Gorbachev had to accept the results of the first presidential elections in Russia—his former protégé, now his opponent, became the first president of the Russian Federation thanks to a popular mandate that Gorbachev himself lacked. Gorbachev had become president of the Soviet Union on the basis of ballots cast by members of the Soviet parliament. He now found himself obliged to deal with Yeltsin.
On the eve of President Bush’s visit to Moscow, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the leader of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, finally agreed on the conditions of the new union treaty. It was a major victory for the republics. They would be declared sole owners of natural resources on their territories and would reserve for themselves the right to decide what contributions, in what amounts, they would make to the Union budget. The Union government was to maintain control over the military and national security, but not foreign policy, which was to be decided in consultation with the republics. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Nazarbayev also agreed on changes in government: the hard-liners brought in by Gorbachev were to go, and Nazarbayev would form and lead the new cabinet. The new union treaty was to be signed on August 20, 1991.21
BORIS YELTSIN, WHO HAD EMBARRASSED Gorbachev at his own party and then at the Spaso House reception hosted by Bush, was not just the popularly elected leader of the Union’s largest republic; he was also about to take control of most of the Union’s oil and gas resources. The state of the Union’s coffers and, possibly, the salary of Mikhail Gorbachev himself would depend on Yeltsin’s goodwill. No matter how embarrassed and annoyed Gorbachev was by Yeltsin’s bizarre behavior, he had no choice but to tolerate it. The same seemed to apply to the president of the United States. The gift prepared by Bush’s staffers for Yeltsin—a Tiffany sterling silver bowl priced at $490—was more expensive than those for the other members of the Soviet leadership, including Gorbachev. The Soviet president received a copy of the first American edition of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which appeared on the gift list without a price. The White House still put most of its geopolitical eggs in Gorbachev’s basket. His gift was priceless.22
President Bush first met Yeltsin during his initial visit to the United States in September 1989. In the course of that trip Yeltsin, then a deputy to the Soviet parliament, visited eleven cities, gave numerous lectures on American campuses, appeared on Good Morning America, visited the Johnson Space Center and the Mayo Clinic, and met with American business leaders and politicians all over the United States, including Texas and Florida. Yeltsin called the trip the realization of a lifelong dream. After circling the Statue of Liberty twice on a helicopter, Yeltsin told one of his associates that he had become “doubly free.” Nor did he hide his feelings in public. If anything, he was eager to outdo Gorbachev and charm the American public away from him.
“All my impressions of capitalism, of the United States, of Americans that have been pounded into me over the years, including by the Short History of the Communist Party—all of them have changed 180 degrees in the day and a half I have been here,” he told the press. But his strongest impression, like that of almost every Soviet citizen visiting the United States for the first time, occurred in a supermarket. The abundance and diversity of products he encountered in a Houston emporium contrasted sharply with the empty shelves of Soviet stores. It was during this trip, according to one of his advisers, that “the last drop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevik consciousness decomposed.”23
Yeltsin’s visit to the United States included a short stopover at the White House, where he met with George Bush. The visit left a bitter aftertaste among the presidential advisers who had arranged the meeting. While Bush wanted to see Yeltsin and learn his opinion of developments in the Soviet Union, he wanted to do so in a way that would not offend Gorbachev, who by the fall of 1989 considered Yeltsin his archenemy. Yeltsin was invited to the White House, but his official appointment was with Brent Scowcroft, not with the president, and that created problems. “He had been told,” recalled Robert M. Gates, the future head of the CIA and secretary of defense, who was then serving as deputy national security adviser, “that he probably would see the President, but because we wanted as low key a visit as possible he was not given absolute assurances.” When Condoleezza Rice, the Soviet Union expert on the National Security Council, brought Yeltsin into the White House through the basement entrance of the West Wing, he asked whether that was an entrance used by visitors to the president and refused to go any farther unless he was assured that he would see Bush. Rice told Yeltsin that if he was not going to see Scowcroft, he could leave the White House and go back to his hotel.
Yeltsin finally dropped his objections and went to see Scowcroft, to whom he presented his vision of how the United States could help the Soviet economy. Scowcroft was not interested and, according to Gates, almost fell asleep. Everything changed when Bush dropped by Scowcroft’s office. “Chameleonlike, Yeltsin was transformed,” recalled Gates. “He came alive, was enthusiastic, interesting. Plainly, in his view someone had arrived worth talking to—someone powerful.” Bush confirmed his support for Gorbachev, but Yeltsin had achieved his goal of meeting with the president of the United States. As soon as he left the White House, he approached the reporters waiting on the lawn and gave an account of his meeting to the world. “It was not the quiet, uneventful conclusion to the visit we had hoped,” remembered Scowcroft, “but no harm was done.”24
Boris Yeltsin made a positive impression on Bush, but Scowcroft found the future Russian president devious, and judging by his memoirs, he never fully shed that impression. Yeltsin’s early advocates in the administration, including Rice and Gates, were appalled by his uncouth and unpredictable behavior. Recalling the visit, Gates wrote in his memoirs, “He apparently drank too much, gave a poor account of himself in a speech at Johns Hopkins University, and was generally boorish.” Nevertheless, the people around Bush could not help noting the shift of power in Moscow in the spring of 1990, after the first semi-free elections to the republican parliaments. Although Gorbachev was the choice of Western politicians and the favorite of the Western public, there was no denying that the mercurial Yeltsin was on the rise.
In June 1990, a week after Yeltsin’s election as chairman of the Russian parliament, Gates sent a memo to George Bush saying that Yeltsin “has proved himself remarkably adept at using the new rules of the system to reemerge as a political leader. He appears to be an effective and popular politician, however erratic.” Gates recommended avoiding any negative comments about Yeltsin: “We may someday find ourselves across the table from him.” Bush was in agreement. Yeltsin’s next visit to the United States took place in June 1991, soon after his election to the Russian presidency. It was a huge success that improved his standing with the American administration. Bush and Yeltsin placed a joint call to Gorbachev in Moscow, warning him about a possible coup attempt by hard-liners—the information came through American diplomatic channels from a Yeltsin ally in Moscow. Yeltsin’s relations with the Bush administration, which had begun with a faux pas in the fall of 1989, were now back on track, or so it seemed for a time.25
Bush’s official visit to Moscow in July 1991 included a meeting with the Russian president. Bush met him in the late morning of July 30. Gorbachev, who wanted to prevent Bush from meeting Yeltsin without him, invited Yeltsin and Nazarbayev to a luncheon with the American president. They were supposed to join Bush’s and Gorbachev’s advisers, who were also invited to the event. The meeting with the American president, which Yeltsin and Nazarbayev were eager to have, would take place, but under Gorbachev’s control and supervision. Nazarbayev accepted and took the opportunity to lobby the US president for investments in Kazakhstan’s natural resources sector, but Yeltsin refused to play the role assigned to him by the Soviet leader and take part in what he called a “faceless mass audience.” Instead of coming to the luncheon, he invited Bush to visit him in his new Kremlin office. Bush accepted the invitation.26
The Bush-Yeltsin meeting lasted approximately forty minutes and
dealt largely with the problems of the new union treaty initiated by Gorbachev and supported by Yeltsin. The meeting itself was a sign of the special status accorded to Yeltsin by the White House. Judging by Bush’s talking points, his main task was to assure Yeltsin of American support for the policy of reform, both his and Gorbachev’s, while forestalling any possible initiative on Yeltsin’s part either to open a Russian representation in the United States or to sign an official agreement on cooperation with the United States. “As you know, we cannot establish diplomatic relations with your republic, which we recognize to be a constituent part of the USSR,” Bush was supposed to tell Yeltsin. He held to that line at the meeting. When Yeltsin asked him, “Do I understand that you support my idea of formalizing the basics of our relationship?” Bush responded, not very diplomatically, “Which relationship? Do you mean the U.S. and Russia or yours with the center? I am unclear about what you are asking.” Secretary of State James Baker, who was present, “translated” Bush’s answer to the disappointed Yeltsin: “President Yeltsin, the answer will depend on what the Union treaty says about the authority of the republics to enter into agreements with other countries. We will have to see this new Union treaty.”27
If by inviting Bush to visit him in his new Kremlin office Yeltsin was seeking to build up his image as an independent world leader in the eyes of his domestic audience, he certainly succeeded. If he wanted to poke Gorbachev in the eye, he succeeded as well. Gorbachev recalled the episode with bitterness in his memoirs. But if Yeltsin wanted to improve his relations with the American president, he failed completely. Bush was furious with Yeltsin for being almost ten minutes late. “How long are we supposed to wait for His Highness?” complained Scowcroft. The originally planned fifteen-minute courtesy call was then extended to forty minutes, with Yeltsin repeating the points he had made to Bush during their private meeting to a group of Russian and American advisers who joined the two presidents afterward. Yeltsin then sprang another surprise when he attempted to hold an impromptu press conference with journalists who had been brought to the Kremlin without Bush’s consent. He told them that the two sides had already prepared a draft agreement on Russian-American cooperation, for which he was grateful to President Bush. Bush swallowed the bitter pill, but as Yeltsin was getting ready to answer the journalists’ questions, the president told him that he was already late and had to leave. Getting into his car, Bush told Scowcroft that he had been ambushed by the “grandstanding” Yeltsin.28
What happened at the Moscow summit reminded Bush and Scowcroft of the erratic politician they had first met in September 1989. But however boorish, childish, and unpredictable Yeltsin’s behavior turned out to be, Bush was increasingly finding more common ground with him than with Gorbachev. In the summer of 1991, one of the most important questions on Bush’s Soviet agenda was the independence of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—a cause supported by many members of the US Senate and Congress. Bush was gently pushing Gorbachev toward recognition of Lithuanian and Latvian independence, declared in 1990. If Gorbachev was indecisive, Yeltsin was not. On behalf of Russia, Yeltsin had condemned the actions of the center during the crackdown of early 1991 and supported the Baltic drive for independence. Now, standing next to Bush, he restated his support for that cause. He told the reporters he had gathered without Bush’s consent that Russia and the United States had a joint position on the Baltics: the three republics should be allowed to leave. It was a position that Gorbachev did not dare to take.29
George Bush would leave Moscow the next day as concerned about the threat to Gorbachev from his own military as about the challenges posed by the republican leaders. Yeltsin was the most outspoken of them, but he was not the only one who wanted a weaker center and more freedom for his homeland.
3
CHICKEN KIEV
SHORTLY BEFORE NOON ON AUGUST 1, 1991, George Bush’s Air Force One took off from Sheremetevo International Airport near Moscow and headed for Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine and the third-largest urban center in the Soviet Union. In early 1991, approximately forty US nuclear warheads were aimed at the city known in Russian as Kiev. In case of a nuclear exchange, multiple nuclear blasts would have turned the city into rubble and killed all of its more than 2 million citizens. The signing of the START agreement meant that the city would be the object of fewer nuclear blasts in the event of war. If it came to the worst, some of its citizens might actually survive. But delivering this dubious good news was not the goal of George Bush’s visit. The American president was coming to deliver a message of a different nature.1
The visit was supposed to be just a five-hour stopover, but it was not the number of hours that mattered. Rather, it was the simple fact that Bush believed negotiations in Moscow were not enough: one had to go to the republics and talk to their leaders as well. This was a new development in the history of Soviet-American relations and a sign of rapidly changing political conditions in the USSR. The White House wanted to signal its readiness to work with the republics while warning their leaders against using violence to achieve their goals. No one in the Bush administration could then have predicted the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union or foreseen the crucial role that Ukraine would play in that process a few months later. Kyiv was chosen as the place to announce the new American policy on the Soviet republics because its top leadership did not favor complete independence. Ukraine’s anti-Moscow forces were strong but not violent, and its audiences might be receptive to the new message from Washington.
But Gorbachev was by no means happy with the idea of the American president visiting Ukraine, the second most populous Soviet republic, whose leadership was more than reluctant to sign the new union treaty that he had been promoting aggressively since April. Unlike Bush, he fully understood the importance of Ukraine to the future of the Union and was afraid that the US president’s visit could give a boost to anti-Union forces in the republic. The Soviet president had done his best to block the visit. On Monday, July 21, slightly more than a week before Bush’s arrival in Moscow, US Ambassador Matlock received an unexpected call from Ed Hewett, President Bush’s special adviser on Soviet affairs. A Soviet chargé d’affaires had come to Hewett’s White House office to deliver an urgent message from the Kremlin, which wanted the Kyiv leg of the visit to be canceled. Matlock was taken aback by this request. The Soviets cited unspecified tensions, but Kyiv appeared quite calm. Moreover, preparations for the visit, which Matlock had begun with the approval of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, were already well under way. They involved not only Americans but also their Ukrainian counterparts, and canceling the visit at this point would be a major embarrassment to the American side.
Bush was caught by surprise by the Soviet request. The news reached him on board Air Force One en route to Turkey. Together with Brent Scowcroft, the president drafted a response to the effect that if the Soviets did not want him to go to Kyiv, he would cancel the visit, but, given the advanced state of preparations and the involvement of the Ukrainian side, Moscow would have to take responsibility for the cancellation. Matlock called the State Department on an open line and, knowing that the KGB was probably listening, described the possible negative consequences of the cancellation—not for Washington but for Moscow and its relations with Ukraine. The following day he repeated the same message to the Soviet foreign minister, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh. The alarmed Bessmertnykh contacted Gorbachev, who allegedly told him, “Just forget about it. Tell the Americans not to worry and to go ahead with their plans. If the president wants to go to Kiev, I am sure he will be welcome there.” The crisis was resolved. Gorbachev had to accept the new rules of the game.2
During Bush’s meeting with Gorbachev on July 30, the American president tried to convince his counterpart that he had nothing to fear from Bush’s upcoming visit to Kyiv. He told the Soviet president, “I want to assure you that during my trip to Kyiv neither I nor any of those accompanying me will do anything that might complicate existing problems or
interfere in the question of when Ukraine might sign the Union treaty.” Gorbachev hinted at the source of his original concern: “As for Ukraine, perhaps the following fact played a role: it has become known that not long before your visit the Heritage Foundation prepared a report in which it recommended that the president make use of his visit to Ukraine to stimulate separatist attitudes there, as that is strategically important.” Bush denied any knowledge of it: “I do not know about that report. But I hope you were informed that I stressed the need for the utmost tact in preparing the itinerary of the visit. I would be prepared not to visit Kyiv but Leningrad, for example. I would very much like to visit one of your cities. But I am not about to support separatism in any instance. Kyiv was included in the itinerary of the visit only after your minister of foreign affairs informed us that it was perfectly acceptable to you.”3
If it had been for Gorbachev to decide, Bush never would have gone to Kyiv. Moreover, Boris Yeltsin shared Gorbachev’s stand on Ukraine. Both believed that the second-largest Soviet republic could not be allowed to go its own way. If Gorbachev, in his conversations with Bush, raised the possibility of civil strife and even war involving Ukraine and other Soviet republics, Yeltsin was calmer but no less determined. “Ukraine must not leave the Soviet Union,” he told the American president during their meeting in Yeltsin’s Kremlin office. Without Ukraine, Yeltsin argued, the Soviet Union would be dominated by the non-Slavic republics. His “attachment” to Ukraine reflected the attitude of the Russian population in general. According to a poll sponsored by the United States Information Agency in February and March 1991, only 22 percent of Russians favored Ukrainian independence, while almost 60 percent were opposed. The Russian public’s attitude toward the Baltics was strikingly different: 41 percent of those polled were in favor of Lithuanian independence, with 40 percent against.4
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