The Last Empire (2 page)

Bush's Christmas address was a major departure from the way in which the president himself and the members of his administration had treated their erstwhile Soviet partner and assessed their ability to affect developments in the Soviet Union. Whereas Bush and his national security adviser, General Brent Scowcroft, had insisted publicly for most of 1991 that their influence was limited, they were now suddenly taking credit for the most dramatic development in Soviet domestic politics. This new interpretation, born in the midst of Bush's reelection campaign, gave rise to an influential, if not dominant, public narrative of the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the sole world superpower. That largely mythical narrative closely linked the end of the Cold War with the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. More important, it treated those developments as direct outcomes of US policies and, indeed, as major American victories.
³

This book challenges the triumphalist interpretation of the Soviet collapse as an American victory in the Cold War. It does so in part on the basis of recently declassified documents from the George Bush Presidential Library, including memoranda from his advisers and formerly secret transcripts of the president's telephone conversations with world leaders. These newly available documents show with unprecedented clarity that the president himself and many of his White House advisers did much to prolong the life of the Soviet Union, worried about the rise of the future Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the drives for independence by leaders of other Soviet republics, and, once the Soviet Union was gone, wanted Russia to become the sole owner of the Soviet nuclear arsenals and maintain its influence in the post-Soviet space, especially in the Central Asian republics.

Why did the leadership of a country allegedly locked in combat with a Cold War adversary adopt such a policy? The White House documents, combined with other types of sources, provide answers to this and many other relevant questions posed in this book. They show how Cold War–era political rhetoric clashed with realpolitik as the White House tried to save Gorbachev, whom it regarded as its main partner on the world stage. The White House was prepared to tolerate the continued existence of the Communist Party and the Soviet empire in order to achieve that goal. Its main concern was not victory in the Cold War, which was already effectively over, but the possibility of civil war in the Soviet Union. That would have threatened to turn the former tsarist empire into a “Yugoslavia with nukes,” to use a term coined by newspaper reporters at the time. The nuclear age had changed the nature of great-power rivalry and the definition of victory and defeat, but not the rhetoric of the warrior's ethos or the thinking of the masses. The Bush administration had to square the circle by reconciling the language and thinking of the Cold War era with the geopolitical realities of its immediate aftermath. It did its best in that regard, but its actions far outshone its inconsistent rhetoric.

It is easy to understand (and sympathize with) the excitement of those involved in the events of late 1991 as they saw the red banner going down the Kremlin flagpole and recalled the sacrifices associated with American participation in the global rivalry with the Soviet Union. But it is no less important today, almost a quarter of a century after those events, to take a more dispassionate look at what actually happened. The declaration of the fall of the USSR as an American victory in the Cold War helped create an exaggerated perception of the extent of American global power at the time when such perception mattered most, during the decade leading up to the 9/11 attacks and the start of the nine-year-long Iraq War. Inflated accounts of the American role in the collapse of the Soviet Union feed present-day Russian nationalist conspiracy theories, which present the collapse of the Soviet Union as the outcome of a CIA plot. Such interpretations not only appear in extremist Internet publications but also are voiced on major Russian television channels.
⁴

My narrative provides a much more complex and potentially controversial picture of what actually occurred in the months leading up to the Soviet collapse than the popular image that exists today
on both sides of the former Cold War divide. It also claims that the American world, which replaced the Cold War–era division of the globe into two rival camps, came into existence as much by chance as by design. It is important to revisit the origins of that world and the perceptions and actions of its creators, both deliberate and inadvertent, on both sides of the Atlantic if we are to understand what has gone wrong with it over the last decade and a half.

THIS BOOK LIFTS THE CURTAIN OF TIME
on the dramatic events leading up to the lowering of the Soviet flag and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The concept of empire, which I include in the title of this book, is vital to my interpretation of the dramatic events of 1991. I join those political scientists and historians who argue that while the lost arms race, economic decline, democratic resurgence, and bankruptcy of communist ideals all contributed to the Soviet implosion, they did not predetermine the disintegration of the Soviet Union. That was caused by the imperial foundations, multiethnic composition, and pseudofederal structure of the Soviet state, features whose importance was fully recognized neither by American policy makers in Washington nor by Gorbachev's advisers in Moscow.

Although the Soviet Union was often called “Russia,” it was in fact a conglomerate of nationalities that Moscow secured through a combination of brute force and cultural concessions and ruled with an iron fist for most of the Soviet period. The Russians were de jure in charge of the largest republic by far, the Russian Federation, but there were fourteen others. Numbering close to 150 million, the Russians constituted only 51 percent of the total Soviet population. The Ukrainians were the second-largest group, with more than 50 million people, accounting for close to 20 percent of the country's population.

The victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution allowed them to salvage the Russian Empire by turning it into a quasi-federal polity, at least with regard to its constitutional structure. This expedient prolonged the imperial history of Russia but did not allow it to escape the fate of other empires in the long run. By 1990 most of the Soviet republics had their own presidents, foreign ministers, and more or less democratically elected parliaments. Not until 1991 did the world finally comprehend that the Soviet Union was not Russia.
⁵

I put the collapse of the USSR into the same category as the twentieth-century collapse of the world's major empires, including the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, British, French, and Portuguese. I call the Soviet Union the last empire not because I believe that there will be no empires in the future but because it was the last state that carried on the legacies of the “classical” European and Eurasian empires of the modern era. I approach the history of the Soviet collapse with the basic premise that imperial rule is incompatible with electoral democracy and that the conflict between them led to the fall of the world's last empire. Once Gorbachev introduced elements of electoral democracy into Soviet politics in 1989, the newly elected politicians in Russia were suddenly empowered to say whether they were willing to continue bearing the burdens of empire, while the politicians in the non-Russian republics faced the question of whether they wanted to remain under imperial rule. Eventually, both groups answered in the negative.

The first to use the opportunity to say no were politicians in the Baltic states and western Ukraine, the parts of the Soviet Union forcibly incorporated into the USSR on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. The next were their counterparts in Russia and eastern Ukraine, which had belonged to the USSR before World War II. In the Baltics, Georgia, and Armenia, new democratic leaders pushed for independence. In the rest of the republics, the old elites hung to power, but with Gorbachev withdrawing the center's support from its regional viceroys and making their political survival dependent on democratic election, they began making deals with rising democratic forces—a development that eventually led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union along the borders established for its fifteen republics.
⁶

My narrative focuses on five months—late July to late December of 1991—that literally changed the world as critical decisions were made on the fate of the USSR. It was in late July, a few days before George H. W. Bush's visit to Moscow to sign a historic arms reduction treaty with Gorbachev, that the Soviet president reached a fateful agreement with Boris Yeltsin on reforming the Soviet Union—an agreement that would trigger the August coup of 1991. In late December, Gorbachev's resignation as president made the Soviet collapse final. While many academic and nonacademic writers have covered the history of the Soviet collapse, they have all but ignored the crucial period
between the August coup and Gorbachev's resignation in December. Some of these authors subscribe, consciously or implicitly, to the proposition that the elimination of the Communist Party after the coup automatically meant the end of the Soviet Union—a misleading assumption, as I show in this book. By the time of the August coup, the party could hold nothing together, including itself. The Soviet Union was wounded during the coup and its aftermath but continued to exist for another four months. It is the period analyzed in this book—the fall and early winter of 1991—that determined what would happen to its constituent parts and, no less important, to its nuclear arsenals.
⁷

In his insightful studies of the Soviet collapse and the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe, Stephen Kotkin focuses attention on “uncivil society”—the communist elites that ruled the inner and outer Soviet empires before deciding to abandon the communist experiment. It has been argued that the Soviet Union, like the Romanov empire before it, collapsed from the top and that the disintegration of the Soviet state was initiated and carried out by the elites, both in the center and in the regions. Indeed, there were no angry crowds in the streets demanding the dissolution of the USSR. The collapse of the former superpower also turned out to be surprisingly peaceful, especially in the four nuclear republics—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus (Belorussia), and Kazakhstan—which played a decisive role in the disintegration of the USSR. The fate of the USSR was decided, in the last analysis, in high offices. It was decided in the midst of a political struggle that involved major political figures in both East and West—a battle of nerves and a test of diplomatic skills. The stakes were enormous, involving the political and, in some cases, even physical survival of those involved.
⁸

At the center of the events of 1991 were several individuals whom I consider most responsible for that dramatic but also peaceful turn in the history of the world. My narrative is not unipolar, as the world became after 1991, or even bipolar, as it was during the Cold War, but rather multipolar, as the world has been for most of its history and is probably becoming again, with the rise of China and the development of political and economic problems in the United States. I take note of decisions made not only in Washington and Moscow but also in Kyiv, Almaty (previously Alma-Ata, renamed in 1993), and capitals
of other Soviet republics that would soon become independent. My main characters are four political leaders who arguably had the greatest impact on what happened to the Soviet Union and, following its collapse, on the world at large.

I tell my story by following the actions and trying to uncover the motivations of President George H. W. Bush of the United States, the cautious and often humble leader of the Western world, whose backing of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and insistence on the security of the nuclear arsenals prolonged the existence of the empire but also ensured its peaceful demise; Boris Yeltsin, the boorish and rebellious leader of Russia, who almost singlehandedly defeated the coup and then refused to take the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević's route of saving the crumbling empire or revising existing Russian borders; Leonid Kravchuk, the shrewd leader of Ukraine, whose insistence on his country's independence doomed the Union; and, last but not least, Mikhail Gorbachev, the man at the center of events who had the most to gain or lose from the way they turned out. He lost it all—prestige, power, and country. Gorbachev's personal drama—the story of a leader who dragged his country out of its totalitarian past, opened it to the world, introduced democratic procedures, and initiated economic reform, changing his homeland and the world around him to such an extent that there was no place left for him—is at the center of my narrative.

My main argument is closley linked to the idea that the fate of the Soviet Union was decided in the last four months of its existence, between the coup that began on August 19 and the meeting of the leaders of the Soviet republics in Almaty on December 21, 1991. I argue that the most important factor in deciding the future of the last world empire was not the policy of the United States, the conflict between the Union center and Russia (respectively represented by Gorbachev and Yeltsin), or tensions between the Union center and other republics, but rather the relationship between the two largest Soviet republics, Russia and Ukraine. It was the unwillingness of their political elites to find a modus vivendi within one state structure that drove the final nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union.

On December 8, in a hunting lodge in the Belarusian forest of Belavezha, having failed to reach agreement on the basis of Gorbachev's proposed template for the creation of a new Union,
Yeltsin and Kravchuk decided to dissolve the USSR and opt instead for the creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States. The Belarusian leaders who played host to the two presidents in Belavezha did not imagine the Union without Russia. Neither did the presidents of the Central Asian republics, who had no choice but to follow suit. A Gorbachev-led Union without Russia or Ukraine did not appeal to anyone. George H. W. Bush contributed to the dissolution of the world's last empire mainly by helping to ensure that the process occurred without major conflict or proliferation of nuclear arms.