The Last Empire (46 page)

When the call finally went through, Bush told Gorbachev right away that he was calling on the issue of Ukraine and was concerned by statements coming recently from the Soviet side—a clear reference to Cherniaev's declaration. “You know our tradition as a democratic nation. We must support the Ukrainian people,” said Bush. He tried to sweeten the pill: “It would seem to us that recognizing Ukrainian
independence could well bring them back into the union treaty process.” After listening to Bush, Gorbachev went over to the attack. “I won't hide that the leak from the White House saying that serious consideration was being given to recognizing the independence of the Ukraine by the U.S.—especially because that leak came on the eve of the referendum—that this was taken negatively,” he said to Bush. “It appears that the U.S. is not only trying to influence events but to interfere.”

Gorbachev continued by declaring that the Ukrainian vote for independence should not be treated as a vote for secession. He brought up events in Yugoslavia. “If someone in Ukraine says that they are seceding from the Union, and someone says they are supporting them,” said Gorbachev, alluding to Bush's readiness to recognize Ukraine, “then it would mean that 12 million Russians and members of other peoples become citizens of a foreign country.” He indicated that Yeltsin's claims to Ukrainian regions bordering on Russia and the situation of Russian minorities in the Crimea and the Donbas coal region of eastern Ukraine were potentially explosive issues. Gorbachev was following the recommendations given him on Ukrainian minorities by Georgii Shakhnazarov the previous month.

Anatolii Cherniaev, who was present during the conversation, summarized Gorbachev's argument as follows: “Independence is not secession, and secession is Yugoslavia squared and raised to the tenth power!” Gorbachev asked Bush to take care not to embolden the separatists. “Every state of the U.S. is sovereign, but we deal with the United States as a strong state,” he said to Bush.

“Very true,” responded the American president, but he was not prepared to yield an inch. “The recognition of the aspirations of Ukrainians to be independent will pave the way to resolve these thorny issues standing in the way of political and economic reforms,” he said. Bush assured Gorbachev that he was not out to make things more complicated for him. “I'm under a little pressure at home,” said Bush, referring to his domestic Ukrainian problem. “I can't understand what you have been through, but people are piling on me, so I can understand a little of what you're experiencing.”

There was no dialogue: the conversation consisted of two monologues. Although the interlocutors avoided an open conflict, both knew that their positions were incompatible. The telephone call
could do little to draw them closer. The political alliance between Bush and Gorbachev was now a thing of the past. Cherniaev regarded James Baker, who participated in the conversation on the American side, as more sympathetic than Bush to Gorbachev's plight and the future of the Union. “Baker is freer in his judgments and less subject to pressure from all kinds of lobbyists, more frank!” wrote Cherniaev in his diary later that day. After the conversation he sat down to draft a press release about it. Gorbachev was eager to use the fact of the call itself, if not its content, to his political advantage on the eve of the Ukrainian referendum. He tried to offset Bush's indirect leak to the press a few days earlier with his own leak. The goal of the statement, according to Cherniaev's diary, was “to put the squeeze on Kravchuk and Co.”
²¹

FOR GORBACHEV, THE DIFFICULT
conversation with Bush followed on the heels of a no less difficult meeting with Boris Yeltsin, whom he considered the source of most of his recent troubles. That morning Gorbachev had begged Yeltsin to save the Union from looming default: the Russians, who were now in control of oil and gas revenues, had stopped financing Union structures. The world's second superpower was broke. Gorbachev still commanded the military and the diplomatic corps but had no money to pay either or even to cover the salaries of his own staff.

The Union coffers were empty. On the previous day, at a session of the Union parliament, Gorbachev had asked the deputies to approve his June decree ordering the Central Bank to issue 68 billion rubles in credits to state institutions and enterprises. He had also asked for approval of new credits in the amount of 90 billion rubles. This was, in effect, a request to print more money, and it did not sit well with many of the deputies. While one chamber of the Union parliament passed a resolution to issue the credits, parliament as a whole, under the influence of the Russian deputies, would not approve it. The Russian government, ready to launch a radical economic reform, wanted to avoid another round of inflation at all costs. The Gorbachev administration was bereft of funds. “Russia, in effect, blocked the acceptance of an extraordinary Union budget at the end of the year,” wrote Gorbachev's economic adviser Vadim Medvedev in his diary. “This led to a mass nonpayment of salaries to institutions on the [[Union]] budget.”
²²

On that same day the State Bank ceased all payments to Union institutions, including the army and the presidential administration. The sole exception was the Ministry of International Relations, now headed again by Eduard Shevardnadze. Yeltsin, mindful of the negative reaction of Western leaders to his earlier plans to cut the ministry's funding, continued to bankroll it from Russian coffers. Ministry officials sounded the alarm, expecting a takeover by Russia, but Gorbachev was powerless. “What could we do?” wrote Cherniaev in his diary. “Russia still has the wherewithal to pay, but M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] has nothing!”

At his meeting with Yeltsin and his advisers on November 30, Gorbachev had no cards to play. His only hope was to shame his opponents into giving him the money. “The case was presented as follows;” wrote Cherniaev in his diary, “the ‘center' cannot be left with no means of support.” At the end of the four-hour session Yeltsin agreed to release some funds. His economic advisers were to figure out exactly how that would be done. While Gorbachev spoke with Bush on the phone in his office, the experts met in the adjacent Walnut Room, so called because of its paneling, previously used for meetings of the Politburo. The problem they were trying to solve could scarcely have been imagined, except perhaps as a nightmare, by the Soviet leaders meeting in that room in the heyday of their Cold War rivalry with the United States.
²³

The Union was on its deathbed. It was no longer even bleeding: when it came to finances, all the blood was long gone. The solution negotiated by Gorbachev was at best a whiff of oxygen. But despite all the disappointments of the previous few days, he was not giving up. In his conversation with Bush, Gorbachev was eager to report one of his rare political successes—on the previous day his efforts to save the Union had gained the full support of his political consultative council, which included the mayor of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Anatolii Sobchak, and the “grandfather of perestroika,” Aleksandr Yakovlev. The council members, many of them founders of the Interregional Group, the first democratic bloc in the all-Union parliament, would now back Gorbachev's efforts to save the Union. Some of them spoke about creating a formal opposition to what was regarded as Yeltsin's intention to destroy the USSR.

Yeltsin's longtime ally, Sobchak, went on television that evening with a strong statement in support of the Union. But the council members were hardly an influential voice in the new Russia. They never formed the opposition bloc that they discussed with Gorbachev, and their ability to influence public opinion was limited at best. Yegor Yakovlev, a council member who had been appointed head of the Soviet Television and Radio Administration after the coup, was losing control of his own staff. “Yegor Yakovlev complained that television is being ‘taken away' from him,” noted Cherniaev in his diary. “He is no longer master there. And the ‘Russians' are now in charge.” Cherniaev then added, with regard to the television news program aired on November 29, “There were comments blatantly offensive to M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] concerning his ‘Ukrainian policy.'”
²⁴

A few days earlier, Cherniaev and Aleksandr Yakovlev, two liberal party apparatchiks, had concluded that, as Cherniaev noted in his diary, “whether we like it or not, there is no alternative to Russia's breakthrough to independence. Gorbachev's efforts to save the Union are hopeless spasms.” On November 29, the day on which Gorbachev received support from Sobchak and other leaders of perestroika, Cherniaev sent his boss a draft address to the Union parliamentarians with an appeal to vote for the new union treaty. Privately, he noted, “I don't believe in it myself. . . . Yet I came up with the words!” The same day, he forwarded a memo to Gorbachev in which he did believe, advising him to “redirect his role toward international affairs and the defense of culture . . . to represent his world prestige at home and draw support from it, not relying either on the Union treaty or on the decisions of congresses that elected him and confirmed the election after the putsch, nor on the Constitution of the USSR!” This was not a plan to save the Union but an attempt to salvage Gorbachev himself as a historical figure, if not a political one.
²⁵

Gorbachev, for his part, was reaching out to anyone who would listen, predicting that the dissolution of the Union would mean a human disaster of epic proportions. In an interview with the Belarusian
People's Newspaper,
Gorbachev made one of his habitual references to Yugoslavia, where the conflict between Serbs and Croats had forced hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to abandon their ancestral homes and flee the conflict area. He thought that the Yugoslav tragedy would pale in comparison to what could
happen in the Soviet Union if new national boundaries were to create a host of ethnic minorities. His argument focused on the Russians—the former masters of the empire—and the discrimination they could face in newly independent states.

“Seventy-five million people live outside the bounds of their ‘small fatherlands,'” asserted Gorbachev, referring to the ethnic homelands of Soviet nationalities and the intermingled population of the Union. “What, then, are they all second-class citizens? And let them not lull us with assurances that everything will be guaranteed in bilateral agreements signed by the republics. I do not believe that they will solve the problem. We must preserve a state that will provide a legal defense for every individual.” Gorbachev then referred to the Russian-speaking inhabitants of the region, who could not fully participate in the political process without knowledge of the local languages. “Willy-nilly, it's turning out that certain citizens living in the Baltic republics are being reduced to something in the nature of a second class,” he told the journalist.

Even though the Belarusian reporter asked questions openly critical of Yeltsin, inviting Gorbachev to lash out against his main political opponent, the Soviet president did not rise to the bait. Whatever he thought of Yeltsin, in public he made an effort not to attack him. Gorbachev was much less restrained when it came to Leonid Kravchuk. Referring to Kravchuk's bid for Ukraine's presidency, he told the reporter, “Generally speaking, a wonderful republic . . . But look at how they are exploiting the idea of independence: in my judgment, by no means only for the purpose of an election campaign.” Then Gorbachev played his minorities card, claiming that he wanted to see Ukraine united, while drawing attention to Ukraine's large Russian minority. “And if they intend to separate Ukraine from the Union,” argued Gorbachev, “what are the twelve to fifteen million Russians living there supposed to do, and who needs it, anyway? I am for self-determination without the destruction of the Union.”
²⁶

Kravchuk and his supporters in Ukraine believed that by constantly expressing concern about the fate of the eastern regions of Ukraine, Gorbachev was in fact trying to stir up interethnic conflict in the republic and exploit it to save the Union. But the question of what would happen to the Russian minority in Ukraine was more than a propaganda ploy on Gorbachev's part. Even those in his entourage
who had already given up on the Union were concerned about the prospect of partitioning what was regarded as Russia's historical territory. “In general there would be nothing amiss if it were not for Ukraine and for the Crimea, which cannot be given up,” noted Cherniaev in his diary.
²⁷

The answer to Gorbachev's and Cherniaev's concerns would be given by the forthcoming Ukrainian referendum. Those around Gorbachev did not believe that the Crimea and other regions of Ukraine with a sizable Russian population would vote for independence. It was a paradoxical situation. The future of the Russia-dominated Union depended on the Ukrainian vote, which in turn depended on the ethnic Russian vote in eastern and southern Ukraine.

14

THE UKRAINIAN REFERENDUM

L
EONID KRAVCHUK SPENT THE LAST DAYS
of November campaigning. The referendum scheduled for December 1 was to be held concurrently with Ukraine's presidential election, and Kravchuk, who wanted to become president of independent Ukraine, had to win both races.

An experienced party apparatchik but a novice public politician, Kravchuk remembered the advice given to him by George Bush during his July visit to Kyiv: look people in the eye, and you can figure out right away whether they will vote for you. Kravchuk did not go knocking on doors like a Western politician, but neither did he avoid contact with all sorts of people. At one point it almost cost him his life. As he visited a local department store in the central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, the head of his security detail told him that thousands of people had gathered on the square in front of the store to see him. Neither his own security detail nor the local police had enough personnel on hand to control the crowd, which was estimated at twenty thousand. Kravchuk refused to leave through the back door. “To flee like a thief from people, many of whom would soon be voting for me?” he wrote in his memoirs. “That would be nonsense!” A rookie campaigner, he overruled his guards and went to talk to the people on the square.