Yeltsin
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A light drizzle was falling. A twelve-wheeled, olive-green T-72 tank, No. 110, from the Taman Motorized Rifle Division, built at the Urals Wagon Works in Sverdlovsk oblast, had just rumbled toward the bottom of the stairs. Yeltsin walked slowly down the steps, grabbed a small Russian flag from a bystander, and stood in front of the machine, intending, he said, to keep it and the three or four additional tanks behind it from coming any closer. For a few seconds, he looked down the barrel of its cannon, “confident that they would not run over a president.” Only when the forty-five tons of metal screeched to a halt did it occur to him to heave himself onto the hull, something his training as a tank operator at UPI and his service as party overseer of industry in Sverdlovsk let him know how to do. Once on it, Yeltsin reached into the hatch to shake hands with the driver and gunner and improvised again.83 Perched on hardware that symbolized Soviet power—and what had been done in its name in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968, and in Kabul in 1979—he pumped his right fist twice. He then read out his appeal to the citizenry, a copy of which he had clutched in his hand as he walked out of the building, unamplified to a knot of television cameras and a sparse audience that grew from about fifty when he began to speak to no more than 150 at the end, as passersby and shoppers from nearby stores came to have a look. Nikolai Vorontsov (the Soviet environment minister), Aleksandr Korzhakov, Gennadii Burbulis, and members of his entourage scampered up the side of the tank as he spoke.
The appeal, rather like Yeltsin’s secret speech in 1987, was not particularly eloquent, and it was composed with two other people, Khasbulatov and Silayev. The values it cited were those of the democratic fragment of the fast-dissolving Soviet civilization. Russia’s new government, it said, had tried to preserve “the unity of the Soviet Union and the unity of Russia,” and it could not accept the illegal and immoral acts of the GKChP, which would “return us to the epoch of the Cold War and the isolation of the Soviet Union from the world community.”84 Yeltsin’s most musical moment, to use Anatolii Chernyayev’s phrase, was formed less by the words he spoke than by how he spoke them and where.
Within minutes, footage of Yeltsin’s stagecraft was transmitted internationally on CNN. Soviet television was allowed to show snippets only, but staffers gave friends in the Western news bureaus tapes they themselves could not broadcast, and copies were sent to the Urals and Siberia. Any Moscow family with a wire antenna could tune in CNN on their home television. Shots of Yeltsin on Tank No. 110 came in a flood when the coup was over. Indigenous viewers saw in them glimmerings of a totemic image from another revolution, tattooed in their heads by the history primers they had read as children—of Lenin at the Finland Station, returning from Swiss exile and holding forth to the Petrograd proletariat from an armored car in April 1917. Immortalized on celluloid from eye level, “Yeltsin’s rather awkward bulk makes him appear someone ‘larger than life,’ his unrefined speaking style ‘the voice of the people,’ his rather unkempt appearance a sign, not of the confusion of a politician caught by surprise but of a strong leader, righteously indignant and full of selfless resolve.”85
There were anxious hours still to come. The hoped-for general strike did not happen, although the GKChP was unable to make use of that failure. In the White House, Yeltsin and 300 to 400 followers hunkered down behind sandbags and office furniture, with gas masks and weapons at the ready. Maybe 75,000 people (in the daylight, fewer at night) massed on the streets below.86 At five P.M. on August 19, he assigned RSFSR Deputy Premier Oleg Lobov, his political client from the Urals, to institute a command center for a “reserve government” at a bomb shelter in Verkhnyaya Sysert, south of Sverdlovsk. Andrei Kozyrev, the hitherto ornamental Russian foreign minister and a fluent speaker of English, was sent to London to lay the groundwork for a government-in-exile.87 In another decree, Yeltsin reached out to the military, enjoining them not to carry out the orders of the coup makers: “Soldiers, officers, and generals, the clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country. They must not be allowed to bring eternal night.”
John Major of Britain was the first of a chain of foreign leaders to telephone with words of support. George H. W. Bush called from the Oval Office the morning of Tuesday, August 20, and for the first time Yeltsin aroused his admiration. “After hearing Yeltsin’s voice, Bush began to believe that there might yet be a hero in this drama, one who would actually vanquish the villains—and it was not Gorbachev, but Yeltsin.” If he won out over the tanks, the American told Yeltsin, Russia would “pave its way into the civilized community of states.”88 Bush clandestinely ordered U.S. national-security agencies to provide Yeltsin with signals intelligence from intercepts of Soviet military sources, and had a communications specialist from the embassy go the Moscow White House to help the Yeltsin group secure their telephone calls.89
That afternoon Yeltsin blazed away at the concourse in front of the White House, this time with loudspeakers to amplify his voice: “You can build a throne out of bayonets, but can you sit on it for long? I am convinced that there is not and will not be any return to the past. . . . Russia will be free!”90 By telephone and through mediators, he proselytized military officers, after which Generals Yevgenii Shaposhnikov and Pavel Grachëv, the commanders of the Soviet air force and airborne troops, agreed between them to have Shaposhnikov send two jets to strafe military vehicles in the Kremlin if the White House were stormed. The pop groups Helios, Mister Twister, Metallic Corrosion, and Time Machine rocked it up in the square. Poet Yevgenii Yevtushenko did a reading for the crowd, stand-up comedian Gennadii Khazanov performed impersonations of Gorbachev and Yanayev, and the master cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich lionized the opponents of the coup and waved a Kalashnikov rifle. Tension was astronomically high that evening, when soldiers accidentally killed three young male civilians.91 Yeltsin was nonplussed that the coup makers did not attack or even seal off the White House: “How could Kryuchkov be so blockheaded as not to understand how dangerous such indecision could be?”92 The GKChP blinked first. At three in the morning of August 21, Kryuchkov decided not to storm the White House, concluding that the carnage would be politically unmanageable. The blockade was lifted in the afternoon and the troops began to evacuate Moscow. By midnight the putschists were behind bars—arrested by agents of the RSFSR procurator general—and Gorbachev, the emperor who had no clothes, was back from Foros, escorted by Vice President Rutskoi of Russia. Descending the stairs of the plane, Gorbachev thanked Yeltsin and, tone-deaf to the end, spoke of being “an adherent of socialism.” On August 24, at the funeral for the three young men who died, Gorbachev was ill at ease, while Yeltsin movingly asked the parents’ forgiveness for not saving their sons’ lives.
Russia had entered an intermezzo of duopoly, dvoyevlastiye, like between the February and October revolutions of 1917. One aspirant, Yeltsin, elected by the people, was ascendant; the other, Gorbachev, chosen by two now lifeless bodies (the Central Committee of the CPSU, which he dissolved on August 24, and the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, which voted to shut itself down on September 5), was descendant.
Capitalizing on the legitimacy gap, Yeltsin compelled Gorbachev to annul his post-coup decrees on leadership of the national-security agencies and appoint men Yeltsin trusted. Gorbachev had made General Mikhail Moiseyev, who was complicit in the plot, acting defense minister on August 21. On August 22 Moiseyev was called to Gorbachev’s office and found Yeltsin next to the Soviet president and commander-in-chief. “Explain to him that he is not minister any longer,” Yeltsin barked at Gorbachev. “Gorbachev repeated Boris Nikolayevich’s words. Moiseyev listened in silence, and off he went.” The dovish Shaposhnikov, sight unseen by Yeltsin, was made minister of defense, and Vadim Bakatin, whom Gorbachev had fired as interior minister the winter before, was made chairman of the KGB.93 On September 1 a Shaposhnikov order cleared by Yeltsin abolished the political directorate of the armed forces, long an implement of party control.
With Gorbachev, Yeltsin
went for the jugular in public on Friday, August 23, in the Russian Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev had been requested to make a statement and answer questions from the benches, which he did for ninety minutes. With a national television audience watching, Yeltsin sashayed up to Gorbachev and stuck in his face a transcript by Nikolai Vorontsov showing that most Soviet cabinet members backstabbed Gorbachev at a cabinet meeting on August 19. “Gorbachev kept his dignity when he was alone at the podium. But when Yeltsin came over, the effect was almost as if he crumpled.” 94 Yeltsin hectored Gorbachev into reading out quotations from the paper to the lawmakers. That done, Yeltsin asked members, “on a lighter note,” to watch him finalize Decree No. 79, suspending the organs of the Russian Communist Party. He scrawled his signature slowly for the delectation of the deputies. They applauded him and heckled the red-faced Gorbachev, who mumbled “Boris Nikolayevich” several times. As an Izvestiya reporter noted, in an eerie inversion of the taunting of October–November 1987, Yeltsin, had now selected Gorbachev for the part of “naughty schoolboy.”95
Brent Scowcroft, viewing the Supreme Soviet scene with President Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, said it was “all over” for Gorbachev. “Yeltsin’s telling him what to do. I don’t think Gorbachev understands what happened.” Bush concurred: “I’m afraid he may have had it.”96 Scowcroft and Bush were correct. After the overmatch on August 23—Gorbachev called it sadistic in his memoirs—it was anticlimactic the next day when Gorbachev dissolved the Central Committee and resigned as general secretary of the party. Yeltsin’s Decree No. 90 on August 25 authorized the RSFSR Council of Ministers to seize all property of the CPSU and its Russian chapter. Yeltsin on August 26 publicly declined Gorbachev’s offer to make him a Hero of the Soviet Union. On August 31 Pravda, which had remained a much more conservative paper than Izvestiya, reprinted an International Herald Tribune cartoon of a smiling Yeltsin reaching down to pump the hand of a miniaturized Gorbachev; the tagline read, “Welcome back to power, Mikhail.”
The coup could not have been more destabilizing, and politics, economics, and culture converged more than ever on the constitutional question. The union treaty initialed in July was a dead letter. Only six union republics had been prepared to sign it, and, riddled with non sequiturs and ambiguities, it would in any event have been impracticable.97 As of August 19, two Soviet republics (Lithuania and Georgia) had announced their independence from the USSR. Between August 20 and September 1, nine (Estonia, Latvia, Armenia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan) followed their example. Tajikistan was to join the crowd in September, Turkmenistan in October, and Kazakhstan in December.
Gorbachev, his administration comatose (with no prime minister, parliament, budget, or bullion reserves), made a last-ditch effort to forge a treaty of union. The negotiating minuet started again at Novo-Ogarëvo, with the republic leaders sitting as the USSR State Council. Yeltsin was uncheerful about it and deputed two leading Russianists, Gennadii Burbulis and Sergei Shakhrai, to prepare working papers. The line had hardened. Earlier, Russia had been prepared to act as cash cow to the USSR and was “ready to cover any breach . . . even at the cost of its own ruination.” After the coup, this was impossible. “The republics had gone their disjunct ways and did not want to return to the old arrangement. The only possibility in these new conditions was an agreement among them in which Gorbachev would act as middleman.”98
Russia came out for a rump “union of states” or “confederation of states” rather than the “union state” Yeltsin had consented to in July. Gorbachev, who would have taken any form of union with a viable central authority, made the point to the State Council on November 14 that every time he agreed with one of Yeltsin’s suggestions Yeltsin would slow down his speech, as if he were asking himself why Gorbachev was acting so agreeably. Yes, Yeltsin said, he was always wary of Gorbachev. Gorbachev “laughed, but without merriment.”99 The talks went on against a backdrop of Russian appropriation of assets from the shell Soviet government. By the late autumn, Gorbachev and his men were accepting receivership as an improvement on insolvency.100 With Gorbachev caving in to most of Yeltsin’s constitutional demands, agreement appeared within reach, yet slipped away at a last Novo-Ogarëvo meeting on November 25. Yeltsin, fresh from a trip to Germany and to Soviet forces there, said he would be prepared to take a confederative agreement to the Russian parliament, only without an irrevocable endorsement from him as president. Gorbachev accused him of weaseling out of commitments. Feeling trapped, Gorbachev said people were whispering that he was a spent force, and the republic leaders seemed to be of the same opinion. In that case, he went on ominously, “Go ahead and agree among yourselves”—something Yeltsin had warned he might do in their tête-à-tête that summer. He would have no part of the “further chaos that would follow from this diffuse position.”101
Besides the difference over the roles of central and Russian governments, there was another sticking point—the place of Ukraine. It was republic number two of the Soviet Union, with almost 50 million people, and the one for which Russians felt the greatest emotional warmth. On August 24 its parliament had voted for separation from the USSR and set a confirmatory referendum for December 1, to coincide with a presidential election. A real country with its own passports, army, and currency seemed in the offing. “What kind of union would there be without Ukraine?” Yeltsin asked on November 25. “I cannot imagine it.” Relations with Kiev could not be sorted out until December at the earliest. Until they were to its satisfaction, any Ukrainian participation would only give feet of clay to a new confederation, since quite likely it would soon have pulled out or set unacceptable terms.102 Leader Leonid Kravchuk made it clear in comments on November 26 that his reservations were not only about a renewed union but about the Russian entity within it, whose head, Yeltsin, seemed to assume that Ukraine and the others would revolve around it “as if it were the sun.”103 On December 1, 90 percent of the Ukrainian electorate, including a majority of ethnic Russians, who were about one-fifth of the republic’s population, voted for independent statehood. Kravchuk was elected president that same day, with 62 percent of the popular vote, and announced he would not negotiate with Gorbachev. Kravchuk and the Ukrainian elite had been encouraged in thinking that secession was a possibility for them by Yeltsin and his Russian elite, and together they were now prepared to drive the final nail in the coffin.104
As the November 25 State Council session ended, the new head of state of Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, a nuclear physicist whom Yeltsin knew from the Interregional group, invited him to tack onto a planned visit to Minsk some time hunting in Belovezh’e Forest. This was a place where they could talk things over in peace—an old-growth wooded area, the only one surviving in Europe, on the border with Poland, where Warsaw Pact meetings had been held and Khrushchev and Brezhnev had gone shooting. Following the Ukrainian referendum and election, Shushkevich took it upon himself to ask Kravchuk to join them.105 Kravchuk was the only one of the leaders to do any hunting. Over herbal vodka and supper in the government villa at Viskuli on December 7, they and their advisers (Yeltsin had with him Burbulis, Shakhrai, Kozyrev, his aide Viktor Ilyushin, and Yegor Gaidar, his new deputy premier for economic reform) briefly reviewed the impasse. The Russians favored a trilateral agreement that would end it. Shakhrai, a legal scholar by background, hit upon a juridical device, the argument that the trinity of Slavic republics was qualified to act because they had been high parties to the Bolshevik-engineered treaty in 1922 that formed the USSR. Gaidar handwrote a text late that night. Around four A.M., Kozyrev slid it under the door of the one stenographer present, who was asleep; a cleaning woman picked it up overnight and it had to be retrieved from the trash in the morning and typed up.106
When they reconvened after breakfast, Yeltsin unexpectedly made one last stab at salvaging a single state. He had “an assignment from Gorbachev,” he said to Kravchuk, to ask whether he would sign the kind of agreement Gorbachev pushed at Novo-Ogarëvo, “
if Mikhail Sergeyevich and the others moved to give Ukraine more rights and freedoms.” Kravchuk said he might have at some earlier date but could not now, and Yeltsin expressed understanding. They then nailed down the accord outlined by Gaidar.107 It was signed around one P.M. on Sunday, December 8, Yeltsin and Burbulis doing the honors for Russia. Its fourteen articles recorded the slipping of the Soviet Union under the waves as a fait accompli (it “is ceasing to exist as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality”) and created a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), headquartered in Minsk, with limited supranational powers on issues of trade, finance, mobility of persons, and security. Russia, not the CIS, was to be legal successor to the USSR and to its obligations and rights, one of them, it was soon to be revealed, the Soviets’ permanent, veto-bearing seat in the United Nations Security Council. Yeltsin phoned George Bush and then USSR Defense Minister Yevgenii Shaposhnikov with the news. “Mr. President,” he said to Bush, using Foreign Minister Kozyrev as interpreter, “the Soviet Union is no more.” Yeltsin was nervous, giving Bush the impression he was reading from a prepared statement. As host, Shushkevich had the thankless duty of calling Gorbachev, and could not get through to him in the Kremlin until Yeltsin and Bush had rung off. Gorbachev demanded that Yeltsin be put on the line and assailed him for a double-cross and for informing a foreign head of state before the president of the USSR. Yeltsin said Gorbachev had to realize they had no alternative but to make the deal.108 Yeltsin was apprehensive of some military or KGB group, perhaps with Gorbachev’s connivance, taking matters into their own hands. Before going to see Gorbachev on December 9, upon his return from Belarus, he asked him on the telephone whether his security would be guaranteed. Gorbachev said it would be.109
The Russian Supreme Soviet ratified the Belovezh’e agreement on December 12, after one hour of deliberation, with a mere six out of 252 deputies voting against and seven abstentions. When Yeltsin received James Baker in the Kremlin on December 16, it was in the St. Catherine’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, with Shaposhnikov at his side. He greeted Baker with the words, “Welcome to this Russian building on Russian soil.” Baker made a point of telling Yeltsin the Americans would “look with disfavor” on any attempt to shame Gorbachev as he left office. “Gorbachev should be treated with respect,” Yeltsin replied reassuringly. “It’s about time our leaders can be retired with honor.”110