ABSTRACT
According to Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev was a passive participant in this process. Gorbachev accepted all of these compromises without protest. A leader of the political organization Democratic Russia had spent an hour with Laptev, threatening to organize a demonstration of several hundred thousand people just outside the walls of the Kremlin if the Congress failed to act decisively to end the crisis now engulfing the state. Unlike Vladimir Lenin, Gorbachev had no need of the marines to master this assembly. He relied on the bullying tactics which had served him well in previous congresses. On the afternoon of 26 December, as Mikhail Gorbachev prepared for his farewell cocktail party, a strange gathering was taking place in the Kremlin room once reserved for meetings of the Communist Party Central Committee. Gorbachev’s last weeks in office were marked by frenetic activity in the service of an illusion. That he was an emperor unarmed was apparent to all except himself.
