The Last Empire (50 page)

Cherniaev was in Gorbachev's office on the evening of December 2, when the Soviet president placed a call to Yeltsin. In response to Gorbachev's offer to meet and discuss the new situation, perhaps with Kravchuk and the leader of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Russian president said, “Nothing will come of it anyway. Ukraine is independent.” He suggested a four-member union consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Gorbachev flatly refused: “And what would be my place in it? If that's the deal, then I'm leaving. I'm not going to bobble like a piece of shit in an ice hole.” Gorbachev would not countenance a union that left him dependent on Yeltsin and reduced him to playing a supporting role to his nemesis. Yeltsin would not tolerate a union in which Gorbachev could tell him what to do.
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On December 3, 1991, George Bush asked his assistants to connect him with Leonid Kravchuk. He wanted to congratulate the newly elected president of a newly independent country on his personal victory and the overwhelming vote in favor of independence. Bush told Kravchuk that Americans welcomed the emergence of a new democratic nation and would send an envoy to discuss nuclear disarmament, border issues, human rights, and the rights of minorities. Kravchuk had good news for Bush: Yeltsin had already been in touch with him, and Russia had recognized Ukrainian independence. He would meet with Yeltsin on the following Saturday to discuss the new situation and coordinate policy.
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15

THE SLAVIC TRINITY

G
EORGE BUSH FIRST LEARNED ABOUT
the planned meeting of Russian and Ukrainian leaders from Boris Yeltsin, with whom he spoke on the eve of the Ukrainian referendum. The Russian president took Bush by surprise when he said that in order to preserve good relations with Ukraine, Russia should recognize its independence right away if the vote in favor exceeded 70 percent.

“Right away?” asked Bush.

“Yes, we need to do it immediately,” responded Yeltsin. “Otherwise our position is unnecessarily unclear, especially since we are approaching the new year and a new reform. Gorbachev does not know about this. He still thinks Ukraine will sign.”

Yeltsin thought otherwise. “Right now the draft union treaty has only seven states ready to sign up—five Islamic and two Slavic (Byelorussia and Russia),” he told Bush. He explained that if Ukraine did not join the Union, Russia would be in trouble: “We can't have a situation where Russia and Byelorussia have two votes as Slavic states against five for the Islamic nations.” A few minutes later he added, “I am now thinking very hard with a very narrow circle of key advisers on how to preserve the Union, but also how not to lose relations with Ukraine. Our relations with Ukraine are more significant than those with the Central Asian republics, which we feed all the time. On the other hand, we can't forget the Islamic fundamentalist factor.”

While skeptical about the prospects of the union treaty promoted by Gorbachev, Yeltsin was optimistic about the future of Russo-Ukrainian relations and a possible new union that would include the two countries. “I think the new Ukrainian president will not begin negotiations with Gorbachev but will begin talks with Russia,” he told Bush. Yeltsin in fact spelled out to Bush his position on the forthcoming meeting with Leonid Kravchuk. He did not want to join the new union without Ukraine but could not imagine Russia without some form of union relationship with that republic. Thus he would start negotiations with Ukraine outside the framework of the new union treaty endorsed by Gorbachev. As for the Central Asian republics, he wanted to reduce subsidies to them but maintain a presence there in one form or another. For now, the Russian president's main concern was secrecy. Yeltsin asked Bush not to reveal the content of their conversation to anyone, meaning Gorbachev. Bush agreed.
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What Yeltsin presented to Bush was nothing if not a bold new policy: Russia was no longer threatening Ukraine with dismemberment, as it had in late August. On the contrary, it was embracing Ukrainian independence and would negotiate a union deal with a sovereign Ukraine behind Gorbachev's back. It was clear that this would trash Gorbachev's hopes for a reformed Soviet Union, but it was not at all clear what the new union between Russia and Ukraine would mean in practice. What would be its conditions, and would Russia be able to offer the Ukrainian elites something they could not get from Gorbachev and had failed to attain under de facto independence? And if the two leaders found a compromise, would it satisfy the Muslim republics? No one, including Yeltsin, seemed to know the answers to those questions. The hope was that they would be provided during the forthcoming meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents.

Yeltsin issued a statement recognizing Ukrainian independence on December 2, when the initial results of the referendum were made public. Russia became the third country to do so, after Poland and Canada. Yeltsin wanted Kravchuk to negotiate with him, not with Gorbachev, and he needed clarity vis-à-vis Ukraine before embarking on radical reform in Russia. The Russian president wanted to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart outside Moscow and out of Gorbachev's
sight, and an opportunity conveniently presented itself soon after the Ukrainian referendum. It came in the form of Yeltsin's official visit to Belarus, which Yeltsin and the Speaker of the Belarusian parliament, StanislaÅ­ Shushkevich, had discussed between sessions of one of the meetings of the State Council chaired by Gorbachev at Novo-Ogarevo. The visit was originally planned for November 29 but then postponed with an eye to the Ukrainian referendum. It would now take place on December 7 and would become the single most important event, after the Ukrainian referendum, to decide the fate of the Soviet Union.
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ON THE MORNING
of Saturday, December 7, Yeltsin arrived in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at the head of the Russian delegation, which included the second most powerful Russian government official, State Secretary Gennadii Burbulis; Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, in charge of economic reform; Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Kozyrev; and Yeltsin's legal adviser, Sergei Shakhrai. At forty-six, Burbulis was the oldest in the group of advisers. The two youngest, Gaidar and Shakhrai, had turned thirty-five. The official goal of the visit was to sign agreements between Russia and Belarus, with the supply of Russian oil and gas heading the agenda. But in his speech to the Belarusian parliament, Yeltsin let the deputies know that his visit to Minsk was only the first leg of the trip and that fostering Russo-Belarusian cooperation was only one of its aims. “The leaders of the Slavic republics will consider four or five variants of the Union treaty,” said Yeltsin to the Belarusian parliamentarians. “Perhaps the meeting of the three heads of state will be historic.”
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What variants did Yeltsin have in mind? One of them came from his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, who drafted a four-page memo for his boss on the possible structure of a reformed union. It was, however, put together in haste and was anything but a blueprint for future policy. On the night before he left for Minsk, Kozyrev had met at the Savoy Hotel in Moscow with his primary contact in the West during the August coup, Allen Weinstein, a former history professor at Boston University and the director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy. The Russian foreign minister quizzed his American friend on the differences between federation, association, and commonwealth. On the same day, while taking part in a meeting with the visiting Hungarian prime minister, József Antall, Gennadii
Burbulis drew up schemes for the future organization of the post-Soviet space. One scheme suggested a loose confederation of all the former Soviet republics except the Baltics; another, a union of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly Kazakhstan.
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The idea of a Slavic union had first been proposed by one of Russia's best-known authors of the Soviet era, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A former prisoner of Stalin's forced-labor camps, author of
The Gulag Archipelago,
which was widely acclaimed in the West and prohibited in the Soviet Union, and a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Solzhenitsyn had been expelled by the Soviet authorities in 1974. Living in exile in Vermont, in 1990 he wrote a treatise titled “Rebuilding Russia.” It began with the following statement: “The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.” Solzhenitsyn was an old-style Russian nationalist who still thought of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians in prerevolutionary terms, as part of one Russian nation. He suggested that the Russians, as he broadly defined them, should slough off the burden of empire and create a state of their own, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the northern portions of Kazakhstan colonized by Slavs, which Solzhenitsyn called “Southern Siberia.”
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“Rebuilding Russia” was published in September 1990 in the largest-circulation Soviet newspaper,
Komsomol'skaia pravda
(
Komsomol Truth
), and was widely discussed in the USSR. A few months later, the idea took on very practical significance when the leaders of the three Slavic republics and Kazakhstan sent Gorbachev a memorandum proposing the creation of a union of sovereign states that other Soviet republics could join. Gorbachev killed the idea, executed his political turn to the right, and, after the use of military force in the Baltics, became a virtual hostage of the hard-liners in the old Soviet leadership. In March 1991 Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and the Belarusian leaders began negotiations on the creation of a Slavic union. These came to a halt after Gorbachev's defection from the hard-liners' camp and his sudden overture to the republican leaders, which included endorsement of a new union treaty.

Yeltsin suggested the idea of a Slavic union to Gorbachev immediately after the Ukrainian referendum, but the Soviet leader
would not listen. He needed the Central Asian republics to save his own union project and maintain his hold on power. In Yeltsin's camp, meanwhile, no one knew what to expect from Kyiv. Burbulis later remembered that after the referendum, when he and others in the Russian government began “to write and call all those Ukrainian freemen, we soon got the feeling that we had to get organized, as the key question was, above all, how to deal with Ukraine in its euphoria.”
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KRAVCHUK FLEW TO MINSK
with a small number of advisers for a rendezvous with the Russian president on the afternoon of December 7, the same day Yeltsin arrived in Belarus. On the morning of that day Kravchuk met with a special representative of President Bush, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Niles. He told the American visitor that he was taking with him to Minsk a package of proposals that could lead to the signing of bilateral agreements with Russia and Belarus and potentially to the creation of a community of states akin to the European Union. Judging by Kravchuk's memoirs, the Ukrainian leadership wanted only one thing at that point: to make its independence a political reality. But to achieve that, the Ukrainians needed Russian cooperation. The referendum results were Kravchuk's main trump card in the fast-approaching political contest with Yeltsin. “At this meeting,” remembered Kravchuk later, “the difference in principle consisted in the fact that I arrived armed with the results of the expression of all-Ukrainian will. Moreover, I already possessed the status of president.”
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Among those accompanying the freshly minted Ukrainian president on his trip to Minsk was Prime Minister Vitold Fokin, a fifty-nine-year-old mining engineer from eastern Ukraine. Like Yeltsin's former prime minister, Ivan Silaev, Fokin was a product of the Soviet planned-economy apparatus, and although he supported the idea of Ukraine's economic autonomy and even independence, he was concerned about the consequences of the disintegration of a single economic space encompassing the former Soviet republics. The Ukrainian nationaldemocratic forces were represented by two members of the oppositional bloc in the Ukrainian parliament. They came from the republic's intellectual establishment. Academician Mykhailo Holubets, who specialized in forestry and ecology, and Volodymyr Kryzhanivsky, a construction designer, had entered politics
during the first free elections in the spring of 1990. In parliament they joined the nationaldemocratic People's Council and were in opposition to Kravchuk and his communist base before the August coup.

In Minsk the Ukrainian delegation was welcomed by the Speaker of the Belarusian parliament, StanislaÅ­ Shushkevich. “We were given a very warm welcome at the airport,” recalled Mykhailo Holubets. “The head of the Supreme Council of Belarus, StanislaÅ­ Shushkevich, a professor of physics, is an extraordinarily pleasant man, a marvelous diplomat, and a wise head of state.” Holubets clearly recognized a kindred spirit. Shushkevich's rise to the highest post in the republic was the result of perestroika and, ultimately, of the failure of the coup. Born in Minsk in 1934, Shushkevich had dedicated most of his life to research and teaching, gaining a second doctorate in radioelectronics at the age of thirty-six—a major accomplishment by the standards of the time. In 1986 he became vice president of his alma mater, Belarusian State University.

Perestroika gave a tremendous boost to Shushkevich's career. In 1989 he was elected to the all-Union parliament, where he joined the democratic Interregional Group, led by one of the most prominent Soviet dissidents and the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov; a historian and communist apparatchik turned radical critic of the communist regime, Yurii Afanasiev; and the future democratically elected mayors of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Gavriil Popov and Anatolii Sobchak. In the following year he was also elected to the Belarusian parliament, where he became first deputy Speaker. In August 1991 Shushkevich resisted the coup and signed an appeal against the plotters. In September, as the hard-liners lost control of parliament in the aftermath of the coup, Shushkevich was elected Speaker of parliament and de facto head of the Belarusian state.
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