The Last Empire (29 page)

There was only one obstacle left on the road to Lukianenko's long-dreamed-of Ukrainian independence—the lack of a quorum in the parliamentary chamber. Kravchuk waited for the deputies to return, which proved to be a slow process. For proponents of independence, every minute seemed like a week. Rumor had it that Kravchuk had ordered the closing of the secret tunnel that linked the parliament to the nearby building of the Ukrainian Central Committee, thereby making it impossible for communist deputies to leave parliament without facing angry crowds. Finally, the number of registered deputies exceeded three hundred. Who would read the text of the declaration? Kravchuk suggested Lukianenko, but his liaison with the People's Council, the poet Dmytro Pavlychko, all but ordered Kravchuk to read the text. Pavlychko wanted the resolution to be proposed by the Speaker himself; otherwise the communists might change their mind. Kravchuk, under attack for having vacillated during the coup, was now on the spot and had to agree.
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He read out the text: “In view of the mortal danger hanging over Ukraine in connection with the coup d'état of 19 August 1991 in the USSR, and continuing the thousand-year tradition of state-building in Ukraine, . . . the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solemnly declares the independence of Ukraine and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state—Ukraine. . . . This act takes effect from the moment of its approval.”
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Kravchuk asked the deputies to vote. A moment later, the numbers of those who had voted for and against the declaration appeared on the huge screen behind him. The chamber suddenly exploded with chants. As the deputies rose and began hugging one another, it became hard to tell democrats and communists apart. A state of elation engulfed the chamber. The Ukrainian parliament had voted for independence, with 346 deputies in favor, 2 opposed, and 5 abstaining. It was five minutes before 6:00 p.m. The crowd outside roared its approval. Foreign diplomats rushed to their consulates to file reports. “The Fat Lady Has Sung,” read the title of the report on Ukrainian independence by the Canadian consul, Nestor Gayowsky.
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At 9:00 p.m. the democrats' symbol of victory, the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian national flag, was carried into the chamber—this after crowds had chanted for hours, “Put the banner on the parliament building!” Petro Stepkin, the conductor of a Cossack choir from
Zaporizhia, where the song festival had been held a few days earlier, had lost his voice from incessant chanting outside the building. Although he and other proponents did not manage to raise the blue-and-yellow flag to the summit, they got it into the chamber. It was a compromise typical of Kravchuk. Against the wishes of communist deputies who still considered the flag an emblem of nationalism, not patriotism, Kravchuk allowed the banner to be brought in, allegedly in recognition of the democratic victory in Moscow: Viacheslav Chornovil claimed that that particular banner had been atop one of the tanks defending the Russian parliament. The communists could not say no to a victory flag from Moscow, even after Moscow had abandoned them.
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9

SAVING THE EMPIRE

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST
28, one week after Russian vice president Aleksandr Rutskoi flew to the Crimea to save the president of the Soviet Union, he headed south yet again, this time to save the Soviet Union itself. Promoted by Gorbachev from colonel to major general after the success of his first mission, Rutskoi was on his way to Kyiv to deal with a crisis that had erupted in Russo-Ukrainian relations after Ukraine's declaration of independence. The plan was to keep Ukraine within the Union by raising the prospect of partitioning its territory if Ukraine insisted on independence.

Reporting on this new mission of Rutskoi and his colleagues, a correspondent for the pro-Yeltsin
Nezavisimaia gazeta
wrote, “Today they have the opportunity to inform the Ukrainian leadership of Yeltsin's position that, given Ukraine's exit from membership in ‘a certain USSR,' the article of the bilateral agreement on borders becomes invalid.” Translated into plain language, this meant that Russia was denouncing its existing treaty with Ukraine, its neighbor, and threatening Ukraine with partition of its territory. “It is expected,” continued the newspaper account, “that independence will be declared today at a session of the Supreme Soviet of the Crimea.” The independence of the Crimea, an autonomous republic within Ukraine, could set off a process of partition that might lead to a violent confrontation between the two largest Soviet republics.
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The plane carrying Rutskoi to Kyiv took off from Vnukovo airport, on the outskirts of Moscow. The vice president was accompanied by Yeltsin's close adviser Sergei Stankevich, who had helped remove the Felix Dzerzhinsky monument from downtown Moscow a few days earlier. But the “Russians” were not the only members of the delegation sent from Moscow to reason with the rebellious Ukrainian deputies. They were joined by “Soviets”—members of the USSR Supreme Soviet or parliament, which had begun its deliberations in Moscow a few days earlier. A few hours before the plane carrying Rutskoi and Stankevich took off, a session of the Supreme Soviet devoted to an investigation of the plotters' activities had been abruptly called upon to deal with an emergency. The deputies temporarily put aside their differences to select representatives for the Russo-Ukrainian negotiations and send them to Kyiv. “This was something of a sign of trouble, one of the last warnings to the Union parliament, which was, objectively speaking, one of the few remaining pillars of the disintegrating Union,” wrote
Izvestiia
the next day.

The Soviet parliamentary delegation included Yeltsin's close ally Anatolii Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad and a strong believer in the Union. According to the same
Izvestiia
article, that day Sobchak had called on the deputies “to concentrate on the main thing: not to allow the spontaneous disintegration of structures of Soviet power and to put an end to unproductive discussions of questions not pertaining to the danger of the country's collapse.” Sobchak was accompanied by a member of the Soviet parliament representing Russia and two elected from Ukraine. They rushed from the Kremlin to the airport, hoping to catch the departing plane of the Russian vice president. No one could have imagined such a situation only a few days earlier. Russia and Ukraine, whose leaders had forged a strong alliance before the coup and managed to preserve it during the darkest days of August, were now quarreling over their borders. And conversely, Russian and all-Union politicians previously divided by seemingly unbridgeable differences were now working together to save the Union. Moreover, the leading role in that attempt belonged to Yeltsin, not to Gorbachev. In fact, Gorbachev was not in the picture at all.
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THE SHIFT IN YELTSIN
'
S POSITION
from undermining Gorbachev and the Union center to collaborating with the former and
supporting the latter was a direct outcome of his victory in the campaign he had waged against Gorbachev ever since the Soviet president's return from the Crimea. On August 22, when Gorbachev tried to tell the Russian deputies that Russia would not be Russia if it did not try to hold the republics together, he was booed and verbally insulted. By August 28, when the joint Russian-Soviet delegation departed for Kyiv, Yeltsin's victory seemed all but complete: he had replaced Gorbachev as the most powerful figure not only in Russia but also in the Union itself. Keeping it together suddenly became one of his main concerns. Trying to get more concessions from the center while Gorbachev was calling the shots in the Kremlin was one thing; conceding the independence of Union republics in the wake of the implosion of the center was quite another. Neither Yeltsin nor his advisers were ready for that, either psychologically or politically. They were prepared to let the Baltics go and hoped that the Central Asian republics would stop demanding subsidies from the center, but no one in Yeltsin's entourage had ever imagined releasing Slavic Ukraine—a nightmare scenario.
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The declaration of Ukrainian independence produced a shock wave throughout the Soviet Union, dramatically altering the political landscape. Ukraine, which had declared its sovereignty in the summer of 1990 only in the wake of Yeltsin's Russia, now took the lead in the drive for independence among those republics whose leaders still remained loyal to the Union. The Baltic republics, Armenia, and Georgia, which declared independence before Ukraine, were all controlled by forces opposed to the old communist regime. Kravchuk's Ukraine became the first country with a communist-dominated legislature to make such a declaration, clearing the way for other republics run by the communist or former communist
nomenklatura
. On August 25, the day after Ukraine's parliament voted for independence, a similar declaration was made by Belarus; on August 26 came one by Ukraine's other neighbor, Moldova. Faraway Azerbaijan would proclaim its independence on August 30. It would be followed the next day by Kyrgyzstan and a day later by Uzbekistan. Not only Gorbachev but also Yeltsin looked on in horror and astonishment as one republic after another declared its independence.
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None of the republics that declared independence after August 24 adopted a Ukrainian-style provision for a referendum to ratify the
declaration, but then, none of them had any immediate intention of leaving the Union. What, then, were the practical consequences of the declarations? For the time being, the major difference between sovereignty and independence was that if sovereignty gave republican laws priority over all-Union ones, independence made it possible to disregard all-Union laws entirely. Only republican laws were now valid. The formal independence of the republics also meant the emergence of more powerful republican leaders.
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August 24 marked a turning point, not only because of the declaration of Ukrainian independence but also because, on the same day, the three Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, received recognition of their independence from Yeltsin himself. The Russian president signed three letters that same day recognizing the independence of Russia's western neighbors without attaching any conditions or questioning the newly independent states' Soviet-era borders. His action left hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians, most of whom had moved to the region after World War II, beyond the borders of Russia and the Union. Their concerns did not seem to be those of Yeltsin's government.

The new, democratic Russia refused to use force, economic pressure, or legal and diplomatic tricks to keep the Baltic republics in the Soviet Union. Territorial issues and minority rights did not seem to be significant issues at the time. In previous years, many members of Russian communities had opposed independence for the republics they called home. They joined the Moscow-sponsored and communist-run Interfronts, which welcomed Moscow's crackdown on Baltic independence in early 1991. Their leaders, who had openly supported the coup in Moscow, now feared revenge on the part of local majorities. Yeltsin's Russian government largely ignored their worries. Its allies were national democrats in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius, not Russian minorities who had sided with the Kremlin conservatives.
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Many in the non-Russian republics of the Union wondered whether the Baltic example set a precedent for Russia's dealings with other republics. It soon became apparent that it did not. The Baltics held a special place in the hearts and minds of Yeltsin's democrats, and Russian diplomatic recognition did not extend to all the Soviet republics that had declared their independence before or during the coup. Georgia, which had declared independence on April 9, 1991,
much earlier than Estonia or Latvia, was not granted recognition. It was not clear whether Ukraine's declaration of independence would place it in the same camp as the Baltics or Georgia. Given that Yeltsin's reaction to Kravchuk's phone call on the eve of the independence vote in parliament was much calmer than Gorbachev's, there was some hope that Ukraine's position would be treated with respect and understanding in Russia. As it turned out, there was only a weekend pause. Kravchuk called Yeltsin with the news on Saturday, which meant that Russian reaction would not come until Monday, August 26, when the session of the Soviet parliament promised by the plotters on the first day of the coup finally convened in Moscow.

At the opening session a deputy from Ukraine, Yurii Shcherbak, read a Russian translation of the declaration of Ukrainian independence. Later he considered that moment the greatest in his life, but at the time he was almost frightened of his own words. Absolute silence suddenly fell on the normally busy chamber. It seemed to him that people's faces went pale. Gorbachev, red faced, rose and left the hall. Gorbachev's loyal adviser Vadim Medvedev recorded in his diary that on that day representatives from the republics spoke “with one voice of independence, the needlessness of the center, and the liquidation of Union structures.”

Proponents of the Union sounded the alarm. A neighbor of Shcherbak's in the chamber, Anatolii Sobchak, went to the podium to state that “under the cover of this talk about national independence they are trying to retain these communist structures, but with a new face.” He declared that what he was witnessing was insane, as the USSR was a nuclear power and its partition might lead to nuclear anarchy. Sergei Stankevich, another member of the delegation and deputy mayor of Moscow, expressed the hope that his Ukrainian friends would not do damage, presumably to the cause of democracy. A Russian moral authority, academician Dmitrii Likhachev, declared that the uncontrolled collapse of the Union could lead to border wars.
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