Seize the Moment

by Richard Nixon

  While internal developments, not external aid, will determine what kind of system will replace the Soviet Union, its desperate economic crisis has given the United States unprecedented leverage over the course of events. The last of the world’s great empires has now disintegrated. We should not assist those who seek to piece it back together. At the same time, we should recognize that the great victories of freedom will survive only if freedom succeeds. As the world’s only superpower, we must not smugly enjoy the defeat of communism but rather roll up our sleeves to help ensure the victory of freedom.

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  I have traveled to the Soviet Union seven times since 1959, when I parried verbal jabs from Nikita Khrushchev in the Kitchen Debate. During my most recent trip in March 1991, I met not only as I had in my previous visits with the top man—Khrushchev in 1959, Brezhnev in 1972 and 1974, and Gorbachev in 1986—but also with a wide range of government officials and political leaders. I had discussions with the head of the KGB, the interior minister, the defense minister, and other key players in the August coup. I met with Boris Yeltsin, who three months later would resoundingly win election as president of Russia and five months later would stand in heroic defiance against the coup plotters. I also discussed the course of events with former key members of Gorbachev’s inner circle such as Eduard Shevardnadze, Alexander Yakovlev, and Leonid Abalkin, as well as with top officials and opposition leaders in Lithuania and in the republics of Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia.

  I discovered that before the coup three fundamental errors about the situation in the Soviet Union dominated the debate about Western policy. The first error was the idea that Gorbachev’s government should be provided with massive economic assistance in order to support the course of reform. Some Western pundits and policymakers peddled the “grand bargain” under which foreign aid to the tune of $100 billion or more would underwrite the Soviet Union’s transition to a market economy. But aid to Gorbachev’s regime—which was dominated by the hard-liners who later tried to depose him—would have undercut, not advanced, the prospects for political and economic reform.

  One newspaper editorialized that spurning aid to the Soviet president could deal “a mortal political blow to Gorbachev, in whose leadership the U.S. has invested so much hope for a continued improvement in East—West relations.” Another argued, “Gorbachev and his country need help. It is fitting, and in America’s interests, to join in supplying that help.” Gorbachev played to this gallery. In his Nobel Peace Prize speech in June 1990, he asserted that “the world needs perestroika no less than the Soviet Union,” that “the Soviet Union is entitled to expect large-scale support to assure its success,” and that if it fails “the prospects of entering a new peaceful period in history will vanish.”

  Moments after the hard-liners announced their seizure of power, the debate began over “who lost Gorbachev.” Many in the West, including leaders such as German chancellor Helmut Kohl, claimed that the failure to shower Gorbachev with gifts of economic aid at the London summit had contributed to the Soviet president’s ouster. That is fatuous nonsense. A helping hand to Gorbachev would have hurt the cause of democracy. Historically, the Russian and Soviet leaders have reformed only when under severe pressure domestically or internationally. Aid at that time would have been exploited by hard-liners to preserve the Communist system. As Andrei Sakharov said shortly before his death in 1989, “In the absence of radical reforms in the Soviet system, credits and technological aid will only prop up an ailing system and delay the advent of democracy.”

  Those who today claim that aid to Gorbachev would have prevented the coup ignore the fact that our aid would have gone to a cabinet dominated by the Soviet-style “gang of four”:

  —Valentin Pavlov, the prime minister, was steeped in the Stalinist practice of blaming external forces for domestic woes. In February 1991, he made groundless accusations that Western banks had conspired to try to undermine the ruble and thereby destabilize the Soviet economy. He then authorized the police and KGB to raid the offices of Western joint ventures without search warrants. When Gorbachev apparently bridged his differences with Yeltsin in April 1991, Pavlov fired a shot across the bow, independently asking the Supreme Soviet to transfer powers from the president to the prime minister on the lame pretext that the head of state simply lacked the time to exercise these responsibilities.

  —Dimitri Yazov, the defense minister, was an unapologetic advocate of reactionary defense and foreign policies. When I pointed out to him in our meeting that arms control could not go forward unless the Kremlin abandoned its attempt to evade CFE limits through the resubordination of three divisions to the naval infantry and other services, he replied that since the Soviet Union did not have a Marine Corps, it was entitled to such transfers to balance U.S. capabilities, breezily disregarding the fact that this still violated the letter of the treaty. In discussing the need to reduce the massive Soviet military budget, I observed that the Kremlin was spending at least 20 percent of its GNP on defense, while the U.S. allocated only 5 percent. He responded that the real Soviet figure was 12 percent of GNP, a patent falsehood based on vastly understated official figures. He then added that because the U.S. economy was “at least five or six times larger” than that of the Soviet Union, Washington was spending almost twice as much as Moscow on the military. As I listened, I was reminded of Khrushchev’s earthy comment to me in 1959 that “statisticians are the kind of people who can melt shit into bullets.”

  —Boris Pugo, the interior minister and tough-minded former KGB chief in Latvia, was a throwback to the Brezhnev era. When I met with him, he engaged in a lengthy hard-line monologue. He blamed the “politicians” and “troublemakers” for generating the political and economic crisis. He insisted that the regime had to cut back on reforms in order to restore order and stability. He justified the use of force in the Baltic states—for which he fully accepted responsibility—as necessary to defend the ethnic Russian minorities living there, ignoring the fact that even the Russians voted overwhelmingly for independence a few days before we met. Until his suicide in the aftermath of the failed coup, Pugo continued to orchestrate bloody attacks by Soviet military and internal security forces against pro-independence republic governments and innocent civilians from the Baltics to Transcaucasia.

  —Vladimir Kryuchkov, the steely head of the KGB, showed no sympathy for broader political reform. In the past, he had publicly accused reformers of taking their cues from the CIA and other Western intelligence services. In my meeting with him, he pulled no punches. While most hardliners carefully cultivated the pretense of supporting reform, Kryuchkov did not bother. He blamed Gorbachev’s reforms for a steep rise in crime and corruption. He called the revolutions in Eastern Europe “disastrous,” not surprising coming from the man who had served as third secretary in the Soviet embassy in Budapest during the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. When I raised the issue of Baltic independence, he dismissed it outright on the grounds that the United States would never entertain such an option for Puerto Rico! He also said that he had had “tough arguments” over reform with Gorbachev and did not know how long the Soviet president would keep him around because “he may get bored with me.” Kryuchkov’s vision for the Soviet future most resembled post-Tiananmen Square China: a mixed economy coupled with a totalitarian state. When I asked about the future of political reform, he bluntly replied, “We have had as much democratization as we can stomach.”

  If Western aid had started flowing before the August revolution, Pavlov, Yazov, and Kryuchkov would be sitting in power instead of sitting in jail. Those who touted the “grand bargain” failed to understand that without political reform, aid to Moscow would have been the “grand con job.” Without genuine democracy, the choke hold of the Communist party apparatus on society would not have been broken, the people would have refused to accept the sacrifices inherent in the transition to the market, and the political process would have lacked the accountability ne
eded to keep the reforms on track. Without democratic self-determination for the Soviet republics, political instability and the lack of an accepted framework of laws would have undermined even the best economic reform program.

  While Gorbachev carries an American Express card, the idea that we should have given the precoup Soviet government a personal automatic-teller card to the U.S. Treasury has been thoroughly discredited by subsequent events. Such aid would have helped the very individuals who sought to return the Soviet Union to its Stalinist past and demoralized the reformers who ultimately prevailed in the August 1991 democratic revolution.

  The second fundamental error in the conventional wisdom of Western analysts before the coup was that there was no better alternative to Gorbachev. That view might have been true in the first years of Gorbachev’s rule. But it was outdated by 1991 and was totally refuted by the resistance to the coup. Although many Western diplomats and leaders were obsessed with supporting Gorbachev, reformers—led by Yeltsin but reinforced by key figures who had resigned from Gorbachev’s inner circle and by new democratic nationalists in the republics—had already become a broad-based movement capable of governing the country.

  When I received briefings on Yeltsin before my trip to the Soviet Union in 1991, I was reminded of the official assessments of Khrushchev in 1959. State Department and CIA briefers characterized Khrushchev as “oafish,” dwelling on his habit of drinking too much in public, his poor Russian grammar, and the sartorial ineptitude of his floppy hats, short-sleeve shirts, and ill-fitting suits. But of all the leaders whom I have met in forty-six years of public life, Khrushchev had the quickest mental reaction time. He proved to be a strong leader, at times almost more than the West could handle. One of the briefers on Yeltsin in 1991 sounded like a recording of my 1959 briefing on Khrushchev. He was dismissed as an opportunistic lightweight who drank excessively, behaved erratically, spoke colloquial Russian, and was not in Gorbachev’s league intellectually or socially.

  After meeting for over an hour with Yeltsin, I found that some of my briefers had fallen victim to the tendency among many foreign policy analysts to mistake style for substance. Politics is not learned from the pages of a textbook or a fashion magazine. It depends on ideas, organization, and charisma. Yeltsin was clearly a political heavyweight who could discuss complex subjects without aides or notes and who had an instinctive understanding of the people. He had proved his ability to marshal a nation-wide campaign, winning 60 percent of the vote in a multicandidate field. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin possessed genuine personal charisma—the intangible quality of leadership that no one can define but everyone can recognize—but each drew his support from a different audience. Gorbachev appealed to Wall Street, Yeltsin to Main Street. Gorbachev captured the elite in Georgetown drawing rooms, Yeltsin the workers at the Sverdlovsk factory gates. Gorbachev appealed to the head, Yeltsin to the heart. Gorbachev dazzled a crowd, Yeltsin moved a crowd. Gorbachev was a man of the world, Yeltsin a man of the people.

  Yeltsin was a better politician—in the Soviet setting—than Gorbachev. Yeltsin is a combination of John Wayne and Lyndon Johnson. He is a two-pistol kind of man who radiates animal magnetism. He takes a no-nonsense approach and adopts categorical views. He expresses his opinions in earthy terms and can connect with the average person. Gorbachev was a Soviet version of Adlai Stevenson: intellectually brilliant, articulate on television, but unable to relate to the man in the street. He spoke tirelessly about abstract “processes in society” and “steadily unfolding phases of change”—rhetoric that thrilled academics but that left people cold. Unlike Yeltsin, Gorbachev was profoundly uncomfortable in dealing with average Soviet people. Yeltsin likes retail politics, while Gorbachev liked boardroom politics.

  Those Soviet experts who characterized Yeltsin to me as a demagogue who “believes in nothing but the desire for power” revealed shocking political superficiality. Yeltsin’s views had grown, evolving to cope with the deepening Soviet crisis while Gorbachev’s remained in the quagmire of Marxism-Leninism. Before the failed coup, Yeltsin had totally repudiated communism, while Gorbachev had not. Yeltsin supported private ownership of enterprises and land, while Gorbachev did not. Yeltsin supported immediate independence for the Baltic states, while Gorbachev did not. Yeltsin called for cutting off all aid to Cuba, Afghanistan, and other Soviet clients in the underdeveloped world, while Gorbachev did not. Yeltsin wanted to make major cuts in spending on the Soviet military, while Gorbachev did not. Yeltsin won office in a fully free election, while Gorbachev did not. Immediately after the coup, Yeltsin spoke of a bold democratic revolution, while Gorbachev spoke timidly of reforming the Communist party.

  Yeltsin certainly aspires to power—as all politicians do—but that does not make him a demagogue. He wants power not for its own sake but for what he can achieve with it. When I asked him whether he sought Gorbachev’s job, he responded flatly that he did not, that ruling from the center would mean compromising principle. Shrewd calculation, as well as genuine conviction, clearly stood behind that decision. He knew that he could never win the support of the reactionaries who kept Gorbachev in power. To court their support, Yeltsin would have had to turn his back on democratic and market reform, a price that he refused to pay. Instead, he sought to defeat the center through an end run—winning power in the Russian republic, developing close political ties with other major republics that shared his values, such as Byelorussia and Ukraine, and confronting Gorbachev with a reformist united front. It was the knowledge that Yeltsin’s strategy was on the eve of success that prompted the Communist hard-liners to launch their coup.

  Yeltsin’s resolute leadership of the democratic revolution after the coup made him a world figure and exposed his critics in Western diplomatic and media circles as political amateurs. Because he proved them wrong, he has been pelted by a barrage of barbs and snipes in the press. One policymaker warned that he had “very serious questions about Yeltsin” and that the Russian leader displayed “undemocratic instincts.” Another dismissed him as a politician with “an enormous ego” and “an instinct for what plays.” Many criticized his decrees outlawing Communist party activities in Russia and his forceful exchanges with Gorbachev before a public session of the Russian parliament immediately after the coup. A major Western newspaper termed his behavior “worrisome” and condemned the way “he bulldozed a shaken Mr. Gorbachev in the autocratic style of the old apparatchiks.” And a widely read columnist condescendingly sniffed at how he licked caviar and butter off his fingers at a state dinner in Washington.

  Yeltsin is a victim of a blatant double standard. When Gorbachev made 180-degree swings in his policies, Western pundits and policymakers called it statesmanship. When Yeltsin made modest shifts in his positions, they called it opportunism. Those who call Yeltsin’s democratic credentials into question never scrutinized Gorbachev’s. Their faith in Gorbachev led them to overlook his often reiterated fidelity to the communist ideology and to excuse his precoup alliance with the unrepentant reactionaries. When I was in the Soviet Union in March 1991, he called out more than fifty thousand troops to enforce his ban on demonstrations in central Moscow. But few of his Western supporters denounced him. Even though KGB thugs and Interior Ministry troops pummeled many of the five hundred thousand protestors who turned out despite his decree, the State Department spokesperson refused to reproach him. She argued that this situation was “no different than our own country,” adding that if groups wanted to hold “a demonstration in Washington, D.C., they have to apply for a permit.”

  After the August coup, Western leaders who staked their political capital on a personal relationship with Gorbachev went bankrupt overnight. Those who belittled Yeltsin and who glorified Gorbachev made the critical error of confusing personal relations between leaders with political relations between great powers. Western policies toward Moscow should never have hinged so much on the fate of one man, even as remarkable a figure as Gorbachev. Fortunately for the Soviet people, the policy
of backing Gorbachev “to the end,” as one policymaker urged, turned out to be as futile as it was foolish.

  Yeltsin has disproved Pushkin’s observation in the nineteenth century that rebellions in Russia tend to be senseless and violent. While the Russian president unquestionably has the eloquence and charisma to incite a crowd to violence, he took power through ballots, not bullets. In the aftermath of the coup, he has sought to advance democracy through parliament, not through purges. In speaking of the violence of revolution, Lenin often remarked that you cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs. If a few bruises to Gorbachev’s ego were the cost of the peaceful triumph over the Soviet Communist system, it was a fair price to pay.

  The third fundamental error prevalent in the Western policy debate before the August revolution was that nationalism in the Soviet republics was an unmitigated evil threatening to unleash instability and violence. In fact, the new nationalists not only gave the democratic movement in the Soviet Union its initial momentum but also provided indispensable strategic depth to the forces resisting the coup. The only fully free elections in Soviet history have been conducted not by Gorbachev and the center but by democratic nationalists in Russia and other republics. Moreover, if Yeltsin and the reformers in Moscow had been the only obstacle to the attempted Stalinist restoration, the coup leaders could have found enough card-carrying killers within the Soviet security apparatus to prevail. It was the fact that the democratic resistance commanded the loyalty of tens of millions across all fifteen republics that caused the Communist system to suffer a fatal breakdown of its political will.

  In an age of nationalism, it was inevitable that loosening the Soviet Union’s totalitarian order would produce an outburst of nationalist feelings. Communism was premised on the idea of a worldwide workers’ revolution, in which the ideology transcended borders and nationalities. The failure of communism thus left the Soviet empire without a unifying ideology and gave the Soviet peoples an opportunity to reassert their national identities. Promoting democratic and market-oriented reforms while simultaneously fighting a rearguard battle to save the empire was impossible. The Soviet empire was put together and held together by force. The glue of the communist idea, which once enhanced unity, long ago lost its potency. Today, the new Soviet political order can remain intact only through the voluntary consent of the Soviet nations.