Moscow, December 25, 1991

By ten minutes to seven the room has been transformed into a brightly lit television studio. There are three central television cameras, a CNN camera, and audio equipment to provide simultaneous translation. Of ABC there is no sign. The crew from Atlanta is unaware that Koppel and Kaplan are hanging out with Gorbachev in the president’s real office down the corridor, compiling material for their documentary on the final days.

Pavel Palazchenko finds the scene a little unreal. While the president is preparing to resign and hand over control of nuclear weapons to Boris Yeltsin, there are more Americans inside the Kremlin than Russians—television executives in tailored suits, interviewers with pancake makeup, producers, directors, editors, writers, photographers, camera crews, microphone holders, assistants with clipboards, engineers, and technicians, all milling around and giving instructions and checking wires and microphones. Gorbachev’s interpreter wonders as he listens to the medley of American accents, “Who could have thought that this—all of this—were possible just a year ago?”⁹

A few hundred yards away, in Red Square, scores of Muscovites have gathered, though they have little interest in witnessing history being made. They are shoppers crushing into the big GUM department store that takes up the side of the vast square opposite the Kremlin, to buy what they can before it closes. Word has got around that some scarce items have appeared on the shelves. They form jostling lines to snap up whatever items of use they can find.

They ignore much of the tawdry goods on display, especially a pile of plastic passport covers. They are stamped “USSR.” Only tourists will buy these in the future.

Chapter 19 THINGS FALL APART

After the fearful days of August 1991, when it seemed, however briefly, that totalitarianism would return to the Soviet Union, the leaders of the constituent republics one by one announced their intention to form independent states. On Saturday, August 24, even Ukraine declared it would seek independence.

Yeltsin was taken aback. Sovereignty within a new union was one thing. But even he found it difficult to contemplate the outright defection from the Soviet Union of the fifty-two million people in Ukraine whose fate had been linked with Russia’s for centuries.

Nevertheless, the Russian president formally recognized the independence of the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which had always been somewhat semidetached members of the Soviet Union. Foreign countries followed suit, no longer wary of offending Gorbachev. But both Yeltsin and Gorbachev faced a dilemma. If the rest of the USSR was disintegrating, what should take its place?

The first initiative to resolve the crisis came in late August. Yeltsin’s secretary of state, Gennady Burbulis, called the Kremlin and suggested to Gorbachev’s adviser Georgy Shakhnazarov that they should meet in the White House and work on new ideas for the future of the Soviet landmass.¹

A political scientist with bald head and thick black eyebrows, Shakhnazarov doubled as a poet and writer of science fiction under the name Georgy Shakh. But many of his original compositions these days were political memos that he delivered to Gorbachev, always urging him towards ever more daring democratic reforms.

Burbulis was an abrasive former professor of Marxist philosophy from Sverdlovsk. He had the zeal of the converted, having evolved in a short time from communist ideologue to ruthless anticommunist. His evolution was so dramatic that on a television quiz show, contestants who listened to a recording of one of his delirious homages to Leninism thought it was the old Stalin-era apologist Mikhail Suslov. With gaunt face and high-pitched voice, Burbulis was known as Yeltsin’s “grey cardinal,” though he had distinctly worldly tastes. He was the first of the Russian government officials to order himself a Zil after the coup, and Yeltsin observed how thrilled he was when the escort car raced ahead of his new limousine, its light blinking and sirens screeching.

The main difference between Shakhnazarov and Burbulis was that the former wanted to maintain the Soviet Union and the latter wanted to destroy it.

Gorbachev’s adviser consented to go to the White House, “though you would think that as I held higher rank as aide to the president of the Soviet Union he would come to my office.” Giving in on this small detail, he realized, symbolized the shift in power.

When he arrived, accompanied by Gorbachev’s legal adviser, Yury Baturin, they were made to wait half an hour in an anteroom. More small humiliations followed during the daylong negotiations in Burbulis’s cavernous office. Several times Yeltsin’s secretary of state went off to chat with his aides, and twice he went to a separate table to conduct business with other visitors. Shakhnazarov concluded that he wanted them to know they were not top priority.