478 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
in the speech to the Supreme Soviet.^27 As he explained to his aides,
he could not have alerted his president without giving him the chance
to dissuade him: ‘Not to leave, for me, would have meant political
suicide.’ Gorbachëv recognized that the decision was irreversible. He
simply asked Shevardnadze to stay in post until arrangements could be
made for a replacement.^28
Shevardnadze wanted to remain on good terms with Gorbachëv;
but he felt sure that his old partner would come under growing
pressure from the reactionary elements. Gorbachëv would be ‘forced
to use tough measures (deistvovat’ zhestko)’.^29 When they met on 30
December, Raisa was inconsolable: ‘I fear, above all, for our friend-
ship.’^30 Shevardnadze in the following days continued to defend his
resignation. He told associates that a plot was under way and that the
Soyuz organization was at the centre of it. He had predicted dictator-
ship, and hoped that Gorbachëv would wake up to the danger. He was
not very optimistic about this. Furthermore, in Shevardnadze’s opin-
ion, Russians like Gorbachëv were less alert than people from other
national groups – like himself – to the perils and nastiness of the cur-
rent ‘campaign of vilification’.^31 He never indicated his sources beyond
claiming – many years later, in his last volume of memoirs – that they
lay somewhere in the KGB and in certain Soviet embassies. He had
taken his information to Gorbachëv, who seemed only to pretend to
be listening.^32 The entire situation was deeply disturbing. And he could
not believe that Gorbachëv was not in receipt of the same signals of
alarm.^33
Other factors also had an influence. Shevardnadze was worn out.
Since 1985 he had lived like a nomad and failed to spend a single full
month in the USSR. He told Stepanov-Mamaladze that he envied him
the free time to take a trip to Tbilisi. He had not even been able to visit
his elderly father when he needed to.^34 Stepanov-Mamaladze, who was
as close to Shevardnadze as anyone, added that he had decided to
jump before he was pushed. Gorbachëv had a proven capacity for
ingratitude, having dropped so many of his loyal fellow reformers in
autumn 1990.^35 Tarasenko put it somewhat differently. He surmised
that Shevardnadze thought he had done most of the big things that he
could as Foreign Affairs Minister. Soviet policy had changed beyond
all recognition since 1985, and he had played an important part in the
process. But the relationship with Gorbachëv was no longer what it
had been. Shevardnadze was no longer one of Gorbachëv’s intimates.
Suspecting Gorbachëv would yield to pressure to use violence in the