The Last Empire (55 page)

Even before the Belavezha meeting, one of Gorbachev's advisers, Nikolai Portugalov, had prepared a memo arguing in favor of Gorbachev's resignation in anticipation of the collapse of the Union structures. “The name and authority of the President of the USSR, a great Russian reformer, should in no case be associated, either now or in history, with the catastrophe that is about to befall our Fatherland,” wrote Portugalov. He called on Gorbachev to follow in the footsteps of French president Charles de Gaulle and step down after explaining to the Soviet public his disagreement with the new leaders of the republics. “That way out is not only the most dignified but also the most rational, the most politically appropriate, for it alone preserves the real possibility of a return to power at the call of the Fatherland and its peoples.” How could that come about? Portugalov explained, “Yeltsin's popularity continues to fall; Gorbachev's popularity will rise as his prophecy [[of economic and political collapse]] begins to come true. The West will give him material assistance.”
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It is not clear whether Gorbachev actually read this memo. But on the evening of December 12, the day the Russian parliament voted to approve the Belavezha Agreement and dissolve the Union, Gorbachev called in Anatolii Cherniaev, whom he knew to be in favor of his resignation. “He was sorrowful,” wrote Cherniaev, continuing his account. “He asked about my impressions of the Russian parliament, which had ratified the Belavezha Agreement. . . . He was taken aback by the insults of the cosmonaut Sevastianov, who had declared from the rostrum of parliament that the document was weak, but it was a good thing that the ‘Gorbachev era' was over. . . . He asked for a ‘handwritten' draft of a farewell speech to the people.” Rumors of Gorbachev's impending resignation had flooded Moscow since the day of the Belavezha Accords, but this was the first sign that Gorbachev was preparing for such an eventuality.
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ON DECEMBER
12, the day Gorbachev asked Cherniaev to prepare his resignation speech, James Baker woke up at 4:30 a.m., concerned about a line in a speech that he was to deliver later that day. It was 2:30 p.m. in Moscow; the Russian parliament was voting to
ratify the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and it was that new and unknown entity that would not let Baker rest. He suddenly realized that the draft of his speech announcing a major shift in American foreign policy made no mention whatever of the Commonwealth. The text referred to the emerging post-Soviet space as “Russia, Ukraine and the other republics.” Should he include the Commonwealth as well? Was it a viable institution? How long would it last, or would it be replaced by something else? No one knew. Baker called his aide Margaret Tutwiler, awakening her at that early hour and asking whether the text of the speech had been released to the press. It had not, allowing Baker to make a last-minute change. He came up with what he later called a “painful phrase”: “Russia, Ukraine, the other republics and any common entities.”
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The venue selected for the speech was meant to underscore its message of a significant change in policy. Princeton, New Jersey, was not only the home of Princeton University, from which Baker had earned his undergraduate degree in 1952, but also the base of operations for the Cold War's most famous thinker on international relations, George F. Kennan. The eighty-seven-year-old dean of international relations and intellectual father of “containment,” which had defined US policy toward the USSR for a good part of the Cold War, was sitting in the front row, waiting to hear Baker's speech. The secretary of state began by praising Kennan for designing a policy that had borne fruit—containment, he argued, had worked. The Soviet Union was no more. “The state that Lenin founded and Stalin built held within itself the seeds of its demise,” declared Baker.

The Soviet collapse, he went on, had brought a new world into existence, and the United States had to take advantage of the “new Russian Revolution” to build long-term relations with its former adversary.

If during the Cold War we faced each other as two scorpions in a bottle, now the Western nations and the former Soviet republics stand as awkward climbers on a steep mountain. Held together by a common rope, a fall toward fascism or total chaos in the former Soviet Union will pull the West down too. Yet equally important, a strong and steady pull by us now can help the Russians, Ukrainians and their neighbors to gain their footing, so that they, too, can
climb above to enduring democracy and freedom. Surely we must strengthen the rope, not sever it.

Baker later wrote that he wanted to achieve two major goals in Princeton: to signal a departure from Cold War policies and to declare a shift in US relations with the Soviet Union, from the center and Gorbachev to the republics. Baker declared that the United States was prepared to deal only with those leaders who abided by a set of principles including the establishment of centralized control over the Soviet nuclear arsenals, nuclear disarmament on the part of all republics except Russia, and commitment to democracy and a market economy. Accordingly, Western and particularly American aid to the republics would depend on their leaders abiding by those principles. The secretary of state spent most of his time explaining the need for American assistance and describing its nature and extent. He paid special attention to humanitarian aid, claiming that the winter of 1991–1992 could become as crucial to the course of world history as the Russian winters of 1812, 1917, and 1941. The first helped defeat Napoleon, the second brought the Bolsheviks to power, and the third contributed to the defeat of Nazism. If the winter of 1991 turned out to be cold and hungry, it might well nullify the accomplishments of what Baker called a “new Russian Revolution.”
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The university setting of Baker's speech, along with a good part of its content—humanitarian aid and economic assistance to a European enemy turned ally—and, finally, its rhetoric of support for freedom and democracy could not but remind one of a speech delivered forty-four years earlier by another secretary of state, George Marshall. In 1947, Marshall went to a commencement ceremony at Harvard University to announce a massive aid package intended to rebuild a Europe devastated by World War II, while securing its democratic future and alliance with the United States. That historical parallel was not lost on James Baker. He had begun to advocate a major economic aid package for the nascent democratic republics in September 1991, after visiting Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Almaty in the aftermath of the August coup. At that time, he wrote to President Bush about the need for strong support of democratic leaders and their policies in the crumbling USSR. “What may be at stake is the equivalent of the postwar recovery of Germany and Japan as democratic allies, only
this time after a long Cold War rather than a short, hot one,” he wrote from Moscow, drawing a parallel between the aftermaths of two wars and implicitly advocating a similar American response.
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Baker's aides in the State Department had increased their efforts to push through a major economic assistance package after the Ukrainian referendum. The notes prepared for Baker prior to his meeting with Bush on December 4 read as follows: “A pivotal point. We have to help the democrats—succeed. Next few months may determine their fate. We can't look like we did nothing to help them. Can't be unilateral effort. Need to catalyze and mobilize others.” Baker added the word “republics” where his assistants referred to the “democrats.” He also made a marginal comment on the reference to the $400 million to be spent on dismantling the Soviet nuclear arsenals: “We spent trillions over 40 years. This is a small investment in
our security
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It is not clear how much success Baker had with the president on December 4, but the notes prepared for his planned meeting with Bush on December 11 included an impatient appeal to the latter to throw his support behind a major economic assistance package that would create “pockets of success” in places where democratic reformers were active, such as St. Petersburg, ruled by Anatolii Sobchak. The appeal, drafted by one of Baker's aides, used the parallel of the American victories in World War II and the Cold War to drive its point home. Oddly enough, the point was attributed to Gorbachev's economic adviser, Grigorii Yavlinsky:

I watched your Pearl Harbor speech, and one line struck me very hard. You said, “we crushed totalitarianism, and when that was done, we helped our enemies give birth to democracies. We reached out, both in Europe and in Asia. We made our enemies our friends, and we healed their wounds, and in the process, we lifted ourselves up.” I was struck because I think we face the same situation today. We've won the Cold War peacefully. Now, we have to decide, as Yavlinsky says, what to do with the people we've defeated. . . . We face a great opportunity and equally great danger.

The author of the notes tried to convince Bush to do what Harry Truman had done—to go to the American people and sell a major new plan of economic assistance abroad. “You have passed the first
two tests—liberating Eastern Europe and liberating Kuwait—but now historians will view those as footnotes to your reaction to present crisis,” went the notes, appealing to Bush's sense of history. “You need to make the case to the American people about why internationalism, not isolationism, is the road to peace and prosperity. . . . [[T]]hey need to know that as Commander-in-Chief you are doing everything you can to make sure those nuclear weapons do not get loose. Nukes scare people. They trust you do something about it.”
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Baker's appeal, if it was ever presented to Bush in the form suggested by the notes, had limited success. In 1991, Bush's administration allocated close to $4 billion in credit export guarantees for food supplies and agricultural products to be shipped to the Soviet Union. Still, the United States lagged behind the European Union, especially when it came to direct grants. Seventy percent of all aid to the Soviet Union was coming from Western Europe. By early 1992, Germany alone had allocated close to $45 billion for economic assistance to the USSR, a good part of it to help the Soviet army leave German soil. The equivalent of a Marshall Plan, for which Baker had advocated and Russian reformers had hoped, did not materialize. There were a number of reasons the Bush administration did not follow in the footsteps of Harry Truman and his advisers. The most immediate one was economic and financial hardship at home. In 1947, the US economy was riding the wave of the post–World War II boom, with the United States accounting for 35 percent of world GDP. By 1991, that share had been reduced to 20 percent, and the US economy had hit the bottom of an economic recession.
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The Bush administration did not have the kind of bipartisan congressional support for major spending that Truman and Marshall had built up in the mid-1940s. Neither American politicians nor the general public considered the Soviet collapse an existential threat to the United States, as the rise of Soviet power had been regarded after World War II. In the fall of 1991 the United States was deep in the recession and thus in no position to spend freely. Many Americans expected the end of the Cold War to produce a financial “peace dividend,” not another drain on the economy. Even the strongest promoters of increased aid to the former Soviet Union were more than cautious about offering anything beyond humanitarian assistance. Thus, Baker urged a common effort of all Western countries to assist the former Soviet
republics. “Baker Presents Steps to Aid Transition by Soviets,” ran the headline of the
New York Times
report by Thomas Friedman published on November 13. “But He Doesn't Mention Any Large Increase in U.S. Funding,” specified the subtitle, cooling readers' expectations.
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The notes prepared for Baker on December 13 for his next meeting with the president were less than enthusiastic. Whoever wrote them had obviously run out of steam, if not hope. “You may wish to discuss your upcoming trip, especially preparing the way for humanitarian support we'll need in the future. This could include military logistics and supplies,” read the notes. Baker's aides were clearly unhappy with the White House's treatment of their proposals. Dennis Ross, the director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and a drafter of Baker's Princeton speech, had sent the secretary of state the text of the speech on December 6 with what Baker considered an “unusual blunt note.” The note not only advocated a shift away from the policy of containment and from Gorbachev as a relevant figure in Soviet politics but also vented frustration with other branches of the administration. “Few have understood the stake,” wrote Ross, according to a crossed-out passage in an early version of Baker's memoirs, “and they have killed almost every good idea we've had in the last three months.”
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Baker's Princeton speech was timed to inaugurate his tour of the crumbling Soviet Union, which would include stopovers in Moscow as well as the capitals of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. It was designed to articulate American policy in the wake of the Ukrainian referendum, but events on the ground had developed so quickly that last-minute revisions were needed. As the State Department finally prepared to shift away from the center toward the republics, news of the creation of the Commonwealth added one more layer of complexity. Figuring out what exactly the Commonwealth would mean for the future of the Soviet Union, the independence of the individual republics, and the fate of the Soviet nuclear arsenals became one of the main tasks of the impending trip. “I wondered,” wrote Baker, recalling his thoughts on the eve of his departure for Moscow on December 14, “whether it would be possible to find any solid footing in a country dissolving into chaos.”
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