Moscow, December 25th, 1991 by Conor O'Clery

Yeltsin was erratic and often drunk, but he was more comfortable with people, and he made decisions based more on gut instinct than intellectual consideration. Gorbachev always came off as suave and worldly, and also aloof and imperious. The personality differences were significant. In this case, the Soviet Union’s demise presents itself as an affair of two men who could not stand each other. By zeroing in on the relationship and its evolution until this moment-in chapters that alternate with the real time story of December 25-O’Clery shows how history can sometimes have a Tolstoyan quality of individual drama played out with consequences for millions. Gorbachev spent much of the day brooding alone in his office. And in many ways these details take the place of any real tension, since all that was left to do by December 25 was to hand over the nuclear briefcase. Curious what Yeltsin ate on that fateful morning? Thin oatmeal porridge and tea followed by eggs, onion, and tomatoes fried in butter. O’Clery seems to have soaked up every detail of that last day, down to the truly trivial.

The very final denouement took place in a series of rooms in the Kremlin and involved one last tug of war between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who experienced the end of the empire as an historical event but also as just another turn in the tortured and bitter relationship of two men who could not have been more different from one another.Ĭonor O’Clery’s popular history of this last day of the Soviet Union is as much a minute-by-minute account of December 25, 1991, as it is a recapitulation of all the bad blood, miscommunication, and histrionic power struggles that characterized Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s long acquaintance-a relationship that had an outsized impact on Russian history. But it was not until December 25, 1991, a few months later, that the red flag was lowered for the last time and the Soviet Union was effectively declared dead. The Communist hardliners lost, as we know, though Gorbachev returned to Moscow a terminally weakened leader. And there was drama, too, in the contrast of the Russian people who came out to the streets and protested in droves, with the thuggish conspirators in their KGB issued gray suits, ashing their cigarettes into the dustbin of history. Then came the heroic gesture of that Russian bear Boris Yeltsin, standing on a tank and waving his fist in defense of Moscow’s White House. There was Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, taken under house arrest at his dacha in the Crimea, his life possibly in danger. Despite the fairly predetermined end of that drama, it was quite a drama. IT IS EASIER to conjure the end of the Soviet Union by thinking of the coup of August 1991 that was the last gasp of the Communist establishment.

Moscow, December 25th, 1991 by Conor O'Clery