Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (36 page)

Nazarbayev was there already. He thought Yeltsin looked terribly hungover. He complained immediately that the Belovezh Agreement was an offense to the dignity of the Asiatic republics.

Gorbachev squared up to his nemesis and accused him of “some kind of a political coup . . . meeting in the woods and shutting down the Soviet Union.” He wanted to know if the independent states would have their own forces. “Yes, except for strategic forces,” replied Yeltsin. “So that means Ukraine will have its own army of 470,000, which is 100,000 more than united Germany!” exclaimed Gorbachev. “You were the first to recognize the Baltic states and signed agreements on human rights and what is the result? Now there are laws on citizenship that discriminate against Russians. That’s what democrats do! They say ‘Russians get out.’”

Yeltsin became indignant and snapped, “Why are you interrogating me? A way had to be found out of the dead end, and we found it!”

The wrangling got nowhere. Yeltsin left after ninety minutes. Gorbachev dictated a statement claiming the end of Soviet law was “illegal and dangerous.”
¹⁵
It was at variance with the will of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians in the March referendum on preserving the Union. It would strand millions of Russians living outside Russia’s borders. He called for an emergency session of the Congress of People’s Deputies to adjudicate on what he dismissed as the “initiative” of the three leaders.

In Andrey Grachev’s opinion, people were too concerned with their daily problems to take action on behalf of the Union. They had lost faith in Gorbachev and his project and just kept silent. That evening the presidential spokesman went to a piano recital in the Pushkin Museum given by Svyatoslav Richter—a Ukrainian—and had a late-night dinner with the Italian and Dutch ambassadors. The Belarus accord was not mentioned by the company, on the principle, he guessed, that “one doesn’t speak of rope in the house of a hanged man.”
¹⁶

Gorbachev’s military options evaporated two days later. Hoping to make a case for the Soviet armed forces remaining a cohesive force throughout USSR territory, come what may, he asked Shaposhnikov to arrange for him to address an assembly of top commanders from all over the Soviet Union on December 10. Their reaction to his plea was a stony silence. The majority of generals distrusted him and knew that he no longer controlled the purse strings. The next day Yeltsin conducted his own, two-hour meeting with the same officers, who reacted more positively to his direct style and to his promise of a 90 percent pay increase.

To James Baker these moves were the stuff of geopolitical nightmare: “Two Kremlin heavyweights jockeying for power, calling on the army to follow them, and raising the specter of civil war—with nuclear weapons thrown in.”
¹⁷

Shaposhnikov later told Baker how serious it was. Some hotheads among the generals wanted to give an ultimatum to the president, demanding that he defy Yeltsin, he said. It would be the August coup all over again. Rumors of military adventures continued to circulate in Moscow. Shevardnadze was alarmed to receive a warning from General Konstantin Kobets, who had organized the defense of the White House in August, that conservative elements in the military were still strong and secretly organizing. On December 11, Vitaly Tretyakov, the editor of
Nezavisimaya Gazeta,
came to tell Gorbachev that Moscow was full of gossip about a new coup. Some newspapers were repeating the rumors about Kremlin barricades. All this is invented, Gorbachev told him.

By December 12 the parliaments of the three Slavic states had endorsed the Belovezh Agreement. In the Russian parliament the vote—188 for, 6 against, and 69 abstentions—was greeted with applause. In Shakhrai’s opinion the deputies realized the agreement had saved the nation from a civil war. And even some hard-liners shared Yeltsin’s goal to see off the unpopular occupant of the Kremlin. Communist deputy Sevastyanov urged his comrades to vote in favor, “so that we can get rid of Gorbachev.”

“Such petty people,” stormed Gorbachev when he heard of the remark. “The era of Gorbachev is only beginning!”
¹⁸
At a press conference he waved the secret memo Burbulis had given to Yeltsin in Sochi and said its thrust was that the “cunning Gorbachev” must be stopped before trapping Yeltsin into a new union. Burbulis denied that the Russian leaders killed off the Soviet Union to get rid of its president. It was already dead, he said. The declaration in the Belarusian forest was a “medical diagnosis.”
¹⁹

The tone of Yeltsin’s accomplices grew insulting. Information chief Poltoranin said condescendingly that the Soviet president need not worry, that he would not suffer the same fate as Erich Honecker. His foreign minister, Kozyrev, told the German newspaper
Das Bild,
“Gorbachev is not a leper. We will find plenty of work for him to do.” Grachev encountered Kozyrev after that and told him to get lost.

The clock was nevertheless ticking loudly for Gorbachev. Nazarbayev had no choice but to accept the fait accompli of the deal in the forest. Kazakhstan, the three Slav republics, and the seven other republics still nominally in the Soviet Union agreed they would meet to discuss dumping the union and joining the Commonwealth of Independent States. They set the date and place: December 21 in Alma-Ata.

Gorbachev still found it hard to accept the reality that the USSR was finished, though he took the precaution of having crates of Politburo archives removed from the Kremlin in army trucks to General Staff military headquarters in Znamenka Street in the Arbat district. He continued to give almost daily interviews and briefings to journalists, ambassadors, and foreign politicians, pouring out a torrent of words as if he could somehow conjure up a compromise by talking about constitutional propriety and restraining the opportunists. When British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite and visiting UK government official Len Appleyard called on Gorbachev in the Walnut Room, Gorbachev stretched out his hand with a grin, saying, “So what—are you here to find out what country you are in and who I am now?” The president was in bouncing form, with his usual tan, bubbling with verbose and hectic charm, observed Braithwaite. Gorbachev spent half an hour extolling the merits of a union state, while making withering remarks about the “highwaymen,” “hairy faces,” and “inexperienced populists” who ruled the roost. As Gorbachev built his “castles in the air,” the ambassador noticed Alexander Yakovlev looking on more and more gloomily and Chernyaev taking notes, “with deadpan determination.”
²⁰

On December 13 Gorbachev told George Bush in a telephone call that the agreement between the three presidents was but a draft, a sketch, an improvisation, and the statement that the Soviet Union was dead was facile and bullying.

Bush said after putting down the receiver, “Yeah, Gorbachev is kind of a pathetic figure at this point.”
²¹

The chief “highwayman” boasted that Gorbachev would be gone soon. Yeltsin told his team in the White House that he had given Mikhail Sergeyevich a deadline, the end of December, or at latest January, when they would finish with one era and transition to another.

Gorbachev suggested two options to his aides. He could resign or else continue to offer his services to the republics as commander in chief and holder of the nuclear suitcase. Chernyaev and Alexander Yakovlev looked blankly at their leader. “Why are you sitting like that,” snapped Gorbachev. “Make notes, you will have to write this up.” Privately Chernyaev thought to himself: “Nobody today is going to offer him any position. So the second option is an illusion.”
²²
Already Gosbank, the Soviet Union’s Central Bank, had told Gorbachev that it could no longer make payments to serving members of the Soviet armed forces and Union civil servants. The Russian government stopped all Soviet-sourced payments “to the army, officials, to us sinners,” complained Chernyaev in his diary. “We are without salaries now.” Historian Roy Medvedev reckoned that by then the power of the president did not extend further than the buildings of the Kremlin.

It was at this point that the Americans got word that Gorbachev and his aides were desperately worried about an attempt to discredit them by Yeltsin’s supporters to deflect criticism for what they had done. It came via a circuitous route.
²³

Pavel Palazchenko invited Strobe Talbott of
Time
magazine and American historian Michael R. Beschloss to lunch in his Moscow apartment on Saturday, December 14. The two Americans were in Russia working on a book on the end of the Cold War. After asking his wife to leave the room, the Kremlin interpreter told his guests to write down a message and deliver it to the Bush administration—without revealing that he was the source. The message asked that the leaders of the United States impress upon Yeltsin that Gorbachev be treated with dignity. It warned: “Some people are fabricating a criminal case against him. It is important that Yeltsin not have anything to do with that.”

In his memoirs Palazchenko claimed his information came from an (unnamed) former member of the Communist Party Central Committee who had approached him in a Kremlin corridor to whisper that efforts were afoot to fabricate a case against Gorbachev. The source alleged that a shadowy team was searching frantically for compromising material to show that Gorbachev was secretly part of the August coup, and insisted that Palazchenko pass this on to the Americans, who might be able to use their influence on Yeltsin to get the effort stopped.

Palazchenko insisted he was not acting at Gorbachev’s prompting to secure American protection. “Nothing could be further from the truth or more out of character for Gorbachev.” The Americans, however, were skeptical. They believed Palazchenko was following a careful script that was intended to preserve the Soviet leader’s deniability. Nevertheless, Talbott agreed to pass on the message.

The request was conveniently timed. James Baker and State Department official Dennis Ross arrived the next day in Moscow for talks with the Russian leaders. Talbott went to see them in the Penta Hotel on Olympic Boulevard. He gave the message to Ross, who showed it to Baker.

The U.S. secretary of state met Yeltsin on the following day, December 16, in the St. Catherine Hall in the Kremlin. This was the first time Yeltsin had commandeered the sumptuous chamber where Soviet leaders had historically welcomed important guests. Marshal Shaposhnikov sat next to him, a strong signal of where the military’s loyalty lay. “Welcome to this Russian building on Russian soil,” trumpeted Yeltsin at the start of a four-hour conversation.

Baker delicately raised the rumors of possible criminal proceedings being taken against Gorbachev. Such action would be a mistake that would not be understood by the international community, he told the Russian leader. “Many people will be watching what’s going to happen to Gorbachev.” The United States hoped the transfer of power could be done “in a dignified way—as in the West.”

Yeltsin responded as if he expected the approach. “Gorbachev has done a lot for this country,” he said. “He needs to be treated with respect and deserves to be treated with respect. It’s about time we became a country where leaders can be retired with honor.”

Baker saw Gorbachev separately, in the same ornate hall and with Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze at his side. Gorbachev’s face was flushed, and he had difficulty speaking, as if he were having an attack of high blood pressure. Baker sensed, as they chewed Velamints that the secretary of state handed around, that these were three men at the end of their political rope. As with the British, Gorbachev called the Belovezh Agreement “a kind of coup,” carried out by people acting like highway robbers. The conversation trailed off inconclusively. Shevardnadze had nothing positive to say: He knew the game was up. In a telephone call with a contact in the United States, Jim Garrison, he had confided, “The Soviet Union is falling apart. My job is to preside over its collapse.”

Gorbachev went that evening in a heavy snowstorm to a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, his refuge from depression during Russia’s darkest hours. The symphony’s funereal trumpet solo was like a requiem for his career.

Yeltsin called President Bush the next day and assured him the transfer of power would take place in a friendly manner. Bush reminded him of the high regard in which Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were held for what they had done for peace. “I do guarantee, and I promise you personally, Mr. President, that everything will happen in a good and decent way,” Yeltsin promised. “We will treat Gorbachev and Shevardnadze with the greatest respect. Everything will be calm and gradual with no radical measures.”
²⁴

The White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, would later claim that the U.S. president not only convinced Yeltsin of the need for a peaceful transition but also told him to be good to Gorbachev and to give him a car, give him a house, and treat him well. He related that Bush then called Gorbachev and said, “You’ve got to be praising Yeltsin, or at least don’t be criticizing him in public. Don’t be tearing him down and picking a fight.”

Gorbachev’s aides were still concerned that something unpleasant was in store for them. Alexander Yakovlev confided to Chernyaev that he thought Yeltsin was fearful of opposition from people like himself and Shevardnadze and would try to liquidate them. They were alone in Gorbachev’s office at the time—the president had stepped out to make one of his regular calls to Raisa—and he lowered his voice in case of listening devices. “I think they will kill me,” he whispered to Chernyaev. “I will ask Gorbachev to send me somewhere, maybe Finland, as ambassador. Yeltsin will have to agree, I am too dangerous for him here.” Chernyaev, also wary of surveillance, responded with a complicit smile.