The Last Empire

by Serhii Plokhy

  My main argument is closley linked to the idea that the fate of the Soviet Union was decided in the last four months of its existence, between the coup that began on August 19 and the meeting of the leaders of the Soviet republics in Almaty on December 21, 1991. I argue that the most important factor in deciding the future of the last world empire was not the policy of the United States, the conflict between the Union center and Russia (respectively represented by Gorbachev and Yeltsin), or tensions between the Union center and other republics, but rather the relationship between the two largest Soviet republics, Russia and Ukraine. It was the unwillingness of their political elites to find a modus vivendi within one state structure that drove the final nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union.

  On December 8, in a hunting lodge in the Belarusian forest of Belavezha, having failed to reach agreement on the basis of Gorbachev’s proposed template for the creation of a new Union, Yeltsin and Kravchuk decided to dissolve the USSR and opt instead for the creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States. The Belarusian leaders who played host to the two presidents in Belavezha did not imagine the Union without Russia. Neither did the presidents of the Central Asian republics, who had no choice but to follow suit. A Gorbachev-led Union without Russia or Ukraine did not appeal to anyone. George H. W. Bush contributed to the dissolution of the world’s last empire mainly by helping to ensure that the process occurred without major conflict or proliferation of nuclear arms.

  In the two decades that have passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, many of the principals in my story have published their memoirs. These include books by George H. W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Leonid Kravchuk, as well as the recollections of their advisers and other participants. While the stories told by eyewitnesses and participants in the events contain a wealth of information and some make for interesting reading, they often fail to present the bigger picture and explain the full meaning of the events they describe. Journalistic accounts, while indispensable for grasping the mood of the time and the feelings of the main actors and people in the street, appeared at a time when confidential documents were still unavailable to the public and participants at the highest levels were reluctant to talk. I have overcome these limitations of many of my predecessors by supplementing their accounts with material drawn from interviews with participants in the events and, most important, with archival documents, which have become available only recently.

  As noted above, this book takes advantage of recently declassified American documents made available to scholars through the George Bush Presidential Library. These include National Security Council files, the correspondence of White House officials responsible for the president’s travel abroad, and transcripts of meetings and telephone conversations conducted by President Bush, some of which I acquired through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Combined with other primary sources from the National Archives in Washington, the James A. Baker Papers at Princeton, and the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow, these new materials allow me to tell the story of the Soviet collapse with a degree of detail unmatched by earlier writers. I was fortunate enough to interview some of the individuals involved personally, including Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislaŭ Shushkevich of Belarus.

  The historical sources that I consulted in writing this book helped answer many “how” questions and quite a few “why” questions. My answers to the second set of queries generally began with an attempt to grasp the ideological, cultural, and personal motives of the leaders at the center of my narrative and learn the information that informed their decisions. I hope that my discussion of both sets of questions will not only shed light on the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union but also help explain the chronic difficulties of the two principal stakeholders in the Union, Russia and Ukraine, in finding a modus vivendi after 1991. I also hope that this book will prove useful to readers trying to understand the involvement of the United States in the Soviet collapse and the role that America should play in a world still largely shaped by decisions made back in 1991. Misunderstanding the reasons for the fall of a rival empire may very well result not only in imperial hubris but also in the decline of one’s own empire, whether it uses that name as a self-description or not.

  I.

  THE LAST SUMMIT

  1

  MEETING IN MOSCOW

  A SUMMIT IS THE TOP OF A MOUNTAIN. The word has also been used to denote a supreme achievement, but it was not until 1953 that it entered the vocabulary of diplomacy. That year, as two brave mountain climbers finally conquered Everest, Winston Churchill spoke in the British parliament of a will to peace “at the summit of the nations.” Two years later, when the word was applied to the meeting of Soviet and Western leaders in Geneva, it gained popularity. The world of international politics badly needed a new term for diplomatic meetings at the highest level, which had become an important feature of international relations since the 1930s. “Summit” fit the bill. Although rulers had met to discuss mutual relations since time immemorial, such meetings were quite rare before the age of air travel. The airplane not only revolutionized warfare but also had the same effect on diplomacy, which aimed to prevent war. And so diplomacy took to the skies.

  Modern summitry was born in September 1938, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain flew to Germany to try to convince Adolf Hitler not to attack Czechoslovakia. In the course of World War II, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin gave a new boost to the practice of personal diplomacy, which did not yet have a proper name. Summitry reached its peak during the Cold War, as meetings between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy, and then Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon, captured the attention of the world media, but it was not until the very end of the conflict that the Soviets adopted the Western term for their own use. In the summer of 1991, in a dramatic shift symptomatic of larger political and ideological changes in Moscow and around the world, Soviet newspapers dropped their preferred term, “a meeting at the highest level,” and replaced it with the English “summit.” This was a pyrrhic victory for a term that would virtually disappear from international relations within the next decade.1

  The “meeting at the highest level” for which the Soviets had changed their diplomatic terminology was scheduled to take place on July 30 and 31, 1991, between the forty-first president of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush, and the first president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev. The summit was long in preparation, but its final date was decided a few short weeks before the event. Until the very end, Soviet and American experts found it difficult to iron out every last detail of the historic treaty that the two presidents were going to sign in Moscow. Bush wanted to do so as soon as possible. No one knew how long Gorbachev would remain in the Kremlin and how long the opportunity to reach agreement would last.

  The Bush-Gorbachev meeting in Moscow was presented by the White House to the media as the first post–Cold War summit. What George H. W. Bush was going to sign with Mikhail Gorbachev was a treaty that was supposed to launch the two superpowers into a new era of mutual trust and cooperation, starting with issues as sensitive as nuclear weapons. START I, or the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which was finally ready for signature after nine years of negotiations, called for the reduction of overall nuclear arsenals by roughly 30 percent and of Soviet intercontinental missiles, largely aimed at the United States, by up to 50 percent. In the forty-seven-page treaty, accompanied by seven hundred pages of protocols, the two presidents would agree not just to curb the arms race but also to begin reversing it.2

  The confrontation between the world’s two most powerful countries, which began soon after World War II and had brought the planet to the brink of nuclear Armageddon, was now all but over. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, German reunification under way, and Mikhail Gorbachev adopting the “Sinatra doctrine,” which allowed Moscow’s East European clients to “do it their way” and eventually leave the Kr
emlin’s embrace, the conflict at the core of the Cold War was resolved. Soviet troops began to leave East Germany and other countries of the region. But the nuclear arsenals were virtually unaffected by these changes in the political climate. The famous Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once remarked that if there was a gun onstage in the first act of a play, it would be fired in the next. The two superpowers had placed plenty of nuclear arms on the world stage. Sooner or later there would be a second act involving different actors who might want to fire them.

  Nuclear arms were an integral element of the Cold War, responsible both for its most dangerous turns and for the fact that the two superpowers, the first to possess atomic weapons, never entered into a direct, open conflict—the risk of nuclear annihilation was too great. With a divided Germany at the center of the Cold War geopolitical contest, the United States, which acquired the atomic bomb in the summer of 1945, felt safe in the face of the overwhelming preponderance of Soviet conventional forces in Central and Eastern Europe, occupied and then subjected to communist rule by Joseph Stalin. But if the Americans felt safe, the Soviets did not. They intensified their efforts to acquire an atomic bomb, and in 1949, with the help of technological secrets stolen from the United States, they succeeded in producing their own nuclear weapon.

  The world now had two nuclear powers, and, if the Korean War was an indication of things to come, they were on a collision course. They tried to outdo each other by developing a new generation of nuclear arms. In the 1950s both countries acquired the hydrogen bomb, far more powerful and much more difficult to control than the atomic bomb. When the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit in the fall of 1957, demonstrating that they had missiles capable of delivering bombs to the United States, the world entered a new and significantly more dangerous stage of rivalry between the two superpowers. After Stalin’s death in 1953, his successors were more open to the possibility of dialogue with the West, but, riding high on recent Soviet successes in missile technology (they were the first to put an unmanned satellite and then a manned one into orbit), they were often unpredictable and thus even more dangerous than their predecessor.

  Under Khrushchev and Kennedy, the two powers found themselves on the brink of nuclear war over the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba in October 1962. By that time, Soviet-American competition extended around the globe. It had begun over the fate of Eastern Europe, captured and never released by the Soviets, and spread to Asia when China went communist in 1949 and Korea was permanently divided a few years later. The crumbling of the British and French empires in the 1950s opened the rest of Asia and Africa to great-power competition, and once Cuba under Fidel Castro turned to the Soviet Union for military assistance and ideological inspiration, Latin America also became a battleground.

  The Cuban crisis of October 1962 was resolved by compromise—the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba and the Americans theirs from Turkey—but both Kennedy and Khrushchev were shaken by the experience. Something had to be done to reduce tensions and the danger of nuclear war. In 1963 the two leaders signed the first accord to bring the nuclear arms race under control—the Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. It had taken eight years to negotiate such a document, and the beginning was modest indeed, but it was a step in the right direction. From then on, while continuing to compete globally and fighting proxy wars throughout the world, from Vietnam to Angola, the two superpowers kept negotiating to reduce their nuclear arsenals, finding solace in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD), according to which both countries had enough weapons to wipe each other off the face of the earth and were thus obliged to negotiate in order to survive.

  Nixon flew to Moscow in May 1972 to sign SALT I—the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty—with Brezhnev, and President Jimmy Carter flew to Vienna in 1979 to sign SALT II with the same leader. Both treaties placed caps on the production of nuclear weapons. But SALT II was quickly followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the American boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympic Games a year later. The next American president, Ronald Reagan, wanted to restore the spirits and international standing of the United States after the Vietnam debacle. In the Soviet Union, the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 unleashed a succession crisis in the Kremlin. International tensions rose, threatening for the first time since the early 1960s to turn the Cold War into a hot one.3

  On September 1, 1983, near Sakhalin Island, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, including a sitting member of the US Congress. They then awaited American retaliation. Later that month, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces Command near Moscow saw a blip on his radar screen indicating a missile headed toward the USSR. Then he saw what appeared to be four more missiles headed in the same direction. Suspecting a computer malfunction, he did not report the image to his superiors. Had he done so, nuclear war between the two powers might well have become a reality. It turned out that a rare alignment of sunlight and clouds had caused a glitch in the Soviet early-warning system. Petrov was later celebrated as a hero. However, what impelled him to help save the world from nuclear war was not a belief that the Americans would not strike first but his conviction that an American assault would start with hundreds of missiles, not one or four. After what became known as the Petrov incident, the Soviets continued to await an American attack.4

  In November of the same year, the Soviets mistook the Able Archer NATO exercises in Europe for preparations leading up to nuclear war. All their spy stations abroad were placed on high alert to detect signs of the coming Armageddon. That same month, 100 million Americans watched the premiere of The Day After, a made-for-TV film in which the inhabitants of Lawrence, Kansas, coped with a nuclear attack. Many credited the film with changing the tone of President Reagan’s rhetoric toward the Soviet Union. Whereas in March 1983 he had referred to the USSR as an “evil empire,” in January 1984 he made his famous “Ivan and Anya” speech, talking about the desire of the Soviet and American peoples to live in peace. “Just suppose with me for a moment,” Reagan told a surprised nation in January 1984, “that an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, say, in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm with a Jim and Sally, and there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted. Would they then debate the differences between their respective governments? Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living?”5

  IT TOOK MORE THAN A CHANGE OF RHETORIC to switch the focus of Soviet-American relations from the interests of the superpowers to those of ordinary people. George H. W. Bush knew that better than anyone else. For a good part of the Cold War he had helped make American policy toward the Soviet Union, often holding positions of the utmost responsibility. Born in June 1924 to the family of a US senator in the American Northeast, the young Bush joined the US Navy on hearing the news about Pearl Harbor, postponing his studies at Yale. At the age of nineteen, he became the youngest naval aviator in the American forces and flew fifty-eight combat missions in the course of the war. In January 1945, while on leave from his duties in the Pacific, he married the nineteen-year-old Barbara Pierce, who became the mother of his six children. Their first child, the future US president George Walker Bush, was born in 1946, while George senior was studying economics at Yale. After completing the four-year program in two and a half years, the elder Bush, unexpectedly for a man of his origins and upbringing, moved his family to Texas to start a career in the oil business. By the time he turned to politics in the mid-1960s, he was already the millionaire president of an oil company specializing in offshore drilling.

  George Bush’s international career began at the dawn of détente in Soviet-American relations. In 1971, President Nixon appointed the forty-five-year-old former Republican congressman from Houston to serve as US representative to the United Nations. With his patron out of office in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Bush found himself in the role of chief architect of the US-C
hinese rapprochement initiated by Nixon. He spent fourteen months as head of the US liaison office in Beijing, helping to build an alliance then aimed primarily against the USSR. In 1976, Bush returned to Washington to head the Central Intelligence Agency, where he presided over US covert operations in Angola directed against the Cuban-backed government of Angola’s first president, Agostinho Neto. As director of the Council on Foreign Relations between 1977 and 1979, Bush witnessed from the front row the deterioration of Soviet-American relations during the last years of Jimmy Carter’s administration.

  In 1981, George H. W. Bush became the forty-third vice president of his country. The man at the top of his ticket, Ronald Reagan, dramatically raised the level of anti-Soviet rhetoric in Washington. He built up American military capability and boosted the nation’s morale in the wake of the Vietnam debacle and the economic crisis of the late 1970s. But Reagan was also looking for a Soviet leader with whom he could negotiate the reduction of both sides’ nuclear arsenals. It was a frustrating search, as the Soviet leaders kept dying on him. Soon after Reagan came up with his START initiative, Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982. His successor, the former KGB chief Yurii Andropov, followed suit in February 1984. Finally, Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, passed away in March 1985. Representing his country at the funerals of the Soviet leaders, George Bush became a frequent guest in Moscow in the 1980s. At home he became known as a man with a motto: “You die, I fly.” It was at Chernenko’s funeral, in March 1985, that Bush first met and greeted a new Soviet leader, the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev.6