As Kremlin aide Sergey Grigoryev put it, “Yeltsin had Gorbachev by the balls.” Ten hours of disputeĪfter 10 hours of dispute and argument in the Kremlin's Walnut Room, fuelled by vodka and cognac, the two antagonists reached a deal: on December 25th Gorbachev would announce his resignation as Soviet leader, and immediately afterwards Yeltsin would come to his office and take possession of the nuclear suitcase, the chemodanchik, which accompanied the president everywhere, thus symbolising to the world the peaceful transfer of power. Gorbachev had little option but to accede. The remaining Soviet republics soon followed but Gorbachev had refused to accept the inevitable until December 23rd, when Boris Yeltsin stormed into the Kremlin and demanded that a transition timetable be agreed so he could take over the building as president of newly independent Russia. Gorbachev's resignation had become inevitable three weeks earlier, on December 8th, when the leaders of the three Slav republics, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, met in a hunting lodge near the Polish border and declared that the USSR had ceased to exist. Thus the Soviet Union expired in a fake presidential office, crowded with Americans, and with the stroke of a German pen provided by a Western media executive. His Russian felt pen had not worked, so he had used a Mont Blanc ballpoint, offered to him by CNN president Tom Johnson, and which now rested in his inside breast pocket.
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