During his first meeting with Bush in Moscow on July 30, Gorbachev urged his guest to speed up the Soviet Union’s admission to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which could provide a financial lifeline for the Soviet economy. In London, Gorbachev had refused to link the signing of the START agreement with his request for Soviet membership in the IMF and American financial assistance, trying to avoid the impression that he was selling out his country’s strategic interests for American cash. But in Moscow he was less shy about his financial expectations. “I ask once again in the presence of the delegation that the President instruct them to consider membership [[for the USSR]] in the IMF,” said Gorbachev. “I have big problems in the next 1–2 years. Call us what you like—associate members, half associate members. It is important for us to use that fund.” Bush was reluctant to commit himself to full membership and thus full financial support, as he had been at the London meeting of the G-7 earlier in the month. “We’re talking about exactly what you want, without the burden of full membership,” he replied.18
After lunch, Gorbachev invited his American guest of honor to take a stroll on the Kremlin grounds. They were immediately surrounded by dozens of reporters. “The KGB agents had to bowl people over to keep our group moving,” recalled Bush. “There were a few incidents, with staff members and press photographers pushed down, and a camera broken—but the ‘tank’ rolled forward and Gorbachev himself told the shoving press people to get out of the way.” Thousands of correspondents had descended on Moscow to cover the eagerly anticipated top-level encounter, and they were all anxious to catch a glimpse and snap a picture or two of the world’s most powerful leaders.
To some, the scene brought a sense of déjà vu. Three years earlier, Ronald Reagan had visited Moscow for the formal ratification of the intermediate-forces treaty, signed the previous year in Washington. Back then, Reagan and Gorbachev had also talked to ordinary Soviet citizens on Red Square. There was more symbolism than content in Reagan’s visit to Moscow. Bush’s visit now was all about content—he and Gorbachev were going to sign a new treaty, not just ratify an old one. But according to David Remnick, the future editor of the New Yorker and then Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, the Moscow “all-business” summit was nothing like Ronald Reagan’s visit, which had been full of drama and excitement. Remnick wrote in his dispatch from the Soviet capital, “Bush worked the crowd as if he were at a Yale mixer. ‘So,’ he said to a small clutch of Russian tourists, ‘are you all from Siberia?’” The hoped-for glamour was missing.19
One reason for the perceived lack of glamour was the personality of George Bush himself. A competent administrator and a cautious, responsible statesman, he was no match for his predecessor when it came to charisma. His Soviet host also outshone him in that regard. “Gorby,” as the outspoken Soviet leader had become known in the Western media since December 1987, when he won the hearts of the American people during his visit to the United States, was the center of attention. The solid but unspectacular Bush could not hold a candle to the animated general secretary. “In the image wars,” wrote Walter Goodman of the New York Times, “Mikhail S. Gorbachev, even in translation, effortlessly demolishes George Bush.” And yet, while Gorbachev was clearly the more engaging of the two grave diggers of the Cold War, it was generally acknowledged that Bush carried more political weight. According to Goodman, the Moscow summit “shattered the first rule of television, the one that says image defeats reality.”20
WHILE THE TWO LEADERS were busy discussing Soviet membership in the International Monetary Fund, their wives, Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbacheva, seized the opportunity presented by the summit to promote not only a new image of Soviet-American relations but also the personal political agendas of their husbands. Barbara Bush, in particular, took advantage of the media’s focus on the summit to appear on a number of American morning talk shows, laying to rest speculation that she did not want her husband to run for a second term on health grounds. Indeed, she virtually initiated his reelection campaign by claiming that he should run for the sake of his country. The success of the Moscow summit created the right atmosphere to kick off the campaign, and George Bush would make his own announcement to that effect immediately upon his return to Washington.
Despite differences of age and upbringing (Raisa was approximately seven years younger than her American counterpart), the two first ladies got along extremely well. It was a major change from the tense relationship between Raisa and Nancy Reagan, who had publicly taken issue with Raisa’s comment that the White House was more an official building and a museum than a place to live. Like many who knew Raisa, Nancy Reagan claimed that she preferred lecturing to conversation. The spirit of Nancy Reagan must have been hovering in the Moscow air in late July 1991 when Raisa Gorbacheva, responding to a journalist’s question about what she was currently whispering in her husband’s ear, remarked, “It was not I who spoke about whispering in my husband’s ear. Maybe it was someone else.” The reference was to an earlier comment of Nancy Reagan’s that Raisa had whispered the word “peace” to her husband. Raisa killed two birds with one stone, patronizing Nancy Reagan and deflecting accusations by her Soviet critics to the effect that she was unduly influencing her husband on matters of policy and official appointments.21
Raisa Gorbacheva and Barbara Bush had established good personal relations during the Gorbachevs’ visit to Washington in June 1990. While their husbands negotiated trade issues, Raisa had accompanied Barbara Bush to a commencement ceremony at Wellesley College, a women’s institution in Massachusetts. Originally Barbara had been scheduled to deliver a commencement address on her own, but 150 students signed a petition of protest against a keynote speaker who had dropped out of college after a year in order to marry and spend her life as a homemaker. The college administration changed the mood by inviting Raisa Gorbacheva to speak as well. Not only was she a career university teacher with a doctorate in sociology, but she was also extremely popular in the United States thanks to her husband’s policies. The fact that Raisa had studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy and technically held a degree in scientific communism was conveniently overlooked (her biography in the Moscow briefing book claimed that she had studied and taught philosophy). Given the controversy at Wellesley, the Soviets were originally reluctant to agree to that visit, but the Americans insisted. Raisa enjoyed the opportunity to meet with American students. She later claimed that their questions prompted her to write her autobiographical book I Hope, which promoted her husband’s policies at home and abroad.22
On the opening day of the Moscow summit, the first ladies toured Kremlin churches and museums and then took part in the unveiling of a sculptural composition donated to the city of Moscow in the name of Barbara Bush. It was a replica of “Make Way for Ducklings,” showing a mother duck leading eight ducklings, inspired by a popular 1941 children’s book by Robert McCloskey and installed in the Boston Public Garden, where the action of the book takes place. “There’s something magical about the thought of American children loving and playing with ducks in Boston while children in Moscow are doing the same,” said Barbara Bush at the ceremony. The Moscow donation was a way of continuing her domestic crusade for children’s literacy. But although the ducklings sculpture was intended to bridge cultural and ideological differences, it actually became a symbol of the difficulties encountered by the Moscow-Washington dialogue after the Cold War: American cultural and ideological imports, enthusiastically welcomed at first, did not thrive on local ground. While Muscovites and their children loved the ducklings, most of them had no knowledge of the story behind them. McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings was not available in Russian translation.23
ON JULY 31, 1991, THE SECOND DAY of the summit, soon after the clock on the Kremlin tower struck half past three, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev entered the Winter Garden of the Grand Kremlin Palace. Their brief encounter there was part of the elaborate Kremlin protocol that accompanied the signing of important internationa
l treaties. The two presidents proceeded down the ornamented stairs of the former tsarist palace to St. Vladimir Hall, a rectangular room decorated with pink marble panels, one of five reception halls named after the chivalric orders of the Russian Empire. The palace itself had been built by Tsar Nicholas I in the mid-nineteenth century to celebrate Russian military might and glory. After the Revolution of 1917, the communists had turned the palace into a venue for party and state functions, as well as for official receptions of foreign dignitaries.24
The nuclear arms reduction treaty was ready to be signed. It looked like the dawn of a new era, a triumph of reason over the madness that had kept the world in thrall far too long. “I really did feel emotionally involved at the ceremony,” recalled President Bush later. “For me this was more than a ritual; it offered hope for young people all around the world that idealism was not dead.” Mikhail Gorbachev was no less moved than his guest of honor. When Bush mentioned in his speech half a century of growing military arsenals, Gorbachev remarked, “Thank God, as we say in Russian, that we stopped this.” He called the treaty “an event of global significance, for we are imparting to the dismantling of the infrastructure of fear that has ruled the world a momentum which is so powerful that it will be hard to stop.”25
By signing the START agreement, the two leaders solemnly agreed not to deploy more than six thousand nuclear warheads against each other and limited each side’s number of intercontinental missiles capable of carrying the warheads to sixteen hundred. Bush and Gorbachev also managed to go beyond the arms control and arms reduction agenda that had dominated Soviet-American relations for most of the previous thirty years. In a sign that the ideological confrontation of the Cold War era was also nearing its end, Bush pledged to ask Congress to grant the Soviet Union most-favored-nation trade status—a privilege heretofore withheld from the USSR on grounds of its violation of human rights and denial of exit visas to its Jewish citizens.
There were also signs of growing cooperation in the international arena. The two presidents issued a joint communiqué on the Middle East, promising to work together to summon an international conference on regional security and cooperation. The Soviets would strive to bring the Palestinians to the table, and the Americans would do likewise with the Israelis. Both presidents would send their foreign secretaries to Israel, where the US secretary of state, James Baker, would discuss the proposed conference while his Soviet counterpart, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, negotiated the opening of full diplomatic relations between Israel and the USSR. Some newspapers claimed that the Middle East announcement almost overshadowed the signing of the START agreement. Finally, there was a basic understanding on Cuba: in order to accommodate American demands, the Soviets promised to curtail their economic support of Fidel Castro’s regime. There seemed to be no bilateral or international issue that the leaders of the two formerly hostile superpowers could not deal with and eventually resolve.26
Bush and Gorbachev had come to the signing ceremony at the Grand Kremlin Palace from the Soviet president’s country residence in Novo-Ogarevo, near Moscow. There they had spent five hours discussing world affairs with no preset agenda and tried to delineate a new world order to follow the abolition of the balance of nuclear terror. Gorbachev later called those informal talks a “moment of glory” for his foreign policy approach, which he dubbed “the new thinking.” For him, they marked a turning point in the formulation of “a joint policy of powers that had until only recently considered themselves mortal enemies and had in their enmity been prepared to push the entire world towards catastrophe.” If it were up to Gorbachev, the world would have become a Soviet-American condominium in which the two countries would not only live in peace but also resolve all international problems to their mutual satisfaction.27
Sitting on an open porch overlooking the Moskva River, Gorbachev presented his vision of a new world order to the American president. Gorbachev’s interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, later recalled the gist of his boss’s argument: “The world is getting increasingly diverse and multipolar, but in this world there needs to be a kind of axis, which our two countries could provide.” The Soviet leader did not use the axis metaphor in his own memoirs, but there is little doubt that it well reflected the essence of his thinking. Gorbachev was prepared to discuss a broad range of issues. He wanted a joint US-Soviet policy on the European Union, which appeared to be gaining not only political and economic power but also military strength. He also wanted a common front in dealing with Japan, India and China, with their 2 billion people, were on the rise; there was also the ever-troublesome Middle East and the undetermined role of Africa in the world balance of power.
Bush was receptive but, as always, cautious. Privately, he must have been more than skeptical. In his memoirs, Bush wrote, “Gorbachev began with a lengthy monologue, during which I barely managed to squeeze in a comment.” The Soviets, however, believed that this was no mere monologue. “Bush agreed,” recalled Palazhchenko, “not in so many words, but in the way he was willing to discuss with Gorbachev in cooperative mode matters the United States would not have allowed the Soviet Union even to touch before.” Bush assured his host that despite pressures from both the right and left of the American political spectrum, he was committed to the success of Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union. While the Right wanted to take advantage of Soviet weakness to destroy its Cold War rival and the Left lamented continuing violations of human rights in the USSR, Bush was against taking advantage of Soviet vulnerabilities.
The Soviets felt that they had been heard. They were euphoric. Gorbachev later remembered nostalgically that “we were living for the future.” Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser, Anatolii Cherniaev, one of the few Soviet officials who participated in the informal brainstorming session at Novo-Ogarevo, recorded these thoughts in his diary a few days later: “Our relations are closer than those with our ‘friends’ in the socialist countries used to be. There is no pharisaism or hypocrisy; no paternalism, backslapping, and subordination.”28
The conversations that so greatly impressed the Soviets, who were desperate for support and hungry for recognition as equals by their new American partner, barely registered on the American radar. Brent Scowcroft, experienced and no less cautious than Bush, later recalled his feelings after the summit: “It had been a satisfactory set of talks. We finally had put START I to bed, a large step on the road to rationalizing strategic nuclear forces in a new era.”29 In his memoirs, recalling the Novo-Ogarevo conversations, Bush made no mention of any Soviet overtures concerning a joint Soviet-American policy. The Soviets knew that he was listening, but did he hear them?
An episode at the press conference following the signing of the START agreement became a metaphor for the Bush-Gorbachev dialogue about a special relationship. When Gorbachev began his preliminary remarks, praising the spirit and results of the summit, Bush, who was using an earpiece for simultaneous translation, turned to his host and said with a smile, “I have not heard a word you said.” There was a problem with the equipment. “Do you hear me now? Do you hear me now?” asked the worried Gorbachev. Bush heard him clearly in Russian but did not understand a word. The confusion lasted a few more minutes until finally the system was fixed. “I understand you are almost in complete agreement with me?” asked Gorbachev after the mini-crisis was over. Bush got the translated message and responded in his trademark way: “What I heard, I liked.”
Judging by Bush’s memoirs, Gorbachev’s overtures to him at Novo-Ogarevo regarding the creation of a joint Soviet-American world order were lost in translation. Gorbachev was daydreaming.30
2
THE PARTY CRASHER
ON THE EVENING OF JULY 31, 1991, George and Barbara Bush hosted a reception for their Soviet guests at Spaso House, the official residence of the American ambassador in downtown Moscow. Next morning they would leave for Kyiv. The guests, apart from Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, included republican leaders, the most prominent among them being the newly elected presi
dent of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. There were also members of Gorbachev’s government, including the minister of defense, Marshal Dmitrii Yazov, and KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov. They were treated to a dinner of watercress soup with sesame seeds, roast tenderloin of beef with truffle sauce, and roasted potatoes. The waiters served 1970 Beaulieu Vineyards Georges de Latour cabernet sauvignon, 1987 Iron Horse Brut Summit Cuvée, and 1990 Cuvaison chardonnay. Coffee, tea, and sweets rounded out the menu.1
In his welcoming remarks at the reception, George Bush went out of his way to praise his Soviet counterpart. He knew what difficulties lay ahead for Gorbachev and what serious opposition he was facing in his own government. Bush declared, “I believe the signing of that treaty offers hope beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, beyond the borders of the United States of America, all across the world. I really believe that from the bottom of my heart.” He raised his glass in a toast to his guests, especially Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he called a man “that I respect and admire, a man whose deeds during the past 6 years have given hope to those who believe, as I do, that one individual can change the world for the better.” Bush continued, “I salute President Gorbachev, then, and I say that we leave confident, more confident than when I came here, that we can, together, build a lasting peace and, with it, a brighter tomorrow for our children.”2
The Last Empire Page 4