Moscow, December 25, 1991

The large CNN team then wait for the day of Gorbachev’s resignation. “We were nervous that Gorbachev would resign ahead of schedule or that other networks would outflank us,” said Loory. On the afternoon of December 24 there is a false alarm. Everyone swings into action. “So now we are rolling to the Kremlin with five or six trucks with cameras and equipment,” recalled Caudill. “The lights were out at the Kremlin. Tom hands his business card to the guard at the gate. The guard has no idea what is going on.” In fact nothing is happening, and the convoy of CNN vehicles and thirty-four staff turns round and goes back the way it came. With everyone far from home, Johnson decides to host a Christmas Eve party in the hotel. He asks Frida Ghitis to find him a Santa Claus hat. A Russian helper is unable to find the right material in the stores. Even the seamstresses at the Bolshoi Theater and the Moscow Circus cannot help. Ghitis spots a picture in a newspaper of a Norwegian Santa Claus delivering presents to children in a Moscow orphanage. “In the end we bought the hat from the Norwegian Mister Claus,” she said. “The party of course was a bust, in spite of Johnson’s lovely hat and matching white beard. Just as it got under way we learned that everything would happen next day, and everyone was much too busy preparing for the two interviews.”

Now that the interview with Yeltsin is about to take place, Charlie Caudill is checking with Russian officials that all the arrangements in the White House are in place and that the simultaneous translation will work smoothly. He asks Yeltsin’s aide which ear he would prefer for the earpiece. The aide replies, “He’s deaf in one ear.” “Which ear?” “I don’t know.” “Ask him!” “No, I will not ask the president of Russia which ear!” Caudill turns to the CNN technician, who can speak Russian, “When Yeltsin sits down, whisper in his ear, ‘Nice to meet you.’ If he smiles, it is the correct ear.”

The moment arrives. Escorted by Johnson, Yeltsin makes a majestic appearance, slowly descending a wide carpeted staircase, immaculate in suit and shiny black shoes, his mane of silver hair perfectly in place, showing no sign that he “sweats buckets” before going on television.⁵ He parades along a red runner on the polished parquet floor to where three upholstered drawing room chairs with gold brocade are arranged for Steve Hurst and Claire Shipman to conduct the interview. The technician murmurs a greeting as Yeltsin sits and the earpiece is fitted on his left side. He smiles. They have guessed the correct ear. The Russian president lost the hearing on his right side as a result of untreated otitis, an inflammation of the inner ear, when he was a youth.

Johnson, who once worked for President Lyndon B. Johnson, is struck by how much Yeltsin resembles his former boss in that he is “very strong, powerful, forceful, a real giant of a man.” Shipman finds the Russian president in ebullient form. “He was on his game, really in his prime, very aware of his power and incredibly confident, but not crowing in an obvious way. He had a gleam in his eye, and a mischievous look. I felt he was impatient to get there.” Hurst remembers Yeltsin as being “very excited, very much on edge, not at all sure of what would happen next.”

Yeltsin uses the interview to reassure viewers abroad that the breakup of the Soviet Union does not mean nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands. He urges the world not to worry about it. There will not be a single second after Gorbachev makes his resignation announcement that the nuclear codes will go astray, he says. “We will do all we can to prevent the nuclear button from being used—ever.”

He professes empathy with his defeated rival. “Today is a difficult day for Mikhail Sergeyevich,” he says graciously, when asked what mistakes Gorbachev made. “Because I have a lot of respect for him personally and we are trying to be civilized people and we are trying to make it into a civilized state today, I don’t want to focus on those mistakes.”

Instead he scolds the international community for not extending more aid to Russia in its hour of need. “There has been a lot of talk, but there has been no specific assistance,” he says. Perhaps this is because willing nations do not know to what postal address they should send humanitarian assistance. “Now everything is clear, and the addressees are known.” Living standards will decline for at least another year, he warns, and the world must help Russia to shed its “nightmarish totalitarian inheritance.”

Yeltsin chides U.S. secretary of state James Baker for waiting until he left Russia after a fact-finding visit the previous week to express pessimism about the survival chances of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which will replace the Soviet Union, though everyone, including the Russian president, knows the CIS is little more than a fig leaf for the divorce.