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Moscow Times
December 25, 2001
Revisiting the 1991 Christmas By Surprise
By Valeria Korchagina
Staff Writer

Ten years ago, as much of the Western world was opening Santa's presents or sitting down to Christmas dinner, Mikhail Gorbachev decided to close the final chapter in the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

"Dear fellow countrymen and citizens," Gorbachev began his televised address to the nation. "In light of recent events and the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I hereby resign the office of president of the U.S.S.R."

The announcement was a formality. The Soviet Union was an empty shell following a parade of independence declarations by the republics and the creation of the CIS by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus on Dec. 8. Nine more Soviet republics joined the CIS later in December. By Dec. 25, all that remained of the defunct state was its president.

Gorbachev has never explained why he chose to step down on Dec. 25 -- perhaps because what was Christmas Day in the West was an ordinary Wednesday in Russia, falling about a week before the big New Year's holidays.

In a documentary shown Dec. 13 on RTR television, Gorbachev said that after it became clear the Soviet Union was gone, he needed time to think over what he should do.

The documentary, called "Nash Gorbachev," or "Our Gorbachev," was part of a series dedicated to Nobel Prize winners from Russia. But instead of paying tribute to the winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, it follows the Soviet president during his final week in office in 1991. The footage -- some of which had never before been released -- was combined with shots of Gorbachev reflecting on that time a decade later.

Looking back, Gorbachev accepts part of the blame for the collapse of the Soviet Union, saying the reforms he launched in 1985 moved too slowly and could not match the speed of historical change. "We were late. I think my darned self-confidence got in the way," he said recently.

His address to the nation on Dec. 25, 1991, lasted only a few minutes. While he was still speaking, with the red Soviet flag at his side, the red flag above the Kremlin was being replaced by the Russian white-blue-red tricolor.

The new masters of the Kremlin took his departure so literally that they moved in the next day. "They gathered in my office and drank a bottle of whisky for their 'victory,'" Gorbachev said with contempt at a news conference Friday, The Associated Press reported. "I have never spoken to Yeltsin again."

Filming History

Igor Belyayev, a filmmaker who spent hours and days with Gorbachev during that last week in the Kremlin, directed the new documentary.

"This is a film about a man whom Russia failed to understand and appreciate," Belyayev said in an interview last week. "I want him to be loved by the people while he is still alive. I want him to be appreciated and loved as a person."

The original filming was initiated by Yegor Yakovlev, who had taken over as chief of Gosteleradio, the state television and radio company, after the previous management was fired in the aftermath of the failed August 1991 coup.

According to Belyayev, Yakovlev felt the need to somehow record history. That was not easy, given that at the time, Russia's leadership was extremely sensitive to any attention paid to Gorbachev. A solution was found in the form of a joint Russian-American project by CNN and Gosteleradio to film Gorbachev's exit.

The actual filming was done by Belyayev and his crew, but the plan was for CNN and the Russians to come up with two different films. While CNN showed the film around the world soon after the events, the Russian part of the project stalled.

"I was left with all these tapes, which I promptly took home and stuck under a sofa, where they remained for 10 years," Belyayev said. "I wasn't even sure that the footage hadn't deteriorated."

When RTR asked Belyayev, a veteran documentary director, if he wished to pick a Nobel Prize winner from Russia to do a film about, the answer was obvious.

"I had a debt [to Gorbachev] that I needed to repay. And I am very happy now that I've done it," Belyayev said.

Belyayev has warm memories from those days with Gorbachev. "I sensed that Gorbachev liked being with me. He relaxed when he spent time with me. I was a person very close to him, I felt like his ally, that I was helping him," Belyayev said.

The two men had known each other since both were students at Moscow State University, although they were not close. Belyayev, 69, now sees Gorbachev, 70, as a symbol of his generation.

"We are a lost generation. We were born too late to become war veterans, and too early to become cosmonauts," Belyayev said. "Gorbachev has become the figure, the main representative of this generation, of our views, of what we essentially are."

Last Kremlin Days

Gorbachev's last days in the Kremlin appeared uneventful. With no country to rule, he is left only with the nuclear suitcase and an office with a plaque that says: "M.S. Gorbachev, president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

In Belyayev's film, he is shown holding talks with officials, receiving visiting diplomats and taking care of unfinished business, such as passing over to fellow Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn the KGB documents related to his persecution in the 1960s and 1970s.

Gorbachev said he would not resort to force to stay in power.

"If I'd ever wanted to remain in the structures of power, that wouldn't have been too difficult," he said in 1991. "I care little about prestige. If that were the case, if that were in my nature, I wouldn't have started the reforms and wouldn't have given up the power I had."

He continued on the same theme 10 years later. "There is no power tougher and stricter than the power of democracy," Gorbachev said. "And the nomenklatura failed the test of democratic power. The intelligentsia failed this test, too."

He still regrets that the Soviet Union collapsed, and remains bitterly disappointed that it was allowed to collapse without a fuss.

"I was astounded. The intelligentsia was silent, the press was silent, everyone was silent. The republics were silent. So no one needed a union state," he said this month. "And what is Russia without the Soviet Union? I don't know. A stump of some sort."

At Friday's news conference, he accused Yeltsin and the leaders of the other republics of ruining the Soviet Union out of personal ambition.

"I was shocked by the treacherous behavior of those people, who cut the country in pieces in order to settle accounts and establish themselves as tsars," Gorbachev said, The Associated Press reported.

He said he couldn't oppose their action because of fear that would push the country toward chaos. "I couldn't choose the path that might have led to rift and civil war in a nation brimming with nuclear weapons," Gorbachev said.

As unappreciated as he is in Russia, Gorbachev remains optimistic that the world will remember him well.

"I still don't know what happiness is," he said in the documentary. "But on the other hand, look at how fate has rewarded me. It allowed me to fulfill myself to lead such a process of renewal that went so far and involved the whole world. God! What other happiness could there be."

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