The Last Empire (10 page)

The Bush-Yeltsin meeting lasted approximately forty minutes and dealt largely with the problems of the new union treaty initiated by Gorbachev and supported by Yeltsin. The meeting itself was a sign of the special status accorded to Yeltsin by the White House. Judging by Bush's talking points, his main task was to assure Yeltsin of American support for the policy of reform, both his and Gorbachev's, while forestalling any possible initiative on Yeltsin's part either to open a Russian representation in the United States or to sign an official agreement on cooperation with the United States. “As you know, we cannot establish diplomatic relations with your republic, which we recognize to be a constituent part of the USSR,” Bush was supposed to tell Yeltsin. He held to that line at the meeting. When Yeltsin asked him, “Do I understand that you support my idea of formalizing the basics of our relationship?” Bush responded, not very diplomatically, “Which relationship? Do you mean the U.S. and Russia or yours with the center? I am unclear about what you are asking.” Secretary
of State James Baker, who was present, “translated” Bush's answer to the disappointed Yeltsin: “President Yeltsin, the answer will depend on what the Union treaty says about the authority of the republics to enter into agreements with other countries. We will have to see this new Union treaty.”
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If by inviting Bush to visit him in his new Kremlin office Yeltsin was seeking to build up his image as an independent world leader in the eyes of his domestic audience, he certainly succeeded. If he wanted to poke Gorbachev in the eye, he succeeded as well. Gorbachev recalled the episode with bitterness in his memoirs. But if Yeltsin wanted to improve his relations with the American president, he failed completely. Bush was furious with Yeltsin for being almost ten minutes late. “How long are we supposed to wait for His Highness?” complained Scowcroft. The originally planned fifteen-minute courtesy call was then extended to forty minutes, with Yeltsin repeating the points he had made to Bush during their private meeting to a group of Russian and American advisers who joined the two presidents afterward. Yeltsin then sprang another surprise when he attempted to hold an impromptu press conference with journalists who had been brought to the Kremlin without Bush's consent. He told them that the two sides had already prepared a draft agreement on Russian-American cooperation, for which he was grateful to President Bush. Bush swallowed the bitter pill, but as Yeltsin was getting ready to answer the journalists' questions, the president told him that he was already late and had to leave. Getting into his car, Bush told Scowcroft that he had been ambushed by the “grandstanding” Yeltsin.
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What happened at the Moscow summit reminded Bush and Scowcroft of the erratic politician they had first met in September 1989. But however boorish, childish, and unpredictable Yeltsin's behavior turned out to be, Bush was increasingly finding more common ground with him than with Gorbachev. In the summer of 1991, one of the most important questions on Bush's Soviet agenda was the independence of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—a cause supported by many members of the US Senate and Congress. Bush was gently pushing Gorbachev toward recognition of Lithuanian and Latvian independence, declared in 1990. If Gorbachev was indecisive, Yeltsin was not. On behalf of Russia, Yeltsin had condemned the actions of the center during the crackdown of early
1991 and supported the Baltic drive for independence. Now, standing next to Bush, he restated his support for that cause. He told the reporters he had gathered without Bush's consent that Russia and the United States had a joint position on the Baltics: the three republics should be allowed to leave. It was a position that Gorbachev did not dare to take.
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George Bush would leave Moscow the next day as concerned about the threat to Gorbachev from his own military as about the challenges posed by the republican leaders. Yeltsin was the most outspoken of them, but he was not the only one who wanted a weaker center and more freedom for his homeland.

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CHICKEN KIEV

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HORTLY BEFORE NOON ON AUGUST
1, 1991, George Bush's Air Force One took off from Sheremetevo International Airport near Moscow and headed for Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine and the third-largest urban center in the Soviet Union. In early 1991, approximately forty US nuclear warheads were aimed at the city known in Russian as Kiev. In case of a nuclear exchange, multiple nuclear blasts would have turned the city into rubble and killed all of its more than 2 million citizens. The signing of the START agreement meant that the city would be the object of fewer nuclear blasts in the event of war. If it came to the worst, some of its citizens might actually survive. But delivering this dubious good news was not the goal of George Bush's visit. The American president was coming to deliver a message of a different nature.
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The visit was supposed to be just a five-hour stopover, but it was not the number of hours that mattered. Rather, it was the simple fact that Bush believed negotiations in Moscow were not enough: one had to go to the republics and talk to their leaders as well. This was a new development in the history of Soviet-American relations and a sign of rapidly changing political conditions in the USSR. The White House wanted to signal its readiness to work with the republics while warning their leaders against using violence to achieve their goals. No one in the Bush administration could then have predicted the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union or foreseen the crucial
role that Ukraine would play in that process a few months later. Kyiv was chosen as the place to announce the new American policy on the Soviet republics because its top leadership did not favor complete independence. Ukraine's anti-Moscow forces were strong but not violent, and its audiences might be receptive to the new message from Washington.

But Gorbachev was by no means happy with the idea of the American president visiting Ukraine, the second most populous Soviet republic, whose leadership was more than reluctant to sign the new union treaty that he had been promoting aggressively since April. Unlike Bush, he fully understood the importance of Ukraine to the future of the Union and was afraid that the US president's visit could give a boost to anti-Union forces in the republic. The Soviet president had done his best to block the visit. On Monday, July 21, slightly more than a week before Bush's arrival in Moscow, US Ambassador Matlock received an unexpected call from Ed Hewett, President Bush's special adviser on Soviet affairs. A Soviet chargé d'affaires had come to Hewett's White House office to deliver an urgent message from the Kremlin, which wanted the Kyiv leg of the visit to be canceled. Matlock was taken aback by this request. The Soviets cited unspecified tensions, but Kyiv appeared quite calm. Moreover, preparations for the visit, which Matlock had begun with the approval of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, were already well under way. They involved not only Americans but also their Ukrainian counterparts, and canceling the visit at this point would be a major embarrassment to the American side.

Bush was caught by surprise by the Soviet request. The news reached him on board Air Force One en route to Turkey. Together with Brent Scowcroft, the president drafted a response to the effect that if the Soviets did not want him to go to Kyiv, he would cancel the visit, but, given the advanced state of preparations and the involvement of the Ukrainian side, Moscow would have to take responsibility for the cancellation. Matlock called the State Department on an open line and, knowing that the KGB was probably listening, described the possible negative consequences of the cancellation—not for Washington but for Moscow and its relations with Ukraine. The following day he repeated the same message to the Soviet foreign minister, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh. The alarmed Bessmertnykh contacted Gorbachev,
who allegedly told him, “Just forget about it. Tell the Americans not to worry and to go ahead with their plans. If the president wants to go to Kiev, I am sure he will be welcome there.” The crisis was resolved. Gorbachev had to accept the new rules of the game.
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During Bush's meeting with Gorbachev on July 30, the American president tried to convince his counterpart that he had nothing to fear from Bush's upcoming visit to Kyiv. He told the Soviet president, “I want to assure you that during my trip to Kyiv neither I nor any of those accompanying me will do anything that might complicate existing problems or interfere in the question of when Ukraine might sign the Union treaty.” Gorbachev hinted at the source of his original concern: “As for Ukraine, perhaps the following fact played a role: it has become known that not long before your visit the Heritage Foundation prepared a report in which it recommended that the president make use of his visit to Ukraine to stimulate separatist attitudes there, as that is strategically important.” Bush denied any knowledge of it: “I do not know about that report. But I hope you were informed that I stressed the need for the utmost tact in preparing the itinerary of the visit. I would be prepared not to visit Kyiv but Leningrad, for example. I would very much like to visit one of your cities. But I am not about to support separatism in any instance. Kyiv was included in the itinerary of the visit only after your minister of foreign affairs informed us that it was perfectly acceptable to you.”
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If it had been for Gorbachev to decide, Bush never would have gone to Kyiv. Moreover, Boris Yeltsin shared Gorbachev's stand on Ukraine. Both believed that the second-largest Soviet republic could not be allowed to go its own way. If Gorbachev, in his conversations with Bush, raised the possibility of civil strife and even war involving Ukraine and other Soviet republics, Yeltsin was calmer but no less determined. “Ukraine must not leave the Soviet Union,” he told the American president during their meeting in Yeltsin's Kremlin office. Without Ukraine, Yeltsin argued, the Soviet Union would be dominated by the non-Slavic republics. His “attachment” to Ukraine reflected the attitude of the Russian population in general. According to a poll sponsored by the United States Information Agency in February and March 1991, only 22 percent of Russians favored Ukrainian independence, while almost 60 percent were opposed. The Russian public's attitude toward the Baltics was strikingly different:
41 percent of those polled were in favor of Lithuanian independence, with 40 percent against.
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In late June 1991, the CIA prepared an intelligence estimate for the president and his advisers, laying out possible scenarios for developments in the USSR. Only one of them, violent fragmentation, included the possibility of Ukrainian independence. Two other options were further “muddling through” and a coup by hard-liners, with the Soviet Union remaining intact. The last option, called “System Change,” foresaw independence for the Baltics, the three North Caucasus republics, and Moldova, with Ukraine entering a Russia-dominated Slavic–Central Asian union. Yeltsin wanted Ukraine to be part of that union, while Gorbachev feared “violent fragmentation.” It appeared that the CIA, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin were all agreed on one thing: if the United States wanted a peaceful transformation of the Soviet regime, which was now abiding by the START agreements to cut its nuclear arsenals, it should make certain that Ukraine stayed in the Union.
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Bush was reminded of the importance of the Soviet nationality question during his talks with Gorbachev at Novo-Ogarevo. Gorbachev's monologue on the future of the Soviet-American world order was interrupted by a message for Bush. Nicholas Burns, a thirty-five-year-old staffer on the National Security Council and the White House liaison to Baltic Americans, had received a call from one of his Baltic acquaintances with the news that unidentified gunmen had attacked a recently established customs post on the Lithuanian border with Belarus and killed six Lithuanian customs agents in execution style. Burns passed the news to President Bush and his party in Novo-Ogarevo. Gorbachev was at once humiliated and infuriated; according to Bush, he visibly paled. The American president had heard of a shooting on Soviet territory before the country's own chief executive! Gorbachev sent advisers to find out what was going on. The US embassy believed that it was the work of the OMON, a special unit of the Interior Ministry forces. The Americans suspected that hard-liners in Moscow had arranged the incident to embarrass Gorbachev. If that was the case, they achieved their goal. Gorbachev's presentation of his vision of a new world order was cut short. “A pall fell over the meeting,” remembered Bush. “We resumed the discussions but the ebullient spirit was gone.”

As far as Gorbachev was concerned, the tragic events in Lithuania had given new urgency to the problem of self-determination, raising the specter of civil war in the USSR. He took the opportunity to switch his discussion with Bush to problems of national self-determination and requested American assistance with regard to Soviet policy in Yugoslavia, where Moscow wanted to prevent the disintegration of another Slavic-Muslim state. He also wanted support vis-à-vis the Soviet republics. “There are an enormous number of real and imaginary international and inter-ethnic problems,” Bush told Gorbachev. “Carving up states along these lines means provoking utter chaos. If I were to start listing the potential territorial problems, I wouldn't have enough fingers, not just on my own hands but on everyone's here. For example, here is the Soviet Union, 70% of inter-republic borders have not been definitely drawn. Before, no one cared about that, and everything was decided pragmatically, virtually at the district soviet level.” If news of the killings on the newly established Lithuanian border embarrassed Gorbachev before Bush, it also legitimized his fears about the possibility of Yugoslav-type chaos in the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev's perspective, the news came at a most opportune time—on the eve of Bush's “unsupervised” visit to Ukraine.
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