After they said good-bye, Yakovlev watched Yeltsin striding along the narrow Kremlin corridor, as if marching on the parade ground. “This was the strut of a victor,” he thought, though the Russian president may have been concentrating on keeping himself erect. Yeltsin’s aides took the archive files and followed him. “In the state he was in it would not have been prudent to hand over to him any sensitive documents,” commented Grachev.
Yeltsin made his way out of the Senate Building into the exceptionally mild night air—it was just below freezing—and crossed the narrow courtyard to Building 14. His closest collaborators were there: Kozyrev, Burbulis, Korzhakov, his loyal assistant Lev Sukhanov, and spokesman Pavel Voshchanov.
“It’s over. That’s the last time I will have to go and see him,” Yeltsin announced.
“You mean that from now on, Gorbachev will have to come and see you,” one of his acolytes asked.
“What for?… Well, maybe to pick up his pension,” snorted Yeltsin. With a clinking of glasses, they celebrated his final ascendancy over Gorbachev.14
“On this whole territory there is now nobody above you,” said Sukhanov, pointing triumphantly to the wall map of Russia.
“And for this, life has been worth living,” Yeltsin replied.
Meanwhile Yakovlev went to check on Gorbachev. He found him in the resting room. He was crying. “He was lying on the sofa with tears in his eyes.” Gorbachev looked up at his old friend. “You see, Sasha, that’s it,” he said.
Yakovlev recognized that this was the most difficult moment of Gorbachev’s life. “These words meant nothing but they sounded like a confidence, a repentance, a desperate cry from the heart, as if they illustrated [Russian poet Fyodor] Tyutchev’s words: ‘Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly.’”
Doing his best to console his comrade, Yakovlev assured him of a glorious retirement and world renown through his research institute. He was close to tears himself. “I had a lump in my throat. I was so sorry for him I wanted to cry. I was overcome with the feeling that something unfair had taken place. Here is the person who was yesterday a tsar of cardinal changes in the world and in his own country, the executor of the fate of billions of people in the world, and today he is the lifeless victim of another crisis of history.”
Gorbachev asked his friend to bring him a glass of water and to leave him alone. “And that,” observed Yakovlev, “was how the golden years of reform ended.” He sincerely believed that Gorbachev wanted the best for his country but couldn’t see it through to the end. “He couldn’t understand that if you took a sword to a monster like the system, you have to go all the way… but he was an evolutionist…. He has no blood on his hands, he wanted to start a civilized society.”15
Yeltsin would remember the daylong session as “protracted and difficult.” He told a reporter that the discussion was confidential, as it involved the passing on of state secrets, but “after that meeting I felt like going and having a shower.”
Looking back after the passage of time, Gorbachev remembered the marathon session with Yeltsin as “informal and seemingly friendly,” but he would reflect bitterly that “Yeltsin’s word, like many of his promises, could not always be trusted.”
There was little left for Gorbachev to do now but to tell the citizens of the mortally wounded superpower that he was leaving the stage.
It was the last occasion when Gorbachev and Yeltsin would meet or even speak to each other.
History finally catches up with Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Thirty seconds before 7 p.m. Moscow time, 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, on December 25, 1991, the first and last president of the Soviet Union takes off his large-lens spectacles, checks to see if they are clean, and puts them back on. He glances a couple of times at his watch. Then he looks up at the camera and begins reading from a typed sheet of paper, without the benefit of a teleprompter.
“Dear fellow countrymen! Compatriots!” he begins.1 “Given the current situation and the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am ceasing my activities as president of the USSR. I have arrived at this decision for reasons of principle. I have always spoken out firmly in favor of autonomy and the independence of nations and sovereignty for the republics. But at the same time, I support the preservation of a union state and the integrity of the country.”
Even now he has not quite given up. By “ceasing” his activities, he leaves open the door to perhaps resuming them at a future date.
