The Last Empire (5 page)

THE FIRST OFFICIAL MEETING
of the Moscow summit took place at noon on July 30, 1991, in St. Catherine's Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. “Gorbachev was marvelous,” wrote George Bush, recalling his impressions of the first summit session, “and how he could stand up to all the pressures against him I simply did not know.” The Soviet leader was in a very tight spot indeed, and the composition of the delegation he brought along to meet Bush indicated his diminished stature in Soviet politics. Gorbachev was accompanied to the meeting by one of the republican leaders, Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. Another republican leader, Boris Yeltsin of Russia, was invited but refused to attend—he was expecting Bush to come to his office later that day. Finally, the minister of defense, Marshal Dmitrii Yazov, was also absent, having sent his deputy to represent him.
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Gorbachev's road to the summit was anything but easy. What he saw as a moment of triumph for his new foreign policy was regarded
by some of the most powerful members of the ruling elite as a sellout of Soviet interests. While the Soviet military brass had always grumbled about budget reductions, Gorbachev was more out of tune with his military-industrial complex than any of his predecessors, including Nikita Khrushchev, who was still remembered with hatred by the military for his huge reduction of conventional forces in the early 1960s. But it was not only the Soviet military who believed that the Americans had gotten their way on almost every major issue pertaining to the nuclear arms treaty. The same sentiment was expressed by Strobe Talbott, one of the leading American commentators on foreign affairs and, in the second half of the 1990s, the principal architect of State Department policy toward Russia.

In a signed article that appeared in
Time
magazine immediately after the Moscow summit, Talbott wrote, “On almost every major question in START, the U.S. demanded, and got, its own way. . . . In the START treaty Gorbachev is tacitly accepting a position of overall inferiority, at least in the near term, since he is giving up right away much of the U.S.S.R.'s principal strength, which is in land-based ballistic missiles, while allowing the U.S. to keep its own advantages in bombers, cruise missiles and submarine weapons.” Talbott had called a spade a spade. But why was Gorbachev prepared to sign a treaty so unbalanced as to not only upset his minister of defense but also raise questions among American political commentators? Talbott offered an answer: “The U.S.S.R. has conceded so much and the U.S. reciprocated so little for a simple reason: the Gorbachev revolution is history's greatest fire sale. In such transactions, prices are always very low.”
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Gorbachev had charged his defense minister with the difficult if not impossible task of convincing the General Staff and the military-industrial complex to accept treaty conditions that cut the number of missiles on both sides but excluded aviation, giving the Americans clear superiority in means of delivering nuclear warheads—they indeed had a preponderance of heavy bombers. The Soviet military eventually gave its consent.
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The last sticky issue of the treaty was resolved less than two weeks before the start of the Moscow summit. It concerned the American right to monitor a flight test of the Soviet SS-25 missile. The first Soviet mobile intercontinental ballistic missile, the SS-25, known
to the Soviets as “Poplar” and to the Americans as “Sickle,” was the latest addition to the Soviet nuclear arsenals. Its firing tests were fully completed in December 1987, and by July 1991 the Soviet Union had 288 Poplars deployed against the United States, which lacked comparable mobile ballistic missiles. The Poplars were “sausages” 1.7 meters wide and 20.5 meters long, mounted on fourteen-wheel transporter-launchers that gave them unique mobility and chances of avoiding detection compared with other weapons in their class. The three-stage rocket was armed with a nuclear warhead up to 1,000 kilograms in size with a blast yield of 550 kilotons, approximately equivalent to forty Hiroshima-size bombs.

A post–Cold War study assessing the possible impact of a 550-kiloton blast on New York City claimed that it would result in more than 5 million deaths, burying half the population of midtown Manhattan under the debris of collapsing buildings and exposing the rest to fatal doses of radiation. Massive fires would devastate everything within a four-mile radius of ground zero, and the fallout plume would extend across Long Island. The American negotiators were not daunted by the SS-25 or its devastating power, since they had more than enough weapons in their arsenal to match it. Their main concern was that the Poplars were powerful enough to carry more than one warhead, which would dramatically change all calculations. To find out whether the Poplars had such a capability, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft—who characteristically focused on capabilities rather than intentions—and his team wanted the right to monitor a test firing of the Poplar at a range of eleven thousand kilometers. The Soviets found the request unacceptable, given the American preponderance in other types of nuclear weapons. Eventually they agreed to the test range of ten thousand kilometers used for other ballistic missiles but refused to “walk” the extra thousand kilometers.
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Gorbachev had wanted all disagreements between American and Soviet negotiators to be resolved before his departure for the G-7 meeting in London on July 16, 1991. On the following day he was planning to meet with President Bush and the leaders of the G-7 to make an indirect appeal for financial aid to the cash-strapped Soviet Union. On July 17, 1991, a few hours before Gorbachev's planned meeting with Bush, Marshal Yazov had reluctantly signed
the document that accepted the American demand. The road to the Moscow summit was finally open. Gorbachev officially invited Bush to Moscow, and the president agreed to visit as soon as possible, specifying the end of July, before his planned vacation in Maine.
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During his first meeting with Bush in Moscow on July 30, Gorbachev urged his guest to speed up the Soviet Union's admission to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which could provide a financial lifeline for the Soviet economy. In London, Gorbachev had refused to link the signing of the START agreement with his request for Soviet membership in the IMF and American financial assistance, trying to avoid the impression that he was selling out his country's strategic interests for American cash. But in Moscow he was less shy about his financial expectations. “I ask once again in the presence of the delegation that the President instruct them to consider membership [[for the USSR]] in the IMF,” said Gorbachev. “I have big problems in the next 1–2 years. Call us what you like—associate members, half associate members. It is important for us to
use
that fund.” Bush was reluctant to commit himself to full membership and thus full financial support, as he had been at the London meeting of the G-7 earlier in the month. “We're talking about exactly what you want, without the burden of full membership,” he replied.
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After lunch, Gorbachev invited his American guest of honor to take a stroll on the Kremlin grounds. They were immediately surrounded by dozens of reporters. “The KGB agents had to bowl people over to keep our group moving,” recalled Bush. “There were a few incidents, with staff members and press photographers pushed down, and a camera broken—but the ‘tank' rolled forward and Gorbachev himself told the shoving press people to get out of the way.” Thousands of correspondents had descended on Moscow to cover the eagerly anticipated top-level encounter, and they were all anxious to catch a glimpse and snap a picture or two of the world's most powerful leaders.

To some, the scene brought a sense of déjà vu. Three years earlier, Ronald Reagan had visited Moscow for the formal ratification of the intermediate-forces treaty, signed the previous year in Washington. Back then, Reagan and Gorbachev had also talked to ordinary Soviet citizens on Red Square. There was more symbolism than content in Reagan's visit to Moscow. Bush's visit now was all about content—he
and Gorbachev were going to sign a new treaty, not just ratify an old one. But according to David Remnick, the future editor of the
New Yorker
and then Moscow correspondent for the
Washington Post,
the Moscow “all-business” summit was nothing like Ronald Reagan's visit, which had been full of drama and excitement. Remnick wrote in his dispatch from the Soviet capital, “Bush worked the crowd as if he were at a Yale mixer. ‘So,' he said to a small clutch of Russian tourists, ‘are you all from Siberia?'” The hoped-for glamour was missing.
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One reason for the perceived lack of glamour was the personality of George Bush himself. A competent administrator and a cautious, responsible statesman, he was no match for his predecessor when it came to charisma. His Soviet host also outshone him in that regard. “Gorby,” as the outspoken Soviet leader had become known in the Western media since December 1987, when he won the hearts of the American people during his visit to the United States, was the center of attention. The solid but unspectacular Bush could not hold a candle to the animated general secretary. “In the image wars,” wrote Walter Goodman of the
New York Times,
“Mikhail S. Gorbachev, even in translation, effortlessly demolishes George Bush.” And yet, while Gorbachev was clearly the more engaging of the two grave diggers of the Cold War, it was generally acknowledged that Bush carried more political weight. According to Goodman, the Moscow summit “shattered the first rule of television, the one that says image defeats reality.”
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WHILE THE TWO LEADERS
were busy discussing Soviet membership in the International Monetary Fund, their wives, Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbacheva, seized the opportunity presented by the summit to promote not only a new image of Soviet-American relations but also the personal political agendas of their husbands. Barbara Bush, in particular, took advantage of the media's focus on the summit to appear on a number of American morning talk shows, laying to rest speculation that she did not want her husband to run for a second term on health grounds. Indeed, she virtually initiated his reelection campaign by claiming that he should run for the sake of his country. The success of the Moscow summit created the right atmosphere to kick off the campaign, and George Bush would make his own announcement to that effect immediately upon his return to Washington.

Despite differences of age and upbringing (Raisa was approximately seven years younger than her American counterpart), the two first ladies got along extremely well. It was a major change from the tense relationship between Raisa and Nancy Reagan, who had publicly taken issue with Raisa's comment that the White House was more an official building and a museum than a place to live. Like many who knew Raisa, Nancy Reagan claimed that she preferred lecturing to conversation. The spirit of Nancy Reagan must have been hovering in the Moscow air in late July 1991 when Raisa Gorbacheva, responding to a journalist's question about what she was currently whispering in her husband's ear, remarked, “It was not I who spoke about whispering in my husband's ear. Maybe it was someone else.” The reference was to an earlier comment of Nancy Reagan's that Raisa had whispered the word “peace” to her husband. Raisa killed two birds with one stone, patronizing Nancy Reagan and deflecting accusations by her Soviet critics to the effect that she was unduly influencing her husband on matters of policy and official appointments.
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Raisa Gorbacheva and Barbara Bush had established good personal relations during the Gorbachevs' visit to Washington in June 1990. While their husbands negotiated trade issues, Raisa had accompanied Barbara Bush to a commencement ceremony at Wellesley College, a women's institution in Massachusetts. Originally Barbara had been scheduled to deliver a commencement address on her own, but 150 students signed a petition of protest against a keynote speaker who had dropped out of college after a year in order to marry and spend her life as a homemaker. The college administration changed the mood by inviting Raisa Gorbacheva to speak as well. Not only was she a career university teacher with a doctorate in sociology, but she was also extremely popular in the United States thanks to her husband's policies. The fact that Raisa had studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy and technically held a degree in scientific communism was conveniently overlooked (her biography in the Moscow briefing book claimed that she had studied and taught philosophy). Given the controversy at Wellesley, the Soviets were originally reluctant to agree to that visit, but the Americans insisted. Raisa enjoyed the opportunity to meet with American students. She later claimed that their questions prompted her to write her autobiographical book
I Hope,
which promoted her husband's policies at home and abroad.
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On the opening day of the Moscow summit, the first ladies toured Kremlin churches and museums and then took part in the unveiling of a sculptural composition donated to the city of Moscow in the name of Barbara Bush. It was a replica of “Make Way for Ducklings,” showing a mother duck leading eight ducklings, inspired by a popular 1941 children's book by Robert McCloskey and installed in the Boston Public Garden, where the action of the book takes place. “There's something magical about the thought of American children loving and playing with ducks in Boston while children in Moscow are doing the same,” said Barbara Bush at the ceremony. The Moscow donation was a way of continuing her domestic crusade for children's literacy. But although the ducklings sculpture was intended to bridge cultural and ideological differences, it actually became a symbol of the difficulties encountered by the Moscow-Washington dialogue after the Cold War: American cultural and ideological imports, enthusiastically welcomed at first, did not thrive on local ground. While Muscovites and their children loved the ducklings, most of them had no knowledge of the story behind them. McCloskey's
Make Way for Ducklings
was not available in Russian translation.
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