The Last Empire (6 page)

ON JULY
31, 1991,
THE SECOND DAY
of the summit, soon after the clock on the Kremlin tower struck half past three, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev entered the Winter Garden of the Grand Kremlin Palace. Their brief encounter there was part of the elaborate Kremlin protocol that accompanied the signing of important international treaties. The two presidents proceeded down the ornamented stairs of the former tsarist palace to St. Vladimir Hall, a rectangular room decorated with pink marble panels, one of five reception halls named after the chivalric orders of the Russian Empire. The palace itself had been built by Tsar Nicholas I in the mid-nineteenth century to celebrate Russian military might and glory. After the Revolution of 1917, the communists had turned the palace into a venue for party and state functions, as well as for official receptions of foreign dignitaries.
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The nuclear arms reduction treaty was ready to be signed. It looked like the dawn of a new era, a triumph of reason over the madness that had kept the world in thrall far too long. “I really did feel emotionally involved at the ceremony,” recalled President Bush later. “For me this was more than a ritual; it offered hope for young people all around
the world that idealism was not dead.” Mikhail Gorbachev was no less moved than his guest of honor. When Bush mentioned in his speech half a century of growing military arsenals, Gorbachev remarked, “Thank God, as we say in Russian, that we stopped this.” He called the treaty “an event of global significance, for we are imparting to the dismantling of the infrastructure of fear that has ruled the world a momentum which is so powerful that it will be hard to stop.”
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By signing the START agreement, the two leaders solemnly agreed not to deploy more than six thousand nuclear warheads against each other and limited each side's number of intercontinental missiles capable of carrying the warheads to sixteen hundred. Bush and Gorbachev also managed to go beyond the arms control and arms reduction agenda that had dominated Soviet-American relations for most of the previous thirty years. In a sign that the ideological confrontation of the Cold War era was also nearing its end, Bush pledged to ask Congress to grant the Soviet Union most-favored-nation trade status—a privilege heretofore withheld from the USSR on grounds of its violation of human rights and denial of exit visas to its Jewish citizens.

There were also signs of growing cooperation in the international arena. The two presidents issued a joint communiqué on the Middle East, promising to work together to summon an international conference on regional security and cooperation. The Soviets would strive to bring the Palestinians to the table, and the Americans would do likewise with the Israelis. Both presidents would send their foreign secretaries to Israel, where the US secretary of state, James Baker, would discuss the proposed conference while his Soviet counterpart, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, negotiated the opening of full diplomatic relations between Israel and the USSR. Some newspapers claimed that the Middle East announcement almost overshadowed the signing of the START agreement. Finally, there was a basic understanding on Cuba: in order to accommodate American demands, the Soviets promised to curtail their economic support of Fidel Castro's regime. There seemed to be no bilateral or international issue that the leaders of the two formerly hostile superpowers could not deal with and eventually resolve.
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Bush and Gorbachev had come to the signing ceremony at the Grand Kremlin Palace from the Soviet president's country residence in Novo-Ogarevo, near Moscow. There they had spent five hours
discussing world affairs with no preset agenda and tried to delineate a new world order to follow the abolition of the balance of nuclear terror. Gorbachev later called those informal talks a “moment of glory” for his foreign policy approach, which he dubbed “the new thinking.” For him, they marked a turning point in the formulation of “a
joint
policy of powers that had until only recently considered themselves mortal enemies and had in their enmity been prepared to push the entire world towards catastrophe.” If it were up to Gorbachev, the world would have become a Soviet-American condominium in which the two countries would not only live in peace but also resolve all international problems to their mutual satisfaction.
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Sitting on an open porch overlooking the Moskva River, Gorbachev presented his vision of a new world order to the American president. Gorbachev's interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, later recalled the gist of his boss's argument: “The world is getting increasingly diverse and multipolar, but in this world there needs to be a kind of axis, which our two countries could provide.” The Soviet leader did not use the axis metaphor in his own memoirs, but there is little doubt that it well reflected the essence of his thinking. Gorbachev was prepared to discuss a broad range of issues. He wanted a joint US-Soviet policy on the European Union, which appeared to be gaining not only political and economic power but also military strength. He also wanted a common front in dealing with Japan, India and China, with their 2 billion people, were on the rise; there was also the ever-troublesome Middle East and the undetermined role of Africa in the world balance of power.

Bush was receptive but, as always, cautious. Privately, he must have been more than skeptical. In his memoirs, Bush wrote, “Gorbachev began with a lengthy monologue, during which I barely managed to squeeze in a comment.” The Soviets, however, believed that this was no mere monologue. “Bush agreed,” recalled Palazhchenko, “not in so many words, but in the way he was willing to discuss with Gorbachev in cooperative mode matters the United States would not have allowed the Soviet Union even to touch before.” Bush assured his host that despite pressures from both the right and left of the American political spectrum, he was committed to the success of Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union. While the Right wanted to take advantage of Soviet weakness to destroy its Cold War rival and
the Left lamented continuing violations of human rights in the USSR, Bush was against taking advantage of Soviet vulnerabilities.

The Soviets felt that they had been heard. They were euphoric. Gorbachev later remembered nostalgically that “we were living for the future.” Gorbachev's foreign policy adviser, Anatolii Cherniaev, one of the few Soviet officials who participated in the informal brainstorming session at Novo-Ogarevo, recorded these thoughts in his diary a few days later: “Our relations are closer than those with our ‘friends' in the socialist countries used to be. There is no pharisaism or hypocrisy; no paternalism, backslapping, and subordination.”
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The conversations that so greatly impressed the Soviets, who were desperate for support and hungry for recognition as equals by their new American partner, barely registered on the American radar. Brent Scowcroft, experienced and no less cautious than Bush, later recalled his feelings after the summit: “It had been a satisfactory set of talks. We finally had put START I to bed, a large step on the road to rationalizing strategic nuclear forces in a new era.”
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In his memoirs, recalling the Novo-Ogarevo conversations, Bush made no mention of any Soviet overtures concerning a joint Soviet-American policy. The Soviets knew that he was listening, but did he hear them?

An episode at the press conference following the signing of the START agreement became a metaphor for the Bush-Gorbachev dialogue about a special relationship. When Gorbachev began his preliminary remarks, praising the spirit and results of the summit, Bush, who was using an earpiece for simultaneous translation, turned to his host and said with a smile, “I have not heard a word you said.” There was a problem with the equipment. “Do you hear me now? Do you hear me now?” asked the worried Gorbachev. Bush heard him clearly in Russian but did not understand a word. The confusion lasted a few more minutes until finally the system was fixed. “I understand you are almost in complete agreement with me?” asked Gorbachev after the mini-crisis was over. Bush got the translated message and responded in his trademark way: “What I heard, I liked.”

Judging by Bush's memoirs, Gorbachev's overtures to him at Novo-Ogarevo regarding the creation of a joint Soviet-American world order were lost in translation. Gorbachev was daydreaming.
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2

THE PARTY CRASHER

O
N THE EVENING OF JULY
31, 1991, George and Barbara Bush hosted a reception for their Soviet guests at Spaso House, the official residence of the American ambassador in downtown Moscow. Next morning they would leave for Kyiv. The guests, apart from Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, included republican leaders, the most prominent among them being the newly elected president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. There were also members of Gorbachev's government, including the minister of defense, Marshal Dmitrii Yazov, and KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov. They were treated to a dinner of watercress soup with sesame seeds, roast tenderloin of beef with truffle sauce, and roasted potatoes. The waiters served 1970 Beaulieu Vineyards Georges de Latour cabernet sauvignon, 1987 Iron Horse Brut Summit Cuvée, and 1990 Cuvaison chardonnay. Coffee, tea, and sweets rounded out the menu.
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In his welcoming remarks at the reception, George Bush went out of his way to praise his Soviet counterpart. He knew what difficulties lay ahead for Gorbachev and what serious opposition he was facing in his own government. Bush declared, “I believe the signing of that treaty offers hope beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, beyond the borders of the United States of America, all across the world. I really believe that from the bottom of my heart.” He raised his glass in a toast to his guests, especially Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he called a man “that I respect and admire, a man whose deeds during the past 6 years
have given hope to those who believe, as I do, that one individual can change the world for the better.” Bush continued, “I salute President Gorbachev, then, and I say that we leave confident, more confident than when I came here, that we can, together, build a lasting peace and, with it, a brighter tomorrow for our children.”
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Bush's praise for Gorbachev clearly failed to convince the latter's conservative ministers. Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, sat at the same table as Gorbachev's minister of defense, Marshal Yazov. Over dinner they exchanged opinions on the START treaty. Yazov, whom the US delegation briefing book characterized as someone who wanted “to shield the military against a decline in its influence and prestige,” had very little to say in favor of it or of his president's foreign policy in general. “He was in a morose mood,” commented Scowcroft, recalling his conversation with Yazov at Spaso House, “complaining that everything was going our way while the Soviet military was deteriorating daily. No new equipment was coming in . . . young men were not responding to the draft, there was no housing for troops returning from Europe, and so on. I asked him why he was concerned anymore about Soviet military readiness. What was the threat? He responded that NATO was the threat.” Scowcroft showed little understanding of his interlocutor's concerns. He eventually prevailed upon the clearly unhappy Yazov to join him in a toast to NATO. Whatever the wine they drank of those available at dinner, the aftertaste could not have been pleasing to Yazov.
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At the Spaso House dinner, one could sense opposition to Gorbachev not only from conservatives but also from reformers. The latter were represented by Boris Yeltsin, recently elected to the brand-new office of president of Russia. Clearly unhappy about not being seated at the head table, he rose from his seat in the middle of dinner, walked over to George Bush's table in the company of Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, and loudly assured the American president that he would do everything in his power to ensure the success of democracy. “Those seated at the tables observed all this not only with curiosity but above all with amazement, and the natural question as to what it all might mean,” wrote Gorbachev later. He clearly felt embarrassed. In his memoirs he described that episode
along with another one that had taken place the previous evening at the reception in Bush's honor.
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The reception took place on July 30, the first day of the summit, in the Chamber of Facets in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev and George and Barbara Bush were standing in the receiving line, welcoming guests. Suddenly the Gorbachevs noticed a couple who did not seem to belong together: the mayor of Moscow, Gavriil Popov, was accompanying Naina Yeltsina, the wife of the newly elected president of Russia. The president himself was not in evidence. But when the greetings were over, he suddenly came into view and approached the hosts with a broad smile. “Why did you entrust Popov with your wife?” joked Gorbachev with some unease. “He is no longer a danger,” answered Yeltsin, making a joke at the expense of his close ally.

Yeltsin had called Gorbachev the previous evening and asked whether he could enter the dining hall together with him and Bush. Gorbachev had refused. Now it appeared that, having been snubbed, Yeltsin felt entitled to do as he pleased. He unexpectedly approached Barbara Bush and, playing the host, invited her to proceed to the dining hall. She was shocked and asked, “Is that really all right?” before making a maneuver that placed Raisa Gorbacheva between herself and Yeltsin. The journalists who witnessed the scene were not sure what exactly was going on. “During all this, Bush and Gorbachev were looking the other way and were engaged in a long and detailed conversation that seemed to be about the elaborate chandelier hanging above their heads,” wrote a correspondent for the
Wall Street Journal
who witnessed the scene. The guests, many of whom were members of the Gorbachev administration, were put off by Yeltsin's domineering behavior. So were the Americans.