Now at his villa, Gorbachev asked the group who had sent them.
‘The Committee.’
‘What committee?’
When they started to explain the Committee’s aims, Gorbachev shouted, ‘Shut up, you asshole. Scumbag!’ KGB forces had surrounded the mansion; ships on the Black Sea trained their guns. Raisa Gorbachev suffered a minor stroke. Unbeknown to the Gorbachevs, the Committee had made a series of unforced errors in Moscow. First they had planned to arrest Yeltsin and had surrounded his dacha, but he escaped to the Russian Supreme Soviet – nicknamed the White House – where he was joined by several military units. Then the conspirators held a farcical press conference at which at least two of them were drunk. The White House was defended by crowds of people and Yeltsin’s units. Yeltsin then appeared and climbed defiantly on to a tank. The conspirators rushed to Crimea to beg forgiveness, while Yeltsin sent his own units to rescue Gorbachev. After arresting the conspirators, Gorbachev phoned Yeltsin. ‘So you’re alive,’ boomed Yeltsin. ‘We’ve been ready to fight for you!’ Two conspirators killed themselves. When Gorbachev arrived back in Moscow, his power had haemorrhaged and he resigned as general secretary on 24 August. At the Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin launched his own coup, humiliating Gorbachev at the rostrum and forcing him to admit that his own ministers had backed the coup.
On 1 December, Ukraine voted for independence. Yeltsin tried to make it stay inside his new version of the Union but failed; Ukraine’s secession was decisive. On the 8th, at a Belarusian Belavezha hunting lodge, beloved of tsars and general secretaries, Yeltsin secretly met the Ukrainian and Belarusian leaders and pulled off their own coup to end the USSR. Nazarbayev and the Central Asians joined them in a new Commonwealth of Independent States.
‘Who gave you the authority?’ shouted Gorbachev. ‘Why didn’t you warn me? … And once Bush finds out, what then?’ But Yeltsin had already called Bush. On 9 December, Gorbachev received Yeltsin and the Kazakh president Nazarbayev.
‘OK, sit down,’ Gorbachev told them. ‘What are you going to say to the people tomorrow?’
‘I’m going to say,’ replied Yeltsin, ‘I’m going to take your place.’
Afterwards Nazarbayev claimed he ‘wished I hadn’t been there’, but now he became dictator of a vast new state, Kazakhstan, so absolute that he ruled for thirty years, acclaimed himself Leader of the Nation and named the capital Nursultan.
At 5 p.m., on Christmas Day, Gorbachev rang Bush. ‘Hello, Mikhail,’ said Bush, at Camp David with his family.
‘George, my dear friend,’ said Gorbachev. ‘I finally decided to do it today, at the end of the day.’ He meant his resignation. ‘The debate in our union on what kind of state to create took a different track from what I thought right.’ This was one of history’s great understatements.
At 7 p.m., as Gorbachev addressed the nation, a general arrived to collect the nuclear briefcase and delivered it to Yeltsin. Afterwards Gorbachev told his aides he was going to ring his old mother who ‘has been saying to me for ages “Throw it all over. Come home”’. Gorbachev took his mother’s advice. Down the Kremlin corridors, Yeltsin searched Gorbachev’s office – the Little Corner, once occupied by Lenin, Stalin and Andropov – then demanded, ‘Bring us glasses.’ He and Korzhakov downed their whiskies. ‘Now,’ growled Yeltsin, president of the new Russian Federation, ‘that’s better.’
THE FAMILIA: BORIS, TATIANA AND RASPUTIN
Yeltsin, advised by a cohort of young reformers, banned Communism, opened many archives, pell-mell converted the command economy to free-market capitalism and launched a privatization programme. But almost immediately the economy crashed, Mafia criminals ran amok and the privatizations were fatally rushed and corrupted as a well-connected plutocracy of ex-Communists and self-made robber barons, together known as the oligarchs, bought oil companies for a fraction of their true value. Yeltsin, who combined the liberal instincts of a democrat with the habits of a drunken tsar, revealed the crimes of Stalin and encouraged exposés of history, yet he never dispensed with the security services. Instead of dissolving the KGB, he divided it into two new agencies. Meanwhile he played two entourages off against each other: on one hand, he championed his young westernized reformers; on other hand, he spent time with his swaggering, hard-drinking security chieftain, Korzhakov, now a general.
As Yeltsin took power in Moscow, Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, was metamorphosing into a Georgian leader. In May 1991, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who had been persecuted by Shevardnadze when he was Soviet proconsul there in the 1970s, was elected president by 86.5 per cent in a free election, promising to end all Russian interference. But within weeks Gamsakhurdia, manic, hollow-eyed and neurotic, managed to offend liberals with his despotism, Moscow with his Russophobia and ethnic minorities with his chauvinistic ‘Georgia for Georgians’. By September the president was a lonely Shakespearean figure besieged in his palace. ‘I’m the victim of the infernal, diabolic machinations of the Kremlin,’ he told this author in his office. ‘If Shevardnadze ever returns, we’ll shoot him like a poodle.’ Yet the rebels now surrounded the palace. ‘Yes, I’m like a king in a Shakespearean play.’ Henry V became first King Lear, then Richard II.
His chief enemy was an even more extraordinary personality, a former gangster boss, GULAG prisoner and playwright, Jaba Ioseliani, who during Stalin’s reign had raided a bank. He now formed a private army, Mkhedrioni (the Knights), to defend Georgian territory and overthrow Gamsakhurdia. In December, Ioseliani, the kind of maverick who thrives in the chaos of fallen empires, drove out Gamsakhurdia and formed a State Council that invited Shevardnadze to return. The Grey Fox, once a world arbiter with Bush and Gorbachev, now became an embattled patriot in a tiny, impoverished state in disarray where he was backed by a warlord who had been in jail when he sat in the Politburo. Shevardnadze swallowed his pride. Watching Jaba and his entourage swagger by, he smiled grimly: ‘How I miss Thatcher and Bush now.’
Spasms of killing inspired by medieval dreams of lost empires demonstrated what could happen when neither empires nor superpowers balanced the world. Yugoslavia was shattered by its feuding nationalities, incited to confrontation by vindictive nationalists, leading first to a war between Serbia and Croatia, then to a Serbian campaign to exterminate Bosnian Muslims, complete with concentration camps, mass rapes and massacres. After three and half years of war, in November 1995, Bill Clinton orchestrated a peace deal at Dayton, Ohio, that formed a tortuously complex multi-ethnic Bosnian state, but the Serbs switched to crushing Kosovan Albanians until March 1999, when Clinton unleashed NATO airstrikes that forced Serbian withdrawal and further infuriated Russia.