On the evening of Sunday, August 25, one day after Gorbachev stepped down as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and signed a decree on the transfer of party property, and the day on which Yeltsin signed his own decree seizing that property, Nikolai Kruchina, the sixty-three-year-old chief of staff of the Central Committee, went to his old office to discuss the property transfer with representatives of the Moscow government.
