Moscow, December 25, 1991

Not since World War II has Moscow experienced such deprivation. The government has imposed rationing of “meat products, butter, vegetable oils, grains, pasta products, sugar, salt, matches, tobacco products and household, bath and other soaps… where available.”⁵ Three days ago the deputy mayor, Yury Luzhkov, admitted that three hundred and fifty stores in the city have run out of meat.

Everyone in Moscow—engineers, actors, professors, shoemakers, store clerks, construction workers, poets—snap up and hoard anything they can find to buy. If a consignment of cheese, or salami, or even just a batch of loaves, appears unexpectedly, people form a queue and take as much as they can carry. Starvation would be a reality for many families were it not for the buckets of potatoes and piles of cabbages kept in their apartments that were harvested in suburban plots before the snows of winter came.

As Moscow stirs to life, small covered trucks with canvas flaps splutter and cough their way along the city’s potholed roads from the newspaper printing houses. They stop at street kiosks to dump parcels of newspapers on the ground. The bundles are much lighter than usual. Most dailies are reduced to four pages, as newsprint and printing ink are in short supply.

The concerns of the populace are reflected in stories about shortages and imminent price rises. A headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda says simply, “Meat has arrived in Odessa.” At least it is more positive than “No Bread in Krasnoyarsk” on Pravda’s front page.

There is little in the skimpy newspapers to indicate that this will be a momentous day in the political history of the country, or indeed of the world. There is a clue, however, in Pravda. In a single paragraph on page one, the Communist Party newspaper notes, without comment, that President Mikhail Gorbachev will make a major announcement, live on state television, before the day is out.

Chapter 2 DECEMBER 25: SUNRISE

The heavy snow on the spruce and fir trees that screen the large dacha west of Moscow has melted a little during the mild winter night. Water drips from the pine needles and trickles out of the snow piled high along the driveway, giving the tarmacadam a dark sheen.

In an upstairs room, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the armed forces, puts on a starched, white, single-cuff shirt and a single-breasted navy wool suit with muted stripes, handmade by his tailors on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He selects from his collection of silk ties a particular neckpiece, black with a red floral paisley design, which he often wears on important occasions.

Small in stature, with magnetic hazel eyes and silver hair that has long since receded to expose the purple birthmark on his head, Gorbachev this morning is exhausted and slightly hungover. He came home late the night before and is now succumbing to the early stages of influenza. His duties as president are almost finished, but last night he lingered for a long time in his Kremlin office to reminisce with Moscow’s police chief, Arkady Murashev, who called out of the blue to wish him well. Very few people have been taking the trouble to do that in the dying days of his reign, and on an impulse he had invited Murashev, a former political opponent, to join him for a glass or two of cognac. With the nuclear suitcase sitting an arm’s length away on the table, the last Soviet president took great pains to impress upon his visitor that he had not made any mistakes in his quest to reform the Soviet Union. It was not his fault that it was falling apart.¹

There is nothing unusual in Gorbachev’s staying late at the Kremlin. Work has always kept him in the office until ten or eleven o’clock. On arriving home he and his wife, Raisa, have made it a practice to go for a walk together in the dark before retiring to bed. He tells her of the events of the day as they stroll along the paths around the dacha. He holds nothing back. He once caused a scandal among Russians by saying publicly that he even discussed matters of state with his wife. Gorbachev numbers the world’s leading politicians as his friends, but his only really close ally in life is his companion and soul mate of thirty-eight years. They have always “rejoiced at the successes and suffered the failures of the other,” as he put it once, “just as if they were our own.”²