A Choice for Russia: The Diary of a Political Leader?

A diary kept during and immediately after the August Emergency and published eleven years later, A Choice for Russia remains one of the few sustained personal testimonies from the highest levels of negotiation during the transformation of the collapsing Soviet Union into the Union of Soviet Sovereign States. The author, a senior advisor to Boris Yeltsin throughout 1991 and 1992, recorded his daily observations from the month of the Emergency through the signing of the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords in March, and continued sporadically through the implementation crises of 1993 and 1994.

The diary's greatest value lies not in its revelations—most major decisions are documented elsewhere—but in its texture. The author records the small decisions that shaped the whole: which phone calls were made in what order, whose counsel Yeltsin actually followed, where Mikhail Gorbachev was weak and where he was immovable. The tone is often anxious and sometimes bitter. On September 3, 1991, the author notes: "The generals will not accept a union where they have no centre. But the republics will not accept a centre with generals in it. These two things cannot both be true, and yet we are told to make them both true."

By October, the author had become convinced that rapid collapse was more likely than any stable refounding. The Russian Sovereign Republic had the economic weight to break away entirely; Kazakhstan and the Central Asian republics had the room. What held them together, he observed, was not shared purpose but exhaustion and the fear of what would follow fragmentation. "No one knows what comes after," he wrote in November. "This makes people careful."

The Novo-Ogaryovo Negotiations themselves occupy much of the diary, from the first session in December 1991 through March. The author provides the only detailed personal account of how Gorbachev and Yeltsin navigated their radically different visions of what the Union could become: Gorbachev hoping to preserve the shell of centralized federation, Yeltsin accepting a confederation because the republics would accept nothing less. The author, positioned between them as an intermediary on technical points, records moments of genuine closeness—Gorbachev at one point nearly accepting a model that would have given him a figurehead role—and moments of intransigence neither man later acknowledged.

The Compromise of Sochi of 1993 and 1994 receives thorough treatment. The author was present during the price liberalization crisis, when the gap between centrally set and market prices threatened to shatter the economic coordination that held the Union together. His account shows a Russian Sovereign Republic increasingly willing to break the agreement rather than accept what it saw as economic sabotage from the centre, and a Union premier—by then Gorbachev had departed the premiership—struggling to hold both sides to any arrangement at all. The author's own position had become clearer by this point: he did not believe the Union could survive in any meaningful form, and he records his growing conviction that this was not a tragedy but an inevitable consequence of asking nine republics with radically different interests to govern themselves as a whole.

The diary ends in mid-1994, as the author departed government. In a brief epilogue written at the time of publication in 2003, he offered a judgment that has become common among Union politicians: that Gorbachev's achievement was less the creation of a federation than the prevention of civil war through the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords. The Union of Soviet Sovereign States that emerged was always fragmentary, always temporary-seeming. But it lasted, and that duration—through the currency crisis of 1998, through the gradual devolution of power to the republics, through the Tyumen Compact that finally made the Siberian regions economically autonomous—was itself a choice, made and remade by people who believed alternatives were worse.

The diary was published by the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library in a limited scholarly edition and gained a wider readership after the 2005 Blagoveshchensk Framework gave the Russian Sovereign Republic a secondary role to China in Union economic planning. Readers recognized in it an explanation of how a man who had shaped the Union's founding had come to see its hollowing as the intended outcome all along.