The Last Days of the Soviet Union: Reporting from the British Embassy, Moscow. History Note: No.24

History Note: No. 24

The last days of the Soviet Union:

Reporting from the British Embassy, Moscow

The Last Days of the Soviet Union Reporting from the British Embassy, Moscow

History Note: No. 24

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The British Embassy in the 1980s, with the Kremlin in the background

Contents

Introduction

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Eyewitness accounts Sir Rodric Braithwaite Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Russia, 1988-92

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Sian MacLeod Second Secretary (Chancery), 1988-92

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Sir David Manning Political Counsellor and Head of Political Section, 1990–93

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Documents

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(above) Tanks on the streets of Moscow, August 1991; (below) A burnt out trolley bus becomes a makeshift memorial to the victims of the coup

Pictures courtesy of Sian MacLeod

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Introduction In his Annual Review for 1990, British Ambassador Sir Rodric Braithwaite reminded the Foreign Secretary that in April President Gorbachev had given himself 18 months to turn things around in the Soviet Union otherwise he would be gone. Time was running out for Soviet reform, he said; the old system had been destroyed and a new system was not yet in place. His assessment was prophetic as by the end of 1991 Gorbachev had indeed gone and so had the Soviet Union.

This publication, marking the 30th anniversary, charts the last tumultuous year of the Soviet Union through the eyes of diplomats working at the British Embassy in Moscow.

The telegrams, despatches and letters demonstrate the best in political reporting and analysis in an era before mobile phones, rolling news channels and social media were ubiquitous. They record Gorbachev’s attempts to hold on to power, his rivalry with Boris Yeltsin, the attempted coup in August and his resignation from office. The documents are drawn from Foreign and Commonwealth Office files now available to the public at The National Archives, Kew. There are also personal recollections from British diplomats working in Moscow at the time. Sir Rodric Braithwaite reflects on what was the last posting of his career, whilst Second Secretary Sian MacLeod reflects on her first. Political Counsellor David Manning recalls the August coup and Gorbachev’s final days in power.

Richard Smith FCDO Historians

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Eyewitness accounts Sir Rodric Braithwaite, Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Russia, 1988–92 Joined the Diplomatic Service in 1955 with early postings to Djakarta, Warsaw, Moscow and Rome. Head of the European Integration Department (External), FCO, 1973–75; Head of Chancery, Office of Permanent Representative to the European Economic Community, Brussels, 1975–78; Head of Planning Staff, FCO, 1979–80; Assistant Under Secretary of State, FCO, 1981; Minister Commercial, Washington, 1982–84; Deputy Under-Secretary of State, FCO, 1984–88; Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, 1992–93.

My job as ambassador in Moscow from 1988-1992 was much the most exhilarating of my career. I had worked in the Moscow embassy before, in 1963-66.

Nikita Khrushchev had emerged victorious from the brutal power struggle with Stalin’s successors nearly a decade earlier. Orthodox Communist though he was, he could see that the Soviet economic system was failing. He was tinkering with inadequate remedies, against a background of lively discussion in the specialist economic journals. My job in the embassy was to follow his efforts.

Life in Moscow was still difficult for foreigners.

Supplies were scarce, and we were constantly monitored by the secret police. The people we met were either already under the control of the KGB or about to be. But we could travel extensively, and our exchanges with the people we met casually could be most illuminating, critical of aspects of everyday life where people in Moscow prudently kept their mouths shut.

In those days plenty of people pontificated about the Soviet Union in Western capitals who had never been there and didn’t know the language. You could judge what was going on better if you actually lived in the place. You could see for yourself that the country was very poor indeed. Villages on the outskirts of Moscow still had no running water, and the sidewalks were still paved in wood. Soviet economic growth was clearly slowing, its capacity for innovation stunted. The gap between pretensions and reality was huge: there was no chance that the Soviet Union could ever hope to overtake America by 1980 as Khrushchev had boasted.

Khrushchev’s economic reforms were half-hearted and misconceived. He was overthrown by his colleagues, who feared he was endangering the country’s stability. They reimposed discipline and went on to score some fragile successes. They achieved military parity with the United States: the two held one another in mutual apprehension, each exaggerating the grounds for fear. The Soviets had their successes in the developing world, though many countries were already beginning to turn towards the capitalist model. They improved the lot of the Soviet consumer, though only modestly by comparison with what was happening elsewhere.

But by the 1970s dissidents like the scientist Andrei Sakharov, and even some of their own senior officials, were warning the Soviet leadership that the economy was in serious trouble. The Soviet hold on Eastern Europe was beginning to look increasingly shaky.

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Soviet ideology was losing its attraction abroad and even at home. The men in the Politburo realised that something must be done. In 1985 they chose Mikhail Gorbachev because he was young, energetic, effective and – they mistakenly believed – orthodox.

By the time I returned to Moscow in September 1988, Gorbachev had transformed the situation. The place was wide open, the press was sizzling, people were ever more openly critical of the regime as they increasingly lost their fear of the KGB. Surveillance of foreigners was barely perceptible. The embassy team was outstandingly active and imaginative, and we all spoke Russian. People of all kinds would accept our invitations and invite us back. We began to build social relationships even with the senior soldiers who had hitherto kept clear of us. Almost no one would refuse to see us if we asked for a call.

In Kiev even the Party leaders we talked to were demanding ever greater freedom from Moscow. Because we didn’t recognise the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States I was not permitted by the FCO to visit them. But my colleagues built very close relations with Baltic politicians who were working tirelessly for independence. All these connections served us admirably during the upheavals of the summer and autumn of 1991.

From 1989 onwards Gorbachev was being challenged with growing success by the politically gifted and nakedly ambitious provincial Party boss Boris Yeltsin. We had the professionally tricky task of continuing to deal loyally with Gorbachev and his people, while building up our relationship with the Yeltsin team. I concentrated on Gorbachev while my colleagues got to know Yeltsin’s people. Even so, Gorbachev accused us to Mrs Thatcher, half-jokingly, of spending too much time with ‘extremists’.

On 18 August 1991 a group of senior military, Party, KGB and government officials calling itself the ‘State Committee on the State of Emergency’, dismayed by Gorbachev’s reforms, confined him in his holiday home in Crimea ‘for his own good’, and brought tanks into the capital to ensure order. I had just gone on holiday to Northern Russian with my wife Jill. We heard the news on the BBC when we woke in our hotel on Monday 19 August. By the time we had scrambled back to Moscow, Yeltsin was defying the conspirators from his headquarters in the ‘Russian White House’. My colleagues had already reported the opening scenes of the drama in detail and were scattered through the city talking to people on the streets.

That first evening it already seemed that the conspirators lacked the resolution to succeed. I concluded that even if they did impose a more authoritarian regime, the pressures for reform would return, and could not be indefinitely resisted. The following night soldiers shot three people in a scuffle. The plotters lost their nerve and called off a plan to storm the White House. The next day they withdrew the tanks. Yeltsin promptly arrested them and banned the Communist Party. A bewildered Gorbachev returned to Moscow, his authority shattered.

I worried that Yeltsin would now hold my failure to cultivate him against me. But he had been told that Jill was with Russian friends on the barricades outside the White House on the night of the shootings, and that may have done the trick. I worked well enough with him and his people for the rest of my stay.

The Americans and their allies had long feared that a disintegrating Soviet Union might lose control of its nuclear weapons: indeed President George H. W. Bush had warned the Ukrainians against pressing for independence only three weeks before the coup.

But now the question was moot. On 6 December, as we were showing our Russian dinner guests out, we read on the embassy telex that Yeltsin and his opposite numbers from Ukraine and Belarus had met in secret, declared their independence, and announced that the Soviet Union was ‘ceasing its existence as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality’. For Yeltsin, who like most Russians believed in his bones that

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Ukraine was an integral part of his country, it was a breath-taking piece of opportunism.

But for the Soviet Union, it was the death blow.

The questions posed by those dramatic events are still hotly debated. Was the collapse of the Soviet Union foreseen or foreseeable? Was it a triumph of American policy, or the inevitable consequence of its own political, social and economic weaknesses? Could Gorbachev have preserved the Union if his reforms had been better designed? Could another leader, more decisive, more willing to shed blood, have held it together by force?

Would the ‘Chinese alternative’ of tight one-party control over a state-dominated capitalism have been a better model than Western liberal democracy?

A whiff of grapeshot or the ‘Chinese alternative’ were both available as solutions even before Gorbachev came to power. But the fear that blood on the streets of Moscow might lead to civil war was common even among the Soviet leadership of the 1970s and 1980s: in 1991 the coup leaders hung back, even though they might have cemented their position by shooting a few hundred demonstrators in Moscow and Leningrad.

As for the ‘Chinese alternative’, Deng started his reform in China in 1979. The preGorbachev Politburo never showed any sign of following suit. And by almost any measure the real parallels between the two countries are few.

My own view is that by 1985 the system was too far gone to be successfully reformed.

At best it might have stumbled on for some years towards an ignominious or a bloody end.

Gorbachev’s task was unprecedented: to reform an authoritarian structure in deep crisis, while negotiating with a superpower rival which held most of the military, political, and economic cards. A fair judgement is that he did adequately in difficult circumstances: a finished reform was beyond any one man or any one generation.

Russians will tell you that history has no subjunctive case. Speculating about the counterfactuals is a stimulating but rather sterile intellectual exercise. What happened is what happened. Even that is not always easy for historians to establish. But the discussion about how and why the Soviet Union ended will continue for the foreseeable future: no historical debate ends in consensus. After all, we are still arguing about the responsibility for the First World War and the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

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Sian MacLeod, Second Secretary (Chancery), 1988-92 Joined the Diplomatic Service in 1986 as desk officer in the South African Department.

Postings include: First Secretary, The Hague, 1996–2000; Deputy Head, Counter Terrorism Policy Department, FCO, 2000–01; Cabinet Office, 2002–04; Political Counsellor, 2004–05, Minister and Deputy Head of Mission, Moscow, 2005–07; Head, Whitehall Liaison Department, FCO, 2007–08; Ambassador to the Czech Republic, 2009– 13; Additional Director, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, FCO, 2014–15; Ambassador and Head of the UK Delegation to the Organisation for the Security and Co-operation in Europe, Vienna, 2015–19. Appointed Ambassador to Serbia in 2019.

My first posting as a young diplomat was to Moscow. After a year’s preparation, the prospect of living and working in the Soviet Union was exciting, but very daunting. Back in the 1980s most people in the UK knew very little about what life in the USSR was really like. And I had never visited the country that was to be my home for the next three years. My Russian language training had taken place in Guildford and Paris. Travelling out by train in November 1988, we arrived in Moscow to be greeted by all the sights, sounds and smells of a large Soviet railway station. In many ways it was a world that now only exists in history books. We had no useable money. The rouble was not convertible and could not be bought abroad. And of course there were no mobile phones. So those hours when new arrivals travelled by rail or road across Soviet Russia with no means of contacting the Embassy could be anxious ones.

By summer 1991 I had been in Moscow for two and a half years. Most of my time had been spent at a desk in the dusty, cramped, wood panelled library in the 19th century merchant’s mansion opposite the Kremlin, that was then our Embassy as well as the Ambassador’s Residence. In those days much of our understanding was built up from grains of information gleaned daily from stacks of official newspapers. My day started with the Government daily paper, Izvestia, and the wire reports of official news agency TASS. On a quiet day, with no visitors, meetings, or events to attend, I might get right through the pile to the dullest regional Communist press.

Every so often I was able to leave the newspapers behind and set out for a glimpse of real life across the country. My political reporting job took me to most of the so called republics of the Soviet Union. Most often I travelled to the three Baltic States and to Ukraine. The United Kingdom never recognised the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania legally as part of the Soviet Union, so according to our own rules, I could travel there as a junior diplomat, but our Ambassador could not. Whenever possible I travelled by overnight train, taking a picnic to go with the glasses of tea served by carriage attendants. We always travelled in pairs. I also visited the Caucasus, Belorussia and Moldavia as we then called Belarus and Moldova. But I was unable to get Soviet permission to travel to several Central Asian Republics. Diplomatic visits to Soviet cities generally followed a set pattern. A call on the local authorities, often the occasion for a lengthy presentation on housing statistics. A meeting with the local Communist Party, if they were willing. And probably a call on a local newspaper. It was often more interesting

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to wander around the shops and markets. But contacts with ordinary people were very limited as they were often too nervous to talk to foreigners.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, meant that the trickle of information, available to Western diplomats and Kremlinologists around the world, became a torrent. And his reforms brought a huge amount of documentation, such as new draft laws to read and report. There seemed to be an impossible amount of information to absorb, analyse and explain. And the attention of our capitals was guaranteed by Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika, his radical economic reforms, including elements of property ownership and private enterprise. Nowhere was more interested than London.

Our Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had recognised early on that Gorbachev was a very new kind of Soviet leader. A man, as she famously said, with whom she could do business.

Within the Embassy library, where I worked, there was a real sense that the works of Lenin on our shelves were metaphorically as well as literally gathering dust. It was clear that the changes around us were of historic significance.

One important change was the shifting relationship between Moscow and the ‘satellite’ republics of the Soviet Union. National movements, or ‘Popular Fronts’ were growing, especially in those republics that had previously enjoyed a period of independence. They were very strong in the Baltic States, where many people had never accepted Stalin’s 1940s annexation. The Baltic peoples had suffered under both Nazi and Soviet rule. And their pre-war independence was still a living memory for some. But they did not only look to the past. They were preparing for a greater autonomy, and, many believed, fully restored independence. I was not in the Baltic States in early 1991 when nervous Soviet troops killed over a dozen unarmed civilians at the television tower in Vilnius and several more on the streets of Riga. But the horror and incomprehension I felt when I visited the graves in a Vilnius cemetery and watched the film shot by a dying Latvian cameraman, was shared by many Russians.

A sense emerged quickly that in Gorbachev’s USSR, violent suppression of peaceful aspirations would no longer be acceptable. For months I had studied the long discussed draft ‘Union Treaty’ designed to establish a new relationship between Moscow and its republics. A bottle of Russian ‘shampanskoe’ on my desk awaited the day when the Treaty was finally signed, and I didn’t have to translate another draft. But not everyone was looking forward to the Treaty’s adoption. Hard line Communists feared the changes which they believed undermined the ideological foundations of the state – and their own privileged careers. Moscow was a notorious breeding ground for rumours. There were perennial mutterings about a possible military coup. But the mutterings were speculation rather than based on any evidence. So as Muscovites headed for their dachas in summer 1991, senior diplomats and foreign journalists set off for their holidays away from the shortages, dust and pot holed roads of Gorbachev’s Moscow. Like many other junior diplomats I stayed in the city. But even I found an excuse to escape for a few days to Tallinn. The Estonians had cleverly arranged an ambitious conference on independent banking and currency to coincide with the great annual Baltic Song Festival. There was a real sense that week that it was only a matter of time before Estonia was fully independent again. The first Estonian performance of Arvo Part’s great St John Passion, which took place that week, on the eve of momentous change in his homeland, was extraordinarily moving.

Back in Moscow, on 19 August we, and the world, woke up to a shock. Gorbachev, the Soviet State radio said, was unwell and unable to perform his duties. I still have a copy of the TASS report. Something was clearly wrong. By the time I rushed to the Embassy the Head of Chancery and duty officer were already compiling our first report. We divided up our resources. Some of our team spent the next three days out on the streets or in Yeltsin’s

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White House stronghold, ringing in to the Embassy when they could to report what was going on. Sitting in the office to keep in touch with events across the country, I helped piece together the whole historic jigsaw as it happened, from faxes, television coverage and phone calls, and wrote reports to keep London informed. With bridges and thoroughfares guarded by tanks, and no trolleybuses running, I walked the 40 minutes to and from the Embassy through the deserted streets, past the tanks, in the early hours and late at night as the curfew allowed. I was catching a few hours sleep when the few innocent casualties of the coup died at a blockaded underpass not far from our flat. After the initial shock of the putsch I don’t think we ever expected a different outcome. The country had changed too much to be impressed by the unconvincing televised statements of the conspirators. Even the protagonists themselves quickly realised their game was up. Not Ten Days that Shook the World but a bare three.

Events moved quickly. Gorbachev returned to Moscow still believing that Soviet Communism could be reformed. But life had moved on and the USSR began to unravel.

The Union Treaty was never signed. These were busy days for us. Within 10 days, John Major, now British Prime Minister, visited Moscow. He drank a toast with the new Baltic leaders, not to a Union Treaty, but to their independence, which we had already recognised.

As ever he was kind to junior staff and made sure that I was included in the celebrations.

In September, I travelled with FCO Minister Douglas Hogg as he made a tour of the three Baltic capitals. A few weeks later I returned to welcome our three hastily appointed Ambassadors to the Baltic States. I introduced them to the new Presidents and Foreign Ministers, whom I had first met when they were working in publishing back rooms or cramped Popular Front offices. Over the weeks that followed I drafted and stamped official notes relating to our recognition of a host of new states which had been part of the Soviet Union.

My first posting, which had begun in the Soviet Union and ended in the Russian Federation, was coming to an end. I looked forward to easing myself back into a more ordinary life in the UK by first spending several months in our new Embassy in Vilnius.

As my photo album shows, this was makeshift diplomacy. Our communications room consisted of a telex machine next to the kitchen kettle in a former art gallery. I have read and reread the accounts by British diplomats who served in Moscow at various historic moments. The colourful accounts of Bruce Lockhart, Reader Bullard and Cecil Parrott, all bring history alive. So do the scholarly writings of my own first Ambassador, Sir Rodric Braithwaite. I thoroughly recommend them all. It was a great privilege for me, in my first posting, to be a part of that same tradition of British diplomacy in Moscow that their books describe.

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Sir David Manning, Political Counsellor and Head of Political Section, 1990–93 Joined the Diplomatic Service in 1972 with early postings to Warsaw and New Delhi. First Secretary, Paris, 1984–88; Counsellor, seconded to Cabinet Office, 1988–90; Head of Eastern Department, FCO, 1993–94; British Member of the Contact Group on Bosnia, International Conference on Former Yugoslavia, 1994; Head of Policy Planning Staff, FCO, 1994–95; Ambassador to Israel, 1995–98; Deputy Under-Secretary of State, FCO, 1998–2000; Permanent Representative to the UK Delegation to NATO, 2000–01; Foreign Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister, and Head of Defence and Overseas Secretariat, Cabinet Office, 2001–03.

In early August 1991, Gorbachev went on holiday to the Crimea, believing that he had at last secured agreement to a new Union Treaty that would devolve significant powers to the Republics while still keeping them within the Soviet Union. It was to be signed on 20 August. The hardliners opposed the new arrangements and, led by Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, Yazov, the Defence Minister and Pugo, the Interior Minister, they launched their attempted coup after apparently failing to persuade Gorbachev to declare a state of emergency and cancel the new Treaty. Early on the morning of 19 August, they announced a state of Emergency, claiming that Gorbachev was incapacitated, and that they were setting up a Committee on the State of Emergency to run the country. I first heard about the coup at about four-thirty in the morning when I was phoned by the military attaché. The dawn comes very early at that time of year in Moscow and it was already light by the time I drove in to the Embassy at what I suppose was soon after five.

I had had no experience of coups but this one seemed odd. As I crossed the Kamenny Bridge, near the Embassy building, I found myself behind a military vehicle which stopped at a red light. The driver waited for it to turn green before going on, and this when almost the only other traffic around consisted of army lorries parked at the side of the road. What sort of coup was it when the military stopped at traffic lights? I was surprised, too, when I arrived at the Embassy to find that other members of staff were having little or no difficulty in getting in, and little or no difficulty, once there, in making phone calls. Very quickly we were talking to colleagues in other Embassies, comparing notes and trying to work out what was happening.

We sent members of the Chancery, the Defence Section and the Commercial Section, which was in another part of town, to walk round the streets and report what was happening. It was a strange, confused day. The Ambassador had left very early to fly to Northern Russia and wouldn’t get back until the evening. David Logan, his deputy, was away on holiday. So, as next in line, I found myself running the Embassy. We couldn’t get through to London on the telephone, the lines were down, and though we had a satellite phone, which was supposed to be state of the art, it didn’t work. We sent what I suppose were roughly hourly SITREPS to the FCO by telegram, reporting what we had learnt from the media, from our sorties around the city and from what we could learn from our various contacts. But we were feeling pretty much in the dark. At one point, I was surprised to be told that there was a telephone call from London. Although we hadn’t been able to get

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through to them, somehow they had got through to us. I was even more surprised to be told that it was the Prime Minister, and thought ‘Oh yeah, sure!’. But, despite my scepticism, it really was John Major. He began by asking how everyone was in the Embassy and saying London was very grateful for the reporting we were providing. He told me that he had our safety very much in mind. It was a typically kind, John Major thing to do. I told him what we had been able to glean up to that point.

It became clear during the day that my instinct that this was an odd, unconvincing coup, wasn’t wrong. The coup plotters had failed to get hold of Yeltsin, which surely should have been a top priority. If they were going to succeed they either had to kill him or lock him up and they had failed to do either. He had been able to make his way from his dacha, on the outskirts of Moscow, to the Russian White House, the Parliament Building. And there he became a symbol, the rallying point. He condemned what was happening and appealed to Russians to resist. Here, on the national stage, was what he had done on a smaller scale in the Baltic States a few months earlier. It was clearly at great risk to his own life. In the evening, I went home to watch the TV news which had reverted from being the relatively lively programme which it had become under Gorbachev to the old Soviet format, lots of carefully censored items read out in a completely monotonous, wooden way. Then, suddenly there was a clip of Yeltsin. It was inconceivable, if the coup plotters really were in total control, that this would have been permitted. Something very odd was going on.

As it turned out, Yeltsin and his supporters had taken control of the White House and the following day it became clear that, unless the plotters got a grip, the coup would either fail or that there might be civil war. Kryuchkov and co. declared a night-time curfew on 20 August, which suggested that they were planning to storm the White House during the hours of darkness. In the Embassy, we knew that the plotters had flown crack military reinforcements to Moscow, presumably to take the White House. On the afternoon of the second day, I went with Rodric Braithwaite, who was now back in Moscow, to the White House. We had a message of support for Yeltsin from London, I think from the Prime Minister. By this time the White House was surrounded by lots of civilians supporting Yeltsin. They had built walls of sandbags, topped with barbed wire. It was exactly the same, defiant response that I had witnessed in the Baltic States seven months earlier. The White House was difficult to get into. It meant following a circuitous route and being checked by Yeltsin’s self-appointed guards at every stage. It was pouring with rain, absolutely torrential, and Rodric and I struggled through the mud outside the building, before we eventually got into the White House. Rodric handed over the message or gave the message orally. They confirmed that they expected to be attacked during the night. I remember, too, that as we left the building we thought that Yeltsin might well be dead by the morning.

I went home from the Embassy in the early evening before the curfew was due to begin.

During that night, troops approached the White House from a nearby underpass, where they met resistance. A number of civilians were killed. I can’t remember how many, three or four, maybe more. At this point the attack faltered. Whoever was in charge may have decided he was not going to take responsibility for shooting civilians in cold blood. From this point on the attempted coup crumbled. The outcome wasn’t a total surprise. The day before, Yeltsin had emerged from the White House, had stood on a tank, and appealed to the Russian soldiers not to back the coup. There is a famous photograph that went round the world. Many of the soldiers would have been conscripts and would have had a miserable time over the past couple of years as they were withdrawn from bases in the former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe. They were not well looked after, so their loyalty to the regime may well have been questionable by this stage. Anyway, Yeltsin’s

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appeal to them not to attack the Parliament building, not to go with the plotters, undoubtedly resonated.

My mother-in-law, who was staying with us, had taken our little dog for a walk to the White House, which was very close to our flat. We could hear the rumble of the tanks. She walked past the cordon of people around the building and, although she didn’t speak any Russian, in her charming way, she managed to make contact with both soldiers and protesters. She treated it a bit like a holiday. The sense of menace one might have expected seemed strangely absent on the first day of the coup. After the night-time attack on the White House was called off, the coup collapsed. The plotters realised the game was up. A plane was sent to the Crimea for Gorbachev, who had been under house arrest, and he came back to Moscow. The TV pictures as he got off the plane showed that he and his wife had obviously been very shaken by events. But they also showed, something else. As Yeltsin greeted them, it was clear that real power had passed. There was Yeltsin at the airport, triumphant. He had faced the coup plotters down with extraordinary courage, the Union Treaty was dead, and so in effect was the Soviet Union, although it didn’t finally disappear until the end of the year. In the following weeks, it became clear that the key Republics would opt for independence, not for a revised version of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev had, if you like, become President of a vanishing state. He was elected President of the USSR but by an electorate of a few hundred people in the Congress of People’s Deputies. By contrast, Yeltsin had been elected President of the Russian Republic by a landslide, with millions supporting him. He had faced down the coup plotters in the Baltic States and in Moscow. There could be no doubt as to who was now in charge.

By the end of 1991, it was clear that the Soviet Union was coming to an end. In early December, I accompanied Rodric Braithwaite when he went to call on Gorbachev. Len Appleyard, the FCO Political Director, who was on a visit to Moscow and Kiev, came too.

The call on Gorbachev took place in the evening. We walked down long echoing corridors, empty corridors, to Gorbachev’s office in the heart of the Kremlin. He had a couple of his close supporters with him. The meeting was very amicable but I had a slight sense of unreality. Gorbachev was very ready to engage and discuss a whole range of pressing issues and yet he had become if not an irrelevant figure, an increasingly isolated one. To me there was something valedictory about the occasion. It felt as though Gorbachev was in the last days of his regime, and so it proved. Three weeks after the meeting, on 25 December, he announced that he was resigning. It was the end of the Soviet Union.

I remember going to the Embassy on Christmas Day afternoon to send a telegram to London in effect saying that the Soviet Union was coming to an end. It was an extraordinary moment; seventy-four years of Soviet history had come to a full stop. As we were drafting the telegram, we were contacted by the Prime Minister’s Office. John Major had a message he wanted delivered to Gorbachev before he left the Kremlin. So I rang up David Chikvaidze, Gorbachev’s Chief of Staff, whom I had got to know a bit. When I told him that a personal message was on its way from Major to Gorbachev, he said they would wait. Several hours went by without our receiving it. Chikvaidze asked at least once where it had got to. When it arrived in the early evening, I got into my car and drove across the bridge to the Kremlin, where I was waved through one of the gates with the most cursory check and into one of the Kremlin courtyards. David Chikvaidze met me and I handed over the message. He thanked me, disappeared back into the building after which, as far as I know, they turned out the lights and left. I have since said to John Major, only halfjokingly, that I wonder whether his was the last communication ever sent to the last leader of the Soviet Union. Did Major have the last word? It certainly seemed surreal that the Kremlin staff were sitting waiting for a message from the British Prime Minister on what was Gorbachev’s last day in the Kremlin.

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The USSR formally came to an end a week later, at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Together with friends from the Embassy, we joined the crowds in Red Square to see in the New Year. It was not only the end of one year and the beginning of the next, it was the end of one era and the dawn of another. Communism, trumpeted as the irreversible culmination of history, had instead collapsed after seven decades. It was an extraordinary moment and everyone in Red Square knew it, although no-one knew what would come next.

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Documents 1

Russia 1990: The Lurch to the Right Annual Review by Sir Rodric Braithwaite: 2 January 1991 (FCO 28/10976)

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2

Power Struggle in the Soviet Union: The Baltic States, Gorbachev and Yeltsin Minute by Roderic Lyne: 18 January 1991 (FCO 28/10976)

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Secretary of State’s call on President Gorbachev Moscow Tel. No. 647: 21 March 1991 (FCO 28/10977)

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Soviet Union: The confrontation continues Moscow Tel. No. 804: 10 April 1991 (FCO 28/10977)

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Soviet Internal: The hardliners rally their forces Moscow Tel. No. 868: 19 April 1991 (FCO 28/10977)

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6

Gorbachev: A second wind for reform?

Moscow Tel. No. 1142: 3 June 1991 (FCO 28/10978)

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Gorbachev defeats the plotters Moscow Tel. No. 1313: 24 June 1991 (FCO 28/10978)

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Gorbachev and Yeltsin Letter from Geoff Murrell to Roderic Lyne: 18 July 1991 (FCO 28/10979)

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Central Committee Plenum, 25 July Moscow Tel. No. 1538: 26 July 1991 (FCO 28/10979)

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Gorbachev Overthrown Moscow Tel. No. 1694: 19 August 1991 (FCO 28/10991)

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Moscow, 19 August: The First Day of the Coup Moscow Tel. No. 1720: 20 August 1991 (FCO 28/10991)

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Record of the Prime Minister’s conversation with Mr Yeltsin 20 August 1991 (FCO 28/10991)

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Soviet Union: Sitrep Moscow Tel. No. 1751: 22 August 1991 (FCO 28/10991)

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Moscow, 21 August: The third day of the coup Moscow Tel. No. 1754: 22 August 1991 (FCO 28/10991)

62

15

Soviet Union: The Morning After Moscow Tel. No. 1758: 22 August 1991 (FCO 28/10991)

66

14

16

Gorbachev after the coup Moscow Tel. No. 1771: 23 August 1991 (FCO 28/10991)

69

17

Soviet Union after the coup Moscow Tel. No. 1777: 23 August 1991 (FCO 28/10979)

72

18

Moscow mourns its dead Moscow Tel. No. 1783: 25 August 1991 (FCO 28/10979)

76

19

Soviet Union: The revolution continues Moscow Tel. No. 1787: 25 August 1991 (FCO 28/10979)

78

20

Soviet Union: Aftermath of the coup Moscow Tel. No. 1869: 30 August 1991 (FCO 28/10979)

81

21

Prime Minister’s Visit: Meeting with Baltic Prime Ministers Moscow Tel. No. 1898: 2 September 1991 (FCO 28/11042)

87

22

Soviet Union: Congress concludes on Day Four Moscow Tel. No. 1955: 5 September 1991 (FCO 28/10979)

90

23

Gorbachev’s Last Stand Letter from Geoff Murrell to Roderic Lyne: 25 November 1991 (FCO 28/10980)

93

24

The End of the Union: Gorbachev’s Statement, 9 December Moscow Tel. No. 2702: 9 December 1991 (FCO 28/10980)

98

25

Gorbachev Resigns Moscow Tel. No. 2842: 25 December 1991 (FCO 28/10981)

100

26

Gorbachev Goes: The end of an era Moscow Tel. No. 2843: 25 December 1991 (FCO 28/10981)

102

27

Recognition of Former Soviet Republics Guidance Tel. No. 54: 31 December 1991 (FCO 28/10990)

105

28

Russia 1991: The Rubble of the Dictatorship Annual Review by Sir Rodric Braithwaite: 1 January 1992 (FCO 176/2)

107

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