The Last Empire (9 page)

A coup had indeed taken place, as Shevardnadze predicted. At the congress, the conservatives had recaptured the initiative, and Gorbachev, instead of stepping down, decided to lead the parade himself. In January 1991, without formally declaring a state of emergency, he gave carte blanche to head of the KGB Vladimir Kriuchkov, Minister of Defense Dmitrii Yazov, and the new minister of the interior, Boris Pugo, to take any measures necessary to stop the movement of Soviet republics toward sovereignty and independence. On January 5, Yazov ordered paratroopers into the Baltic republics, allegedly to facilitate the conscription of new recruits into the Soviet army. On January 11, the central media announced the formation of a pro-Moscow Committee of National Salvation in Vilnius, Lithuania. Three days later, special units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and KGB commandos stormed the Vilnius television tower, which was defended by proponents of Lithuanian independence. Fifteen people died in the attack. On January 20 Interior Ministry troops opened fire in Riga, the capital of the Latvian republic, killing four. Five days later Soviet newspapers published a decree on the joint patrolling of cities by troops of the Interior Ministry and the Soviet army. The decree
provided a legal rationale for the presence of military units on the streets of Soviet cities.

In March, Gorbachev formed a Security Council, his main advisory body, which consisted almost exclusively of hard-liners. That month he also managed to secure a 76 percent vote in favor of preserving the Union in a referendum that was ignored by the newly elected authorities in the Baltics and in the Caucasus but still emboldened the Soviet president and his advisers. On March 28 he ordered troops in Moscow to prevent demonstrations in support of Boris Yeltsin. That day hard-liners in the Russian parliament were supposed to orchestrate a vote removing Yeltsin as Speaker of parliament. The attempt failed. Demonstrations in Moscow went ahead despite government prohibitions. Troops were not used to disperse them. Whereas elite Russian and Slavic units did not hesitate to fire on non-Russians and non-Slavs in the Baltics and the Caucasus, they were much less inclined to fire on fellow Slavs. Besides, Gorbachev balked at the prospect of large-scale bloodshed. He ordered the troops back into their barracks—a move welcomed by the democratic opposition (Yeltsin ceased his direct attacks on the president for a while) but condemned by the party hard-liners. Gorbachev had fooled them again by refusing to go all the way. From their point of view, he was now an obstacle to be removed.

Many in the party apparatus tried to free themselves from the party leader who had gone astray. Unlike Yeltsin, Gorbachev could not imagine leaving the party of his own free will, not only because of his oft-declared adherence to socialist ideals and belief in his ability to reform the party but also for tactical reasons: he did not want the party machine, which still possessed enormous power in the country, to turn against him. A few days before Yeltsin's resignation from the party, had recorded in his diary a conversation he had had that day with Gorbachev: “They are concerned only with their own interests. They need nothing but the trough and power,” said Gorbachev about the party secretaries he had met earlier in the day. “He swore, using foul language,” continued Cherniaev. “I said to him: ‘Abandon them. You are the president; you see what sort of party this is, and in fact you remain its hostage, its whipping boy.'” Gorbachev was not convinced. “Don't you think I see that? I see it,” he told Cherniaev. “But I can't let
that mangy dog off its leash. If I do that, the whole machine will come down upon me.”
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The decisive showdown was supposed to take place at a meeting of the Central Committee scheduled for April 24, 1991. Party committees all over the country were demanding Gorbachev's resignation as general secretary of the party. But Gorbachev once again outmaneuvered his opponents. Those attending the meeting were surprised to learn from the morning newspapers that the previous day he had made a deal with his archenemy, Boris Yeltsin, and the leaders of the republics, who were pushing for more sovereignty. At a meeting in Gorbachev's compound in Novo-Ogarevo, they agreed to work on the text of a new union treaty.

Gorbachev had finally found an alternative to a state of emergency: instead of going back to the status quo ante and relying on force to restore the power of the center, he would go forward and find a formula to balance the interests of the center and the republics. That expedient would free him from the dictates of the party leaders and hard-liners in his entourage. On April 24, responding to a brutal critique of his actions at the Central Committee meeting, Gorbachev declared that he was prepared to resign. The party leaders backed down: without Gorbachev, their party would be doomed. At that moment he was their only protection against Yeltsin and his democratic entourage. The attempted party coup had failed and Gorbachev survived, but the hard-liners did not give up.
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In June 1991 Yeltsin won the Russian presidency on a promise to enhance Russian sovereignty. In the oath that Yeltsin took at his inauguration on July 10, he promised to defend the sovereignty of Russia. The empire was crumbling. The “nation-builders,” as the Harvard historian Roman Szporluk called the proponents of Russian national assertiveness, were emerging victorious in the struggle with the “empire-savers.” On the day of the Russian presidential election, Gorbachev's adviser Anatolii Cherniaev recorded in his diary, “M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] showed himself less perspicacious than Yeltsin with his animal instinct. M.S. feared that the Russian people would never forgive him for renouncing the empire. But it turned out that the Russian people could not care less.” Cherniaev realized the hopelessness of any imperial project without Russia. “After all, there will be nothing without Russia,” wrote Gorbachev's adviser in his
diary. “There will be no Union. And in real terms the president can rely only on it, and by no means on Turkmenia with Nazarbayev!”
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Gorbachev had to accept the results of the first presidential elections in Russia—his former protégé, now his opponent, became the first president of the Russian Federation thanks to a popular mandate that Gorbachev himself lacked. Gorbachev had become president of the Soviet Union on the basis of ballots cast by members of the Soviet parliament. He now found himself obliged to deal with Yeltsin.

On the eve of President Bush's visit to Moscow, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the leader of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, finally agreed on the conditions of the new union treaty. It was a major victory for the republics. They would be declared sole owners of natural resources on their territories and would reserve for themselves the right to decide what contributions, in what amounts, they would make to the Union budget. The Union government was to maintain control over the military and national security, but not foreign policy, which was to be decided in consultation with the republics. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Nazarbayev also agreed on changes in government: the hard-liners brought in by Gorbachev were to go, and Nazarbayev would form and lead the new cabinet. The new union treaty was to be signed on August 20, 1991.
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BORIS YELTSIN, WHO HAD EMBARRASSED
Gorbachev at his own party and then at the Spaso House reception hosted by Bush, was not just the popularly elected leader of the Union's largest republic; he was also about to take control of most of the Union's oil and gas resources. The state of the Union's coffers and, possibly, the salary of Mikhail Gorbachev himself would depend on Yeltsin's goodwill. No matter how embarrassed and annoyed Gorbachev was by Yeltsin's bizarre behavior, he had no choice but to tolerate it. The same seemed to apply to the president of the United States. The gift prepared by Bush's staffers for Yeltsin—a Tiffany sterling silver bowl priced at $490—was more expensive than those for the other members of the Soviet leadership, including Gorbachev. The Soviet president received a copy of the first American edition of Leo Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina,
which appeared on the gift list without a price. The White House still put most of its geopolitical eggs in Gorbachev's basket. His gift was priceless.
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President Bush first met Yeltsin during his initial visit to the United States in September 1989. In the course of that trip Yeltsin, then a deputy to the Soviet parliament, visited eleven cities, gave numerous lectures on American campuses, appeared on
Good Morning America,
visited the Johnson Space Center and the Mayo Clinic, and met with American business leaders and politicians all over the United States, including Texas and Florida. Yeltsin called the trip the realization of a lifelong dream. After circling the Statue of Liberty twice on a helicopter, Yeltsin told one of his associates that he had become “doubly free.” Nor did he hide his feelings in public. If anything, he was eager to outdo Gorbachev and charm the American public away from him.

“All my impressions of capitalism, of the United States, of Americans that have been pounded into me over the years, including by the
Short History of the Communist Party—
all of them have changed 180 degrees in the day and a half I have been here,” he told the press. But his strongest impression, like that of almost every Soviet citizen visiting the United States for the first time, occurred in a supermarket. The abundance and diversity of products he encountered in a Houston emporium contrasted sharply with the empty shelves of Soviet stores. It was during this trip, according to one of his advisers, that “the last drop of Yeltsin's Bolshevik consciousness decomposed.”
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Yeltsin's visit to the United States included a short stopover at the White House, where he met with George Bush. The visit left a bitter aftertaste among the presidential advisers who had arranged the meeting. While Bush wanted to see Yeltsin and learn his opinion of developments in the Soviet Union, he wanted to do so in a way that would not offend Gorbachev, who by the fall of 1989 considered Yeltsin his archenemy. Yeltsin was invited to the White House, but his official appointment was with Brent Scowcroft, not with the president, and that created problems. “He had been told,” recalled Robert M. Gates, the future head of the CIA and secretary of defense, who was then serving as deputy national security adviser, “that he probably would see the President, but because we wanted as low key a visit as possible he was not given absolute assurances.” When Condoleezza Rice, the Soviet Union expert on the National Security Council, brought Yeltsin into the White House through the basement entrance of the West Wing, he asked whether that was an entrance used by
visitors to the president and refused to go any farther unless he was assured that he would see Bush. Rice told Yeltsin that if he was not going to see Scowcroft, he could leave the White House and go back to his hotel.

Yeltsin finally dropped his objections and went to see Scowcroft, to whom he presented his vision of how the United States could help the Soviet economy. Scowcroft was not interested and, according to Gates, almost fell asleep. Everything changed when Bush dropped by Scowcroft's office. “Chameleonlike, Yeltsin was transformed,” recalled Gates. “He came alive, was enthusiastic, interesting. Plainly, in his view someone had arrived worth talking to—someone powerful.” Bush confirmed his support for Gorbachev, but Yeltsin had achieved his goal of meeting with the president of the United States. As soon as he left the White House, he approached the reporters waiting on the lawn and gave an account of his meeting to the world. “It was not the quiet, uneventful conclusion to the visit we had hoped,” remembered Scowcroft, “but no harm was done.”
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Boris Yeltsin made a positive impression on Bush, but Scowcroft found the future Russian president devious, and judging by his memoirs, he never fully shed that impression. Yeltsin's early advocates in the administration, including Rice and Gates, were appalled by his uncouth and unpredictable behavior. Recalling the visit, Gates wrote in his memoirs, “He apparently drank too much, gave a poor account of himself in a speech at Johns Hopkins University, and was generally boorish.” Nevertheless, the people around Bush could not help noting the shift of power in Moscow in the spring of 1990, after the first semi-free elections to the republican parliaments. Although Gorbachev was the choice of Western politicians and the favorite of the Western public, there was no denying that the mercurial Yeltsin was on the rise.

In June 1990, a week after Yeltsin's election as chairman of the Russian parliament, Gates sent a memo to George Bush saying that Yeltsin “has proved himself remarkably adept at using the new rules of the system to reemerge as a political leader. He appears to be an effective and popular politician, however erratic.” Gates recommended avoiding any negative comments about Yeltsin: “We may someday find ourselves across the table from him.” Bush was in agreement. Yeltsin's next visit to the United States took place in June
1991, soon after his election to the Russian presidency. It was a huge success that improved his standing with the American administration. Bush and Yeltsin placed a joint call to Gorbachev in Moscow, warning him about a possible coup attempt by hard-liners—the information came through American diplomatic channels from a Yeltsin ally in Moscow. Yeltsin's relations with the Bush administration, which had begun with a faux pas in the fall of 1989, were now back on track, or so it seemed for a time.
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Bush's official visit to Moscow in July 1991 included a meeting with the Russian president. Bush met him in the late morning of July 30. Gorbachev, who wanted to prevent Bush from meeting Yeltsin without him, invited Yeltsin and Nazarbayev to a luncheon with the American president. They were supposed to join Bush's and Gorbachev's advisers, who were also invited to the event. The meeting with the American president, which Yeltsin and Nazarbayev were eager to have, would take place, but under Gorbachev's control and supervision. Nazarbayev accepted and took the opportunity to lobby the US president for investments in Kazakhstan's natural resources sector, but Yeltsin refused to play the role assigned to him by the Soviet leader and take part in what he called a “faceless mass audience.” Instead of coming to the luncheon, he invited Bush to visit him in his new Kremlin office. Bush accepted the invitation.
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