The active phase of the struggle between the Union center and the republics was over. Those republics that were not yet ready to leave the Union gained time to make their final decision. The Russian president’s recognition of Baltic independence had closed one chapter by encouraging the sovereignty of the republics and their rebellion against the center. The declaration of Ukrainian independence opened a new chapter in which Russia began to feel responsible for the fate of the center and the republics alike. Soon after the Soviet superparliament adopted the Nazarbayev statement, Yeltsin signed a decree canceling passages of his earlier decrees that had infringed on Union rights. Gorbachev and Yeltsin had reached an interim agreement: they now shared responsibility for maintaining the empire.
Boris Yeltsin and his administration soon moved into one of the Kremlin buildings. He demanded and received the same type of VIP armored limousine that Gorbachev used. “Both presidents cooperated, striving for compromise,” recalled Yeltsin’s bodyguard Aleksandr Korzhakov. “Mikhail Sergeevich had the advantage over Boris Nikolaevich not in the Kremlin but at his suburban residence in Ogarevo. The heads of the other Union republics would gather there. Gorbachev drank his favorite Armenian Jubilee cognac and behaved like a tsar at table. Yeltsin was angry with him and made sharp remarks, but Boris Nikolaevich’s colleagues did not support him.” Dual power, not seen in Russia since the Revolution of 1917, had reemerged in Moscow. No one could tell how long the power sharing in the Kremlin would last or what would happen if one party decided to break the deal that was keeping the shaky Union together.27
The two Kremlin presidents were brought and kept together by two factors now beyond their control: the leaders of the non-Russian republics, who did not want either of them to become more powerful than the other, and the president of the United States, who remained loyal to Gorbachev and looked to the Gorbachev-Yeltsin alliance for hope that a weakened but still stable Soviet Union would continue to exist. For Yeltsin, as had been the case during the coup, the only way to build up his relations with Bush and thus with the West in general was to show willingness to cooperate with Gorbachev. “For the time being, for now, Gorbachev and I are close,” said Yeltsin to the visiting American ambassador, Bob Strauss, on August 24. Yeltsin asked Strauss to convey to the American president that he and Gorbachev were working together. Strauss summarized his impressions from the visit as follows: “This is a man who is conscious of his authority and new stature, but also someone who wants to convey the message that he is working with Gorbachev—from a position of strength.”28
IV.
SOVIET DISUNION
10
WASHINGTON’S DILEMMA
GEORGE H. W. BUSH WAS SITTING on the sea terrace of his Kennebunkport home, enjoying the warm weather and watching seagulls on the rocks from which he often fished. It was early afternoon on September 2, 1991, the day the Congress of People’s Deputies began its deliberations in Moscow. A few hours earlier, Bush had announced to the world that the United States was resuming its diplomatic relations with the Baltics—the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which had now regained their independence of the interwar period. The Baltics played an important role in American thinking about the fate of the Soviet Union. For months the White House had pushed for official Soviet recognition of the independence of Lithuania. Now, with diplomatic relations restored, the question was, what next? Should Washington support the drive of the other republics for independence, or should it try to save whatever was left of the Soviet Union? This would become the main question on the administration’s agenda in the weeks and months to come.1
September 2, 1991, was the last day of the president’s vacation, and he had just finished his lunch with a glass of sherry. Bush was in a reflective mood. “Forty-seven years ago this very day I was shot down over the Bonin Islands,” he dictated into his tape recorder. “So much has happened, so very much—in my life and in the world.” On September 2, 1944, an Avenger aircraft piloted by the twenty-year-old Lieutenant (j.g.) George H. W. Bush took off from the USS San Jacinto as one of four torpedo bombers attacking Japanese installations on the island of Chi Chi Jima. Bush’s plane was hit by Japanese antiaircraft fire before reaching its target, but the young lieutenant made it to the island, dropped his bombs, and headed back to the aircraft carrier. With fire engulfing the plane, Bush and his two crewmen bailed out in the middle of the ocean. Only two of their parachutes opened, and Bush turned out to be the only survivor: he was picked up by an American submarine after floating for four hours in an inflated raft. Lieutenant Bush was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and went on to a career with enough momentous events to fill three, if not more, lives—his own and those of the two comrades he lost in battle.2
The world had indeed changed a great deal in almost half a century. In September 1944, America’s mighty ally, Joseph Stalin, completed his takeover of Romania and Bulgaria, and Stalin’s commanders launched major offensives to recapture Tallinn and Riga, the capitals of Estonia and Latvia, which had been annexed by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940 but occupied by the Nazis after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration had refused to recognize the Soviet annexations, but in December 1943 Roosevelt told Stalin that he would not start a war with him over the issue. This statement amounted to de facto recognition of the Soviet takeover, later tacitly confirmed at the Yalta Conference in early 1945. The United States walked a fine line throughout the Cold War, accepting de facto Soviet control of the Baltics but refusing to recognize the USSR’s sovereignty over the region. The Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian diplomatic missions in the United States were closed, but the American government recognized the sovereign authority of the three Baltic legations and worked with them during the Cold War.3
Nicholas Burns, a thirty-five-year-old staffer at the National Security Council (NSC) and White House liaison to the American Baltic communities, remembered later,
We were very focused on the Baltic states from the beginning. We never accepted their forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union. We accepted Soviet sovereignty in Armenia, Turkmenistan, in Ukraine, but we never accepted it in the Baltic states. We kept Baltic legations open; we protected the Baltic gold given to us in 1940. There was very strong sentiment in the US Congress that the Baltic states should be free, and there was a very strong and active Baltic community called the Joint Baltic American National Committee, and I met with them very frequently as a White House staffer. Our administration very much wanted to support Baltic rights.4
Long-standing, if not always active, American support for Baltic independence was part and parcel of US foreign policy thinking during the Cold War era. According to that view, the independent Baltic states of the interwar period belonged to the ranks of nations unlawfully taken captive by the Soviet Union. Similar treatment was not extended to Moldova, western Ukraine, and western Belarus, which had been incorporated into interwar Romania and Poland, but they were also annexed by the USSR at the same time as the Baltic states after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. There was a peculiar logic in that distinction: unlike the Baltic states, none of the latter territories were independent during the interwar period or recognized as such in international law. Thus, in the minds of US foreign policy experts, the Baltic states received special treatment that put them in the same category as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. By that logic, Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe would not be complete until the Baltic states had regained their independence.5
This was hardly a view shared or even fully understood in Moscow. For the Soviets, the Baltics were not part of Eastern Europe but former possessions of the Russian Empire lost during the Revolution of 1917 because of imperialist intervention. They had recovered them as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, lost them again in 1941, and reconquered them in the bloody war with Hitler. In Moscow’s view, the Western Allies had accepted this new geopolitical reality at the Teheran and Yalta conferences. Letting
the Baltics go was unimaginable to those Soviet leaders who were locked into the Cold War mind-set and believed that by taking over the region they had redressed the injustice done by the West to Russia in the aftermath of the revolution. A more immediate reason to keep the Baltic republics was that allowing their secession would create a precedent for other Soviet republics and spell the end of the USSR. As Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze once told Jack Matlock, the Balts were not the only ones who had been taken and kept by force.6
Using force once again was an option that Gorbachev and his hard-line advisers had tried but did not fully manage to implement. The main foreign policy obstacle before them had been the position of the United States and other Western states. The cost of the use of force in the Baltics was explained to Gorbachev in the plainest possible language by George Bush in the aftermath of the Soviet military crackdown there in early 1991. In a letter delivered by Ambassador Matlock to Gorbachev on January 24, Bush made continuing American economic cooperation and assistance to the crumbling Soviet economy dependent on Soviet behavior in the Baltics.
“I had hoped to see positive steps toward the peaceful resolution of this conflict with the elected leaders of the Baltic states,” wrote the US president.
But in the absence of that and in the absence of a positive change in the situation, I would have no choice but to respond. Thus, unless you can take these positive steps very soon, I will freeze many elements of our economic relationship including Export-Import credit guarantees; Commodity Credit Corporation credit guarantees; support for “Special Associate Status” for the Soviet Union in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank; and most of our technical assistance programs. Further, I would not submit the Bilateral Investment Treaty or Tax Treaty to the United States Senate for consent to ratification when and if they are completed.
One paragraph of the letter presented the history of US economic assistance to the Soviet Union through the prism of Soviet treatment of the Baltics. “I honored your personal request and signed the Trade Agreement in spite of the economic blockade that the Soviet Union had imposed on Lithuania,” wrote Bush. “You gave me assurances that you would take steps to settle peacefully all differences with the Baltic leaders. Several weeks later, you lifted that blockade and began a dialogue with Lithuanian and other Baltic leaders. From that time on, our cooperation in the economic sphere had expanded, culminating in the steps that I took on December 12 in response to the difficult circumstances that your country faced as winter approached.” But the Soviet military crackdown in the Baltics, argued Bush, made continuing economic assistance impossible. “Unfortunately,” read the letter, “in view of the events of the last two weeks—resulting in the death of at least twenty people in the Baltic states—I cannot, in good conscience, and indeed, will not continue along this path.”7
“No one wishes to see the disintegration of the Soviet Union,” wrote George Bush to Gorbachev in the same letter. He was not trying to mislead the Soviet president. Bush and his administration indeed did not intend to kill the Soviet Union by pushing for Baltic independence. In 1988, when Soviet deputy foreign minister Anatolii Adamishin asked US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Simons, “Please, please, please don’t open a second front in the Baltics,” he was told that the United States had no intention of doing so, as it was not US policy to encourage the breakup of the Soviet Union. That remained true in 1989, 1990, and even 1991. But whatever Bush thought about his and his administration’s actions, pushing for Baltic independence actually amounted to encouraging the breakup of the Union.
Gorbachev’s reliance on Western economic assistance in the last two years of his rule was among the factors that obliged him to deal with the Baltic crisis by granting the rebellious republics ever greater autonomy. That was a slippery slope. According to the Soviet constitution, which, with the start of perestroika, had ceased to be a dead letter in the Soviet political process, the Baltic republics had the same rights as all other Union republics, including the three largest of them—Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. When Gorbachev and his advisers proposed legislation granting the Baltics special rights, the leaders of other republics felt discriminated against and demanded equality. When Gorbachev and the central government resisted such demands, the republics began to take them on their own. This was the logic behind the successive declarations of republican sovereignty that began with Estonia in the fall of 1988 and engulfed the Soviet Union as a whole by the summer of 1990. The postcoup declarations of independence also followed the Baltic example.8
As the White House understood quite well, encouraging Baltic independence also meant undermining Gorbachev and thus US interests in other parts of the world. Baltic demands for independence ran counter to the US global agenda. “We’ve got so much at stake that it affects the others in the world, and it affects us,” wrote Bush to Gorbachev on January 23, 1991, with regard to the Baltic issue. “Arms control comes to mind, but so [[do]] Afghanistan, Cuba, Angola, and many other regional questions. Then you have the natural wariness of the Germans and the Poles, all of whom don’t want to see a reversal of any kind with the Soviet Union.” In short, as noted by Robert Gates, then a deputy national security adviser, the Bush administration had bigger fish to fry: the drive for Baltic independence could jeopardize the American-Soviet dialogue.9
But there was also an issue of domestic American politics. Bush, who was never fully trusted by the Republican Right, had to pay close attention to the aspirations of the American Balts. “I took a great deal of flack in the press, from leaders in the US Baltic communities, and from ‘experts’ that I was too accommodating, accepting Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ and reforms at face value,” he recalled years later. On the eve of Bush’s trip to Moscow and Kyiv in July he received a letter, signed by forty-five members of Congress, urging him to use the summit to “effectively press the Soviets for direct and substantive talks with the leaders of the Baltic states.”
Questions about Baltic independence had been introduced in Bush’s talking points not only with Gorbachev but also with Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk, two other Soviet leaders he expected to meet during the trip. But Gorbachev cited Soviet law, which, as Bush knew, made secession almost impossible. The US president found himself between two fires—on one hand Gorbachev, maneuvering but unyielding on the issue of Baltic independence; on the other, ever more persistent critics at home. Given the pressure from Baltic émigré organizations in the United States and their supporters in the Republican Party, it is easy to imagine that President Bush and his advisers were simply doing what domestic US politics was forcing them to do, hoping that the pieces of the foreign policy puzzle would somehow ultimately fall into place.10
In a manner of speaking, they did. The collapse of the coup revived Bush’s hopes that Gorbachev could actually set the Baltic republics free. “A cautious Gorbachev,” he said, dictating his diary entry for August 21, “has to worry less about the problem of his political right—military, KGB, etc. And maybe we can get a breakthrough on Cuba, Afghanistan, Baltics, etc.” The Baltic states, all of which had declared their independence before or during the coup, needed a decision of the Union parliament to make independence fully legitimate, and the Baltic leaders once again turned for help to the American president. “Should you, Mr. President, advise M. Gorbachev to support such a resolution,” read a letter sent to Washington soon after collapse of the coup by the leader of the Lithuanian parliament, Vytautas Landsbergis, “perhaps this question would be solved quickly and positively.” Landsbergis believed that this was Gorbachev’s last chance to prove his democratic credentials. “We do not know whether M. Gorbachev will stay in his position for any length of time, although he may still manage to participate in the question of Baltic independence and save political face to some extent,” argued Landsbergis. He asked Bush for immediate “renewal of recognition for Lithuania.”11
The pressure on Bush to grant US recognition to the Baltic states had be
en mounting ever since the collapse of the coup. On August 23, Republican senator Slade Gorton of Washington wrote to Bush, demanding recognition and claiming that “any possible tie—any bond between those nations and the Soviet Union—was certainly destroyed by the military action taken against them.” The senator had in mind the introduction of the state of emergency in the Baltic republics during the coup. The United States was indeed lagging behind in recognition of the independence of the Baltic states. Smaller countries, led by Iceland, began granting recognition almost immediately after Estonia and Latvia made their declarations on August 20 and 21, respectively. Yeltsin had Russia follow suit on August 24. Bush then cabled Gorbachev to tell him that the United States could not wait and would recognize Baltic independence on August 30. Gorbachev asked him to hold off until September 2, hoping that his State Council would recognize the Baltics on that day. It turned out, however, that the new council would not meet until September 6.12
Bush could not wait any longer. He made his announcement on the date Gorbachev had originally requested, September 2, the last day of his Kennebunkport vacation. After lunch, enjoying the sea view from his terrace, Bush dictated into his tape recorder, “Today I had a press conference. I recognized the Baltics. I called the presidents of Estonia and Latvia, having talked to Landsbergis of Lithuania a couple of days ago. I told them what we were going to do. I told them why we have waited a few days more. What I tried to do was use the power and prestige of the United States, not to posture, not to be the first on board, but to encourage Gorbachev to move faster on freeing the Baltics.” In a letter sent to Landsbergis a few days earlier, he wrote, “We never recognized the forcible incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union, and we are proud that we stood with the Lithuanian people during the many difficult times of the last fifty-one years.”13
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