The Last Empire (35 page)

Drawing aside the veil of American impartiality with regard to relations between the center and the republics, Bush asked Kravchuk a direct question that revealed the underlying premise of American policy at the time: “Do you see that there must be an economic union with the center or not? We think that is a necessary step to encourage investment.” “I would be glad to have that if the center could do something,” responded Kravchuk. “But the center is incapable of doing anything. We're losing time. The Soviet Union is a huge country. It is impossible to pursue economic reform at a rapid pace in the entire country.”

The two leaders parted ways without reaching an understanding. The Ukrainian visitor sought to be as gracious as possible in his subsequent comments to the press, which accused Bush of being completely in Gorbachev's corner. “I am convinced that President George Bush is beginning to change his way of thinking,” he told
the press. Later, Kravchuk summed up Bush's position as follows: he wanted the Soviet Union to go on. The security of the nuclear arsenals was always at the top of his agenda. Kravchuk respected that position, as he believed that it corresponded to the interests of those who had elected Bush to govern their country.
²⁶

GEORGE H. W. BUSH
indeed wanted the Soviet Union to survive. It was essential to his security agenda, which remained focused on Soviet nuclear weapons, just as it had been at the height of the Cold War. By the time the president met with the increasingly difficult Kravchuk, Dick Cheney and his experts at the Department of Defense had prepared the proposal for nuclear disarmament that Bush had requested at the NSC meeting three weeks earlier. It was immediately sent to American allies in Western Europe and to Gorbachev in Moscow. On September 27, Bush called Prime Minister John Major of Britain, President François Mitterrand of France, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany to explain his initiative and ask for support. He also called Gorbachev. At first glance, the proposal constituted a unilateral offer by the United States to reduce its nuclear arsenal by removing tactical nuclear weapons and getting rid of multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs) on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In reality, the proposal was designed as an invitation to the USSR to do the same. As Scowcroft told the secretary-general of NATO, Manfred Woerner, “We are not planning negotiations. This is a unilateral move. Of course, if the Soviets reject our proposals, we may have to reconsider.”
²⁷

Ultimately, the success of the proposal depended on the Soviet response. In his telephone conversation with Gorbachev on September 27, Bush told the Soviet leader, “We'll spell out what we do. In some categories, we'll spell out how the Soviet Union could take similar steps. For example, we cancel ICBMs except for single warheads, and would like to say that the Soviet Union is doing the same thing.”

Gorbachev seemed interested but avoided any specific commitment. “George, thank you for those clarifications,” he told the US president. “Since you're urging that we take steps, I can only give an answer in principle—since there is much that must be clarified—and that answer is a positive one.” Bush said that he understood and asked whether he could announce that Gorbachev's initial reaction was positive. Gorbachev gave his consent.
²⁸

Gorbachev spoke to Bush in the presence of top Soviet military officers with whom he had just finished studying the text of the American proposal. General Vladimir Lobov, the new chief of the Soviet army General Staff, was more than skeptical. According to Scowcroft, the proposal to remove tactical nuclear weapons served immediate American interests in more than one way. In Germany, American weapons of that class had been rendered obsolete by German unification: if fired, they would now hit the eastern territories taken over by Bonn. In South Korea, the Seoul government wanted such weapons out in order to engage North Korea on the diplomatic level. Elsewhere in the Pacific, the governments of Japan and New Zealand objected to nuclear-armed American ships in their ports. Given the American offer to remove tactical nuclear weapons unilaterally, problems associated with long negotiations and subsequent verification were eliminated.

According to Gorbachev's foreign policy adviser, Anatolii Cherniaev, who was present during the telephone call, “[[General]] Lobov tried to ‘exert pressure': it was supposedly disadvantageous to us; they will deceive us; I see no reciprocity, and so on—even though Mikhail Sergeevich pointed a finger at Bush's text, arguing the opposite.” After his conversation with Bush, Gorbachev entertained the generals by sharing his impressions of a play that he and his wife had seen a few days earlier. It was based on Thornton Wilder's 1948 novel
The Ides of March
. Gorbachev told the surprised generals that he saw analogies between the last days of the Roman Republic and the times they were living in. “There is in him a mixture of artlessness and a clever pretense of credulity with the new generals,” noted Cherniaev in his diary. One way or another, Gorbachev eventually convinced his new military chiefs to go along. They turned out to be much more agreeable than their predecessors.

Boris Pankin wrote in his memoirs that “after the putsch of August 1991, many of the military were embarrassed by their own tacit sympathy for its aims, if not active support. So the quiescence of the Soviet military made it easier for us to be imaginative.” In that vein, Cherniaev credited Bush's proposal to the international influence of Gorbachev's “new thinking,” which he himself had helped shape. “Do you not see in this any emergence of a new US policy, new relations with us, results of new thinking?” he asked the ever suspicious generals
after the Bush-Gorbachev teleconference. Apparently they did not. Cherniaev's statement would come as a surprise to the Americans as well, but not to Gorbachev. He kept believing in his transformative influence on the very nature of international politics.

Eight days later, on October 5, Gorbachev called Bush not only to accept the challenge but also to invite him to go further down the road to nuclear disarmament. He proposed a one-year ban on nuclear testing and an invitation to other nuclear powers to join the United States and the Soviet Union in reducing their nuclear arsenals. The Soviets would get rid of their tactical nuclear weapons, negotiate on the MIRVs, and unilaterally cut their ground forces by seven hundred thousand. It was now the Americans' turn to be surprised and check the new proposals with their generals. “There were some differences in our positions,” recalled Bush, “but on balance it was very positive and forthcoming.” Bush's gamble had worked. While the Soviets, like the Americans, were of course trying to make a virtue of necessity in cutting their military budgets, there is no question that both countries benefited, as did the world at large. Their agreement in the fall of 1991 created a basis for the START II treaty, which Bush and Yeltsin would sign in January 1993.
²⁹

A few days later, when Bush again called the National Security Council into session, there was good news to share. The plan to reduce nuclear arsenals that they had discussed at the previous meeting was now working. Nevertheless, the course of developments in the Soviet Union was as murky as ever, and the dilemma of whom to support, the center or the republics, was no closer to a solution. As discussion of these problems resumed, Dick Cheney again sought to change the existing strategy of supporting the center. “It was still Cheney against the field,” remembered Robert Gates, who took part in the meeting. Despite general agreement on the need to support democracy and economic reform, there was no consensus on how best to do so. “Support for the center puts us on the wrong side of reform,” argued Cheney. James Baker disagreed: “The guys in the center
are
reformers.” Baker summed up his argument by stating, “We should not establish the policy of supporting the breakup of the Soviet Union into twelve republics. We should support what
they
want, subject to
our
principles.” The meeting ended with no clear decision, which meant a continuation of the balancing act between the center and the republics, Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
³⁰

11

THE RUSSIAN ARK

“T
HANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART
,” said Boris Yeltsin to George Bush before putting down the receiver. The American president had called to ask about his health and offer medical assistance. It was September 25, early afternoon in Russia. A few days earlier, Yeltsin, still exhausted after his August brush with destiny, had felt chest pains. The brief vacation he had taken a few weeks earlier did not alleviate his condition. He needed more rest. “I have been reading in the papers that you may require some medical attention,” said Bush when he heard Yeltsin's voice on the other end of the line. “I would like to offer you the best hospital facilities in Washington, D.C. if that would have any appeal to you.”

After the collapse of the August coup, George Bush had adopted a practice of calling both Kremlin presidents, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. “We knew that Gorbachev was weakening, we knew that Yeltsin was strengthening, and President Bush began to juggle our relations with Gorbachev and Yeltsin,” recalled Nick Burns, the NSC staffer who was often a note taker on Bush's calls to Moscow. “We made a very concerted effort to work together with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. So every time that President Bush talked to Gorbachev he would usually follow up with a call to Yeltsin.” Yeltsin was clearly moved by these signs of attention. “Mr. President, thank you,” he said to Bush at the end of their telephone conversation on September 25. “I am very grateful. Thank you for your personal attention to me. I don't know how to find the words to thank you.” The two presidents agreed not
to reveal the substance of their conversation to the press, in order, as Yeltsin said, “not to worry people too much.”
¹

That day people in Russia read media reports not about Yeltsin's health but about his diplomatic achievements in the North Caucasus, where he and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan had negotiated a cease-fire between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagornyi Karabakh—the site of the first ethnic conflict to erupt in the USSR during the perestroika era. “We had a tough mission to Nagornyo-Karabakh, but we brought the two sides to the table and signed a protocol,” Yeltsin told Bush on the phone. He also let him know that he was taking another short vacation. That day the presidential spokesman, Pavel Voshchanov, declared that Yeltsin would go on vacation “not for relaxation but so that he can work on his further plans and on a new book in calm surroundings.”

Relaxation and the need for medical treatment were in fact the main reasons for his absence from the capital for the second time in less than a month. Yeltsin vacationed at a government mansion, Bocharov Ruchei, near Sochi on the Black Sea. He made no substantive progress on his new book of memoirs, but he had plenty of time to consider his “further plans” and discuss them with his numerous visitors. His chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, arranged tennis matches and Russian saunas for the president, but rumors reached Moscow that he was drinking heavily. “They say he would get blind drunk,” noted Gorbachev adviser Anatolii Cherniaev in his diary. “And the only ambulance in town stood ready near the dacha.”
²

Whether the rumors were true or not (one could hardly expect Gorbachev's aides to be too kind to Yeltsin), the Russian president's disappearance from Moscow came at a most unfortunate time for the new Russian government. “It was as if Napoleon had repaired to the Riviera to compose poetry after routing the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz,” commented one of the president's supporters in the Russian parliament. “The country was heading for collapse,” recalled Yeltsin's principal adviser at the time, Gennadii Burbulis. With the Union government in shambles and the Russian government not yet in control, no one was in charge. “And that situation of power without power, of responsibility without resources could not continue indefinitely,” argued Burbulis many years later. “One way or another,
an effective government had to be established quickly. But Yeltsin took off for Sochi.”
³

He left behind three competing centers of power, one around Mikhail Gorbachev and two others within his own government. With Yeltsin out of town, they found themselves at one another's throats. One part of Yeltsin's government wanted to embark on a radical course of political and economic reform, which would mean severing economic ties with the other republics. Another wanted to move ahead slowly, coordinating Russia's efforts with the rest of the former Union. Gorbachev, for his part, wanted to restore the old Union under a new name, with as strong a center as possible. While the central authorities were in disarray, the Union republics stopped transferring taxes to Moscow, using their newly acquired right to issue currency in order to buy industrial products in Russia. Food was becoming more and more an issue in Russia's industrial centers. October 1991 would become the crucial month in deciding the country's future course and the prospects of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin had to make a choice. He took his time.
⁴

THE SPLIT WITHIN THE RUSSIAN
government became public with the resignation on September 27 of Ivan Silaev, the Russian premier, who had doubled since late August as head of the interim Soviet government. He had found himself in an impossible situation, simultaneously representing the center and the Union's largest republic. The leaders of the other republics accused him of favoring Russia, while members of the Russian government claimed that he was advancing the interests of the center. Attacks on Silaev from within his own government intensified after he issued a letter recommending the suspension of a number of Yeltsin's decrees concerning the takeover of all-Union property and the introduction of Russian customs duties. Silaev wanted the decrees, many of them issued immediately after the August coup, suspended until consultations could be held with the other republics. His opponents saw his letter as an attempt to restore the old center.
⁵