Moscow, December 25, 1991
Page 22
Caudill is horrified to find Russian TV technicians have brought in three big cameras, “like in the 1950s,” to transmit the pictures to both the Russian and worldwide audiences. He needs higher quality pictures. “No way are we going to use these,” he says. His technicians set up a state-of-the-art camera to route the pictures to their truck, and from there to Russian TV and on to a CNN feed, “an incredibly difficult operation.” Caudill has the extra pressure of having the company’s president breathing down his neck. Johnson says to him as they work frantically, “Caudill, you know this is your ass!”
By ten minutes to seven the room has been transformed into a brightly lit television studio. There are three central television cameras, a CNN camera, and audio equipment to provide simultaneous translation. Of ABC there is no sign. The crew from Atlanta is unaware that Koppel and Kaplan are hanging out with Gorbachev in the president’s real office down the corridor, compiling material for their documentary on the final days.
Pavel Palazchenko finds the scene a little unreal. While the president is preparing to resign and hand over control of nuclear weapons to Boris Yeltsin, there are more Americans inside the Kremlin than Russians—television executives in tailored suits, interviewers with pancake makeup, producers, directors, editors, writers, photographers, camera crews, microphone holders, assistants with clipboards, engineers, and technicians, all milling around and giving instructions and checking wires and microphones. Gorbachev’s interpreter wonders as he listens to the medley of American accents, “Who could have thought that this—all of this—were possible just a year ago?”[182]
A few hundred yards away, in Red Square, scores of Muscovites have gathered, though they have little interest in witnessing history being made. They are shoppers crushing into the big GUM department store that takes up the side of the vast square opposite the Kremlin, to buy what they can before it closes. Word has got around that some scarce items have appeared on the shelves. They form jostling lines to snap up whatever items of use they can find.
They ignore much of the tawdry goods on display, especially a pile of plastic passport covers. They are stamped “USSR.” Only tourists will buy these in the future.
Chapter 19
THINGS FALL APART
After the fearful days of August 1991, when it seemed, however briefly, that totalitarianism would return to the Soviet Union, the leaders of the constituent republics one by one announced their intention to form independent states. On Saturday, August 24, even Ukraine declared it would seek independence.
Yeltsin was taken aback. Sovereignty within a new union was one thing. But even he found it difficult to contemplate the outright defection from the Soviet Union of the fifty-two million people in Ukraine whose fate had been linked with Russia’s for centuries.
Nevertheless, the Russian president formally recognized the independence of the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which had always been somewhat semidetached members of the Soviet Union. Foreign countries followed suit, no longer wary of offending Gorbachev. But both Yeltsin and Gorbachev faced a dilemma. If the rest of the USSR was disintegrating, what should take its place?
The first initiative to resolve the crisis came in late August. Yeltsin’s secretary of state, Gennady Burbulis, called the Kremlin and suggested to Gorbachev’s adviser Georgy Shakhnazarov that they should meet in the White House and work on new ideas for the future of the Soviet landmass.[183]
A political scientist with bald head and thick black eyebrows, Shakhnazarov doubled as a poet and writer of science fiction under the name Georgy Shakh. But many of his original compositions these days were political memos that he delivered to Gorbachev, always urging him towards ever more daring democratic reforms.
Burbulis was an abrasive former professor of Marxist philosophy from Sverdlovsk. He had the zeal of the converted, having evolved in a short time from communist ideologue to ruthless anticommunist. His evolution was so dramatic that on a television quiz show, contestants who listened to a recording of one of his delirious homages to Leninism thought it was the old Stalin-era apologist Mikhail Suslov. With gaunt face and high-pitched voice, Burbulis was known as Yeltsin’s “grey cardinal,” though he had distinctly worldly tastes. He was the first of the Russian government officials to order himself a Zil after the coup, and Yeltsin observed how thrilled he was when the escort car raced ahead of his new limousine, its light blinking and sirens screeching.
The main difference between Shakhnazarov and Burbulis was that the former wanted to maintain the Soviet Union and the latter wanted to destroy it.
Gorbachev’s adviser consented to go to the White House, “though you would think that as I held higher rank as aide to the president of the Soviet Union he would come to my office.” Giving in on this small detail, he realized, symbolized the shift in power.
When he arrived, accompanied by Gorbachev’s legal adviser, Yury Baturin, they were made to wait half an hour in an anteroom. More small humiliations followed during the daylong negotiations in Burbulis’s cavernous office. Several times Yeltsin’s secretary of state went off to chat with his aides, and twice he went to a separate table to conduct business with other visitors. Shakhnazarov concluded that he wanted them to know they were not top priority.
The sticking point was whether there would be a single union state with some devolved sovereignty, as Gorbachev wanted, or a less centralized union of states, as the Russians insisted. If the latter idea prevailed, then the USSR was indeed finished. Burbulis made it clear that he envisaged Russia going it alone in the world. But when Shakhnazarov asked him if he were prepared to allow an independent Ukraine to keep the Crimea, Yeltsin’s adviser replied, “Absolutely not!” The Russian-populated peninsula in the Black Sea had been ceded from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 by Khrushchev at a time when the Soviet Union was regarded as a permanent entity and it didn’t matter much. Now it did.
Both sides took a break to report to their respective masters. Gorbachev and Yeltsin conferred separately on the telephone. Yeltsin retreated from Burbulis’s hard-line position and said he would agree to an all-union army and foreign ministry. Gorbachev was somewhat heartened. He could perhaps salvage a confederation and a common market similar to, or even stronger than, the European Union.
Yeltsin had to capitulate very quickly on Crimea. The Russian president had raised the issue in a conversation with President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. He told him an independent Russia might have to redraw its borders with other republics, a reference to Crimea and Russian-speaking areas of northern Kazakhstan. “Well then, that’s war,” said Nazarbayev. “That’s civil war.” Yeltsin’s economic adviser, Yegor Gaidar, was also emphatic about the danger. “If you start to discuss the problem of the borders,” he said, “then you have civil war.” Yeltsin quickly closed this Pandora’s box. He could see every day on television the bloodshed that border disputes were causing in the former Yugoslavia.
The Russian and Soviet presidents could at least show a common face to the world again. “After the coup Russia has changed and so has the president,” Yeltsin declared grandly in a television interview. “He found within himself the courage to change his views. I personally believe in Gorbachev today much more than I did three weeks ago before the putsch.” The two rivals openly consulted each other during a session of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. Their only altercation occurred when Yeltsin criticized Gorbachev for creating the climate for the coup, to which the Soviet leader retorted, “Don’t spit on me!”
On September 5 Gorbachev cajoled the congress to approve in principle a new union to be called a Union of Sovereign States, the details of which would be negotiated by the new State Council comprising the leaders of the willing republics. But it would be the last time his famous powers of persuasion would work their magic on a parliamentary assembly.
An anecdote made the rounds. The “Union of Sovereign States” meant the “Union to Save Gorbachev.” (The initials were the same in Russian.)
“There were times when President Gorbachev thought I was a political corpse and I thought he ought not to be president,” said Yeltsin. “Now we are committed to common work—how to deal with a crisis.” Gorbachev agreed: “We do have to cooperate now.”
Then Yeltsin went to ground. Physical exhaustion and melancholy followed the intensity and excitement of battle. He spent almost two weeks on the beach at Yurmala on the Baltic coast; then on September 18, citing a minor heart attack, he retreated to Sochi on the Black Sea. He spent most of the time in a state of semiparalysis or dictating notes for the second volume of his memoirs.
Everyone, it seemed, was rushing to get books out. On October 4 Gorbachev sold a short text called The August Coup to HarperCollins for half a million dollars. It featured seven color pictures of himself with a smiling George Bush. It was written in such haste that a garbled reference to President Francois Mitterrand not calling Gorbachev at Foros nearly caused a diplomatic rupture with Paris.[184]
In Sochi Yeltsin had a visit from Burbulis to discuss strategy. As they sat on deck chairs by the warm sea, his grey cardinal presented him with a “Top Secret” memorandum called “Russia’s Strategy in the Transitional Period.” It was a blueprint for a fully independent Russia. This would be achieved by going along with the new union negotiations until they failed, thereby preserving the appearance of legality. Yeltsin should then make his own arrangements with the other republics and consign the USSR to history.
Yeltsin faced a decision of enormous consequence. He could win full control of Russia, but the price would be high. Russia would lose the steppes of southern Siberia and “Russian” cities like Kharkov and Odessa, as well as the Crimea peninsula and Sevastopol, where the Russian fleet had been based since the reign of Catherine the Great.
In Moscow Gorbachev was also trying to relax after the strain of Foros. He took his wife to see a performance of Thornton Wilder’s play Ides of March, whose theme of betrayal he and Raisa found timely, and “really enjoyed it.” A stream of foreign dignitaries came to seek his assessment of the situation. He assured them that the centrifugal tendencies had been reversed. He warned one visitor, “If we fail to preserve the unitary state, we’re going to have another Yugoslavia on our hands. I bet my life on it.” Unlike the Serbs, however, who fought to preserve their hegemony in Yugoslavia’s provinces, Russians living in the republics were generally passive as the Soviet Union fell apart. Many of them foresaw only further misery and a return to a new era of totalitarianism if the center prevailed, and they were encouraged to support the process of disintegration by the most credible Russian figure of the time, Boris Yeltsin.
When at last he returned to Moscow, on Wednesday, October 10, Yeltsin found Russia in political chaos and his parliament a nest of political intrigue. Geared up for a long period of opposition, neither he nor the deputies had a firm idea of how to use the levers of power that were now within reach. Russian ministers were squabbling, and Rutskoy was warning of anarchy. The city was full of rumors of a second coup to prevent the USSR’s disintegration.[185]
Gorbachev, meanwhile, was busy trying to seize back the initiative by rallying the leaders of the republics to the cause of a new union treaty. He convened a meeting of the State Council the day after Yeltsin’s reappearance. The Russian president arrived late and remained sullen throughout. Nevertheless, the leaders of the republics agreed to form a new economic union, with discussions to take place later on a political union. A ceremonial signing of a cobbled-together economic treaty took place the following Thursday, October 18, in St. George’s Hall. Gorbachev fussed over the seating and whether champagne toasts should be televised (they were), and he made sure that the red flag was bigger than the flags of the republics. He personally decided on the types of chairs most suitable for an official dinner that followed in the St. Catherine Hall. He convinced himself that there was a momentum again for a single union state with a common defense and foreign policy. He conveyed this to the visiting German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who assured him of German support for the survival of the Soviet Union but had offended Gorbachev by visiting the independent-minded republics without liaising with Moscow. After Genscher left, Gorbachev called him an “elephant” and complained that he had behaved shabbily.[186]
While seemingly in favor of the economic union, Yeltsin had been calculating his next big move. On Sunday, October 28, he delivered a shock. In a rousing speech to the Russian legislature, sitting in the Great Kremlin Palace, he declared that the only way out of the country’s crisis was by drastic action. Therefore he planned to free prices, end subsidies, and speed up privatization in the territory of Russia.
“The time has come to act decisively, harshly, without hesitation,” he announced. There would be difficult times ahead, but the alternative was ruin. “The period of moving in small steps is over. We need a major economic breakthrough…. If we don’t seize the real chance to break the unfavorable course of events, we shall condemn ourselves to beggary and our centuries-old state to disaster.” Swayed by his powerful oratory, the parliament gave Yeltsin the power to enforce his “big bang” economic reforms by decree. Even Gorbachev’s loyal aide Anatoly Chernyaev was impressed, seeing Yeltsin’s drive as a breakthrough to a new country and a new society.
The first Gorbachev knew about this bold initiative was when he glanced at the television in his office and saw that Yeltsin was speaking. The Russian president had not bothered to alert him, although they had spoken on the phone just the night before. He asked for the text of the speech. Next day he read it several times on the presidential plane en route to Madrid, where he was cohosting a Middle East conference with U.S. president George Bush. The economic mechanisms were fine, he thought. But it boiled down to one thing. This was a Russian initiative. The center had no role. Yegor Yakovlev, also on the plane, warned Gorbachev that Yeltsin clearly meant to destroy the Union.
In Madrid Gorbachev found his international colleagues more apprehensive than ever about his survival capacity. He blustered that Yeltsin was “rather easily influenced” by his entourage and not to take him too seriously. But his own demeanor gave the game away. James Baker found Gorbachev unfocused, acting like a drowning man who is looking for a life preserver. Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez urged Gorbachev to persist in his efforts, as Europe needed its two secure pillars, the European Community in the west and the Soviet Union in the east.
At a joint appearance of the Soviet and U.S. presidents, interpreter Palazchenko observed the skeptical, cold, and indifferent faces of the Americans, who once regarded Gorbachev as a top-caliber world leader but whom they now thought of as “already a goner.” As the conference ended, Bush bade Gorbachev good-bye with a patronizing pat on the back, saying, “You’re still the master!”[187]
In an extraordinary tacit acknowledgment of the influence of the United States, the new Soviet foreign minister, Boris Pankin, traveling with Gorbachev, quietly asked James Baker to encourage the American president to persuade Yeltsin to preserve the Soviet foreign ministry.[188]
On the plane back to Moscow Gorbachev told Chernyaev, Palazchenko, and Grachev of his determination to succeed in forging a new union. The most pessimistic person on the plane, noted Palazchenko, was Raisa, who had “grave concerns” for the future.
She had every reason to be worried on her husband’s behalf. Nothing was certain. After his speech Yeltsin formed a new Russian government with himself as prime minister and two ultra-radical reformers, Gennady Burbulis and Yegor Gaidar, as deputy prime ministers. It began, with breathtaking audacity, to take over central institutions and to convert Soviet industry ministries into stock corporations subject to Russia, a process the
demoralized Soviet government was too feeble to resist.
Ukraine forced the constitutional crisis to a head. Its leaders organized a plebiscite on independence to be held on December 1, 1991. Gorbachev assured everyone who would listen that Russia and Ukraine would not and could not separate, as the two nations were branches of the same tree. But if Ukraine opted for independence, as seemed likely, it would have to be either allowed by Moscow to break free or cajoled into a redesigned union. The alternative was war.
The possibility of war was taken seriously, especially in Kiev, and alarmist rumors appeared in the media. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Konstantin Masik, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that “Yeltsin discussed with military leaders the possibility of a nuclear strike on Ukraine” to prevent the republic becoming a nuclear threat to Russia. The Russian information ministry protested vehemently to the newspaper that this was propaganda fomenting war, but editor Vitaly Tretyakov pointed out that the charge was not disavowed by Masik or his boss, Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk. The Russian government sent its legal counsel, Sergey Stankevich, to tell Tretyakov that the charge was wild and absurd. Yeltsin’s military adviser General Konstantin Kobets also dismissed the story as nonsense.[189]
Yegor Gaidar recalled that the leadership did not discuss plans for using nuclear means in the event of territorial disputes but acknowledged that perceptions were as important as facts.
Though the coup had failed, there was still talk of the military taking a role to enforce a new union. The prospect, and even the desirability, of such a drastic step was raised in mid-November by Gorbachev himself in conversation with Shaposhnikov.[190] By the marshal’s account he was invited late at night to the Kremlin. Gorbachev revealed that he was worried that the Soviet Union was about to fall apart despite all his efforts, and “something needs to be done.” The Soviet president outlined options, one of which was, “You, the military, take power in your hands, put in place the government that is convenient to you, stabilize the situation and then step aside.”