a Catholic church in Moscow since the 1917 October Revolution, when she was eight years old. “I have never felt this good,” she whispers. “It is like coming back home.”⁴

The service ends, the worshippers disperse, and the darkened streets of Moscow fall quiet for a few hours. But long before dawn many thousands of people begin emerging from the city’s grim apartment blocks. Dressed in padded coats, scarves, and fur hats, they make their way through the icy slush to catch the early trams and metro trains. It is the beginning of a daily search for food that has preoccupied Moscow’s citizens for months. Their overriding goal is to find where deliveries have been made overnight. They form irritated lines in the darkness at grimy stores, where the reward for waiting might be a loaf of bread, a scrawny chicken leg, or a few wilted vegetables.

Shoppers in Moscow in December 1991 do not look for goods; they look for queues. They obey the advice of the Russian television program Vesti: “If you come across a line, join it, and count yourself lucky.”