Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev protested he had not read it. “Read it now,” commanded Yeltsin, towering over the red-faced Soviet president. Gorbachev did so obediently. It revealed that almost the entire cabinet had betrayed him, whether through conviction or cowardice. One after another they had backed the emergency committee. Yeltsin produced Decree Number 79 suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party, which he ostentatiously signed in front of the assembly. As Gorbachev stuttered, “Boris Nikolayevich, Boris Nikolayevich… I don’t know what you’re signing there… ” Yeltsin snapped, “I have signed it.”

The scene of Yeltsin’s bullying, relayed throughout the world, revealed that Gorbachev was no longer master in the “other country” to which he had returned. “I think he may have had it,” remarked George Bush after he saw Yeltsin “rubbing Gorbachev’s nose in the dirt” on television.

As Yeltsin gloated with what Gorbachev regarded as “sadistic pleasure,” the Soviet president suffered interrogation for over an hour from excited deputies. One rushed to the microphone to declare hysterically that all communists must be swept from the country with a broom. Gorbachev snapped back: “Even Stalin’s sick brain did not breed such ideas!” He saw in their eyes no pity and much hatred.

At 1:30 p.m. Khasbulatov whispered to Yeltsin, “Time we ended this.”

“Why?” asked the Russian president, no doubt recalling his own humiliations orchestrated by Gorbachev at party meetings.

“I can’t help feeling sorry for him,” replied Khasbulatov.

Yeltsin smiled and rose to bring the session to a close. He invited Gorbachev to lunch with him and Khasbulatov in his office. Though he was seething, Gorbachev still had to show his rival his appreciation for the defeat of the coup and his safe return to Moscow. With some emotion he related to them how he had heard Khasbulatov on BBC calling the plotters “criminals” and had told Raisa that if Russia rose up, they would surely regain their freedom.

“What was Raisa Maximovna’s reply?” asked Khasbulatov quickly. “She said she never would have thought that we would be saved by Yeltsin and his associates,” said Gorbachev.

When he left, Gorbachev’s limousine was delayed for half an hour by hundreds of Yeltsin supporters blocking the way, booing and jeering. The crowds later besieged Communist Party headquarters on Old Square, from which party apparatchiks were frantically taking papers, televisions, fax machines, copiers, and telephone handsets. The throng moved to the Lubyanka, where the fourteen-ton statue of the founder of the Bolshevik secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was toppled from its pedestal with the help of a crane supplied by Mayor Popov.

Yeltsin gave a radio interview in which he criticized Gorbachev for surrounding himself with a dirty circle of hard-liners in the run-up to the coup. “You cannot absolve him of any guilt in the plot,” he said. “Who chose the officials? He did. Who confirmed them? He did. He was betrayed by his closest people.” He asserted his supremacy over Gorbachev by dictating whom he should appoint to replace the arrested comrades. Shaposhnikov, the jovial air force marshal with bushy eyebrows, thick jet-black hair, and grey moustache who had threatened to bomb the plotters, replaced Yazov. Former interior minister Vadim Bakatin moved into Kryuchkov’s office in KGB headquarters, where he horrified the top brass by giving the Americans a blueprint of the listening devices the KGB had planted in a new U.S. embassy building in Moscow.

Gorbachev would later defend his actions by explaining that if the coup had happened a year earlier, it might have succeeded, but he had been stringing the hard-liners along to camouflage his concessions until there was no turning back. The Soviet president found it more difficult, however, to shake off the charge that he had encouraged the plotters by his behavior in January, when he claimed to know nothing about the bloody military actions in Vilnius but never sought to punish those responsible. The emergency committee had reason to believe he would have done them the same favor, after it had carried out the dirty work and then brought him back to Moscow.

On August 24, 1991, finally facing up to the fact that “the party’s over,” Gorbachev resigned as the sixth and last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the all-powerful organization that had been founded by Lenin and led by Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Though he remained president of the Soviet Union, he conceded that the party that elevated him to his post could not be reformed. He signed over the party’s vast holdings to the USSR Supreme Soviet, which voted to ban all party activities. All across the Soviet Union communist officials frantically burned and shredded documents that might incriminate them.