Collapse and Afterlife

OPENING SCENE

December 25, 1991. The Kremlin, Moscow. It is Christmas Day in the Western calendar, though the Soviet Union has never observed it as a holiday. The streets outside are cold and quiet. Earlier that day, Gorbachev had sat for three hours writing and rewriting a resignation statement. He had crossed out lines, rewritten them, crossed them out again. He had governed the Soviet Union for six years and nine months, presiding over a process of reform that had, by this point, entirely escaped his control.

The speech he finally delivers runs for eleven minutes. He speaks of what has been accomplished: the end of the Cold War, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the removal of the threat of nuclear confrontation that had shadowed the whole world since 1949. He says he leaves the presidency with "anxiety," but also with hope. He does not say what he clearly believes, which is that the Soviet Union he inherited was unreformable, and that the country he is dissolving was already dead before he handed in his resignation. The television cameras in the studio capture a man who looks tired but not broken. Several Western correspondents in Moscow that night later noted that Gorbachev appeared to be the only calm person in the room.

Outside the Kremlin walls, a small crowd has gathered to watch the flag ceremony. There are more journalists than Russian citizens. Some people cheer. Others stand in silence. The Soviet flag, the red banner with its gold hammer and sickle, has flown from the Kremlin since November 1917. It has outlasted every Western prediction of Soviet collapse. It has survived famine, purges, invasion, and Cold War. Tonight, two workers lower it down the pole and carry it away. The Russian tricolor, the white, blue, and red horizontal stripe flag that the Russian Republic had been using since June 1991, goes up in its place. The whole ceremony takes about three minutes. The Soviet Union is over.

In the hours that follow, CNN broadcasts Gorbachev's speech around the world. George H.W. Bush addresses the American people from the Oval Office, saying that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union "freedom" has won. In the capitals of the newly independent states, which have been declaring independence for months, the mood varies sharply. In Vilnius and Tallinn and Riga, it is celebration. In Kiev it is cautious relief. In some of the Central Asian capitals, where leaders have been the most reluctant to declare independence from Moscow, there is genuine uncertainty about what comes next. In fifteen former Soviet republics, the same question hangs over the night air: What are we now, and what does that mean?