The Russian Supreme Soviet ratified the Belovezh’e agreement on December 12, after one hour of deliberation, with a mere six out of 252 deputies voting against and seven abstentions. When Yeltsin received James Baker in the Kremlin on December 16, it was in the St. Catherine’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, with Shaposhnikov at his side. He greeted Baker with the words, “Welcome to this Russian building on Russian soil.” Baker made a point of telling Yeltsin the Americans would “look with disfavor” on any attempt to shame Gorbachev as he left office. “Gorbachev should be treated with respect,” Yeltsin replied reassuringly. “It’s about time our leaders can be retired with honor.”110
Eight of the post-Soviet nations joined the CIS at Alma-Ata on December 21. (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania never did sign on; Georgia did so in 1993.) Seeing the writing on the wall, Gorbachev on December 23 negotiated a retirement package with Yeltsin and Aleksandr Yakovlev. On Wednesday, December 25, he took leave of the presidency and the Soviet Union on television and gave control of the USSR’s 35,000 nuclear weapons to Yeltsin. He described the dismemberment of the USSR as a mistake and a betrayal of a thousand years of Russian history, but accepted that he was unable to prevent it. Thirty-eight minutes after he began, he was done and the hammer-and-sickle was run by hand down the Kremlin flagstaff; five minutes after that, the Russian tricolor was run up to flutter in the hibernal breeze. Gorbachev and Yeltsin bickered down to the wire about the handoff. They had agreed to meet one-on-one in Gorbachev’s study, but Yeltsin, seeing red over parts of the resignation speech that were critical of the republic leaders, demanded he take the nuclear briefcase (the black Samsonite bag containing the authorization codes) in another Kremlin spot. They ended up doing it through the good offices of Shaposhnikov, who received the case from Gorbachev ten minutes after Gorbachev’s talk.111 The USSR had gone the way of the overland empires of the Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians and refracted into fifteen countries.
For Gorbachev, the alternatives had been unpalatable. One was to get Yeltsin to work with him to save the union. Yakovlev plied Gorbachev again after the coup with the nonstarter idea of Yeltsin as vice president; Georgii Shakhnazarov made several similar proposals. Gorbachev did not move a muscle to pursue them. Another possibility was for Gorbachev to fall on his sword and resign in Yeltsin’s favor. Shaposhnikov saw this as desirable and thought it could be followed by USSR-wide elections. The delicate state of civil-military relations kept him from raising it with either Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Gorbachev himself aired the possibility with Gavriil Popov, by now the mayor of Moscow, in late August (“Maybe I should hand everything over to Boris”), and Eduard Shevardnadze spoke with Yeltsin about it around this time. Popov advised against such a choice, thinking Yeltsin as USSR president would drive the non-Russian elites away.112 Yeltsin heard of this talk but considered it “unserious” and the post-coup Soviet presidency “ephemeral.”113
Gorbachev’s only other option was to reverse the tide by force. This was not in him to do, and his disinclination since 1989 to take responsibility for local tests of strength had made the army officer corps distrustful of his intentions. Any praetorian ambitions the generals might have had were wrung out of them after the coup. In late November the Soviet president fished in his Kremlin office for Shaposhnikov’s opinion of a temporary military takeover, to be followed by a return to barracks. The reply was that it would land its authors in jail, upon which Gorbachev replied that his query was only hypothetical. The army did not have the training or equipment for police work, the minister said, and Yeltsin would torpedo any such policy. It could bring August redux or, worse yet, “mountains of corpses and a sea of gore.”114
Yeltsin, with a steelier spine and far more political capital, had greater choice than Gorbachev did in the matter. It goes without saying that he took power into account, but his actions in late 1991 were not driven by power alone.115 He came down against even a diluted post-Soviet federation for two reasons. First was his skepticism of the viability of such a construct. Seven union republics (all three in the Baltic, all three in the Caucasus, and the western borderland of Moldova) had boycotted the post-coup talks.116 The Ukrainians took part in some consultations, but Kravchuk did not darken the door of Novo-Ogarëvo. His refusal to agree was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
For Yeltsin, another point, as I see it, was determinative. He opted against a neo-USSR because he was opting for a Russian state—self-standing, governable, and capable of modernization and normalization. To put it another way, he opted for nation-building over empire-saving.117 What he desperately wanted was to leap into post-communism in the protocountry, Russia, that had freely elected him president. The opening move was laid out in the rousing address to the Russian congress on October 28 in which Yeltsin committed Russia to radical economic reform. A liberalization of prices, something Gorbachev had hemmed and hawed about for years, was the key component. The diarist Chernyayev cast a Gorbachevian scowl on Yeltsin’s uncouthness but sank it in a panegyric to his call to arms, with an allusion to the French Revolution:
Yeltsin’s report… is a breakthrough to a new country, to a new society, although the ideas and concepts behind this very exit were all laid down in the philosophy of Gorbachev-style perestroika. He himself [Gorbachev] was not able to break in good time with his habits, although he more than once confessed, “We are all from the past.” I hate to say it, but not everyone has the will to break with this past conclusively and at the right time….
In [Yeltsin’s] report it’s either win all or lose all. But in Russia that has always been how big things are done. M. S. [Gorbachev] never went further than Mirabeau. This fellow is going all the way to Napoleon, skipping over Danton, Robespierre, Barras, and even the enragés.