The Last Empire (57 page)

The next day, Baker took his questions about the Commonwealth, its future, and control over nuclear weapons to the only man in Moscow who was in a position to answer them, Boris Yeltsin, whose performance made a strong and positive impression on the American guest. Yeltsin insisted that their meeting take place in St. Catherine's Hall in the Kremlin, where Gorbachev had received distinguished foreign officials. He brought with him not only members of his government, including the Young Turks Yegor Gaidar and Andrei
Kozyrev, but also two top ministers of Gorbachev's crumbling cabinet: the minister of defense, Marshal Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, and the minister of the interior, General Viktor Barannikov. Yeltsin's people had intrigued journalists on the eve of the meeting by suggesting that they watch who would accompany Yeltsin. The reference was to the two Union ministers, whose appearance in Yeltsin's entourage was designed to send a clear signal both to Baker and to the domestic audience about who was now really in charge at the Kremlin.

Yeltsin began the meeting by welcoming Baker to “a Russian building on Russian soil.” He then brought a level of clarity to the issues of the Commonwealth, nuclear control, and humanitarian aid that Kozyrev had failed to offer the previous day. First of all, he announced that on December 21 the Commonwealth would be joined by the Central Asian republics. He told Baker that Russia would take over key Union ministries, replace the Soviet Union on the United Nations Security Council, and exercise sole control over nuclear arms throughout the Commonwealth. In the presence of Shaposhnikov, Yeltsin declared his desire to someday merge the Commonwealth's armed forces with those of NATO. Like Kozyrev before him, Yeltsin wanted the United States to recognize Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus as independent states and acknowledge Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union in the international arena.

Baker was pleased to hear direct answers to the questions he had asked Kozyrev the previous day—the foreign minister had probably briefed Yeltsin ahead of time on the questions that interested Baker. Alerted by Palazhchenko's message of the day before, Baker was anxious to raise the “Gorbachev issue” with Yeltsin. The Russian president told his guest that media speculation about Gorbachev possibly becoming commander in chief of the Commonwealth was groundless. Yeltsin was much more responsive to the notion that Gorbachev should be treated with respect. When Baker said that rumors had reached him about possible criminal prosecution of Gorbachev and that such a turn of events would not be understood or welcomed by the United States, Yeltsin was quick to show goodwill to his vanquished rival. “Gorbachev has done a lot for this country,” he told Baker. “He needs to be treated with respect and deserves to be treated with respect. It's about time to become a country where leaders can be retired with honor!”

The sensitive issue of centralized control over nuclear arms was discussed by Baker and Yeltsin in a confidential part of the meeting without their advisers. Yeltsin told Baker that currently there were three nuclear briefcases with launch codes: one with Gorbachev, another with Shaposhnikov, and the third with Yeltsin himself. For a nuclear launch to take place, all three would have to authorize it. Yeltsin's presentation implied that Gorbachev no longer had sole power to decide such issues: Yeltsin was already involved, and it was hard to imagine him agreeing with Gorbachev about anything, let alone a nuclear launch. What Yeltsin foresaw, with the USSR gone and the Commonwealth taking its place, was a reduction in the number of nuclear briefcases, not an increase. “Will remove telephone and briefcase from Gorby before end of December,” noted Baker on his Soviet-made notepad, which had the word “Moskva” at the top. Yeltsin explained that Gorbachev's case would be taken away from him, but the leaders of the nuclear republics—Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus—would be not given their own briefcases. “The leaders of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Byelorussia do not understand how these things work, that's why I'm telling only you,” said Yeltsin. “They'll be satisfied with having the telephones.” Baker found that explanation satisfactory.

At the end of the conversation, Yeltsin promised to provide Baker with a list of officials with whom the United States could deal in delivering humanitarian aid. Baker decided not to ask questions that would embarrass the Russian president, and so he crossed out the following paragraph of his negotiations checklist: “Right now we can't even ship food under CCC [[Commodity Credit Corporation agreement]] because your side is unable to pay the freight cost it agreed to cover. And you need to figure out how you are going to pay for the CCC credits that come due in January. If you default, we're legally required cut you off. That would be disastrous.”

Overall, Baker was satisfied with the results of the meeting. Yeltsin's confidence, the clarity of his presentation, and his direct responses to questions that Kozyrev had had trouble answering the previous day made a strong impression on Baker. It was then, listening to the Russian president, that he apparently crossed the line between his political and emotional attachment to the USSR and acceptance of the Russian-led Commonwealth as its substitute. Comparing his meeting with Yeltsin to the meeting he had later in the day with Gorbachev,
Baker wrote in his memoirs that on that day he “saw firsthand the Soviet Union's past and Russia's future.”
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Kozyrev, by contrast, was highly dissatisfied with the meeting, not out of jealousy toward his boss but because he thought that Yeltsin had missed a unique opportunity to negotiate large-scale economic assistance from the United States, settling instead for humanitarian aid. Before the meeting, Kozyrev had discussed economic assistance with Yeltsin's economic guru, Yegor Gaidar, and they agreed that Kozyrev would ask Yeltsin to give Gaidar a chance to present Russian desiderata to Baker. It never happened. According to Kozyrev, when Baker asked whether Yeltsin wanted humanitarian aid to be given only to Russia, Yeltsin responded, “Why, no. Ukraine and all the republics should receive humanitarian assistance.” This came as a shock to the Young Turks. “Yegor and I almost jumped out of our skin during that discussion,” recalled Kozyrev. “I asked him, ‘Yegor, was that what you wanted?' He said: ‘No, that's not it.' I said: ‘Let Yegor speak.'” Yeltsin refused to give his economic guru an opportunity to present his case. “No one could speak when he was speaking,” remarked Kozyrev about Yeltsin.

Kozyrev had clearly misread the signals given by the American secretary of state on the previous day. There was no Marshall Plan in the works. Humanitarian aid and technical assistance were the extent of the help that the United States was able and willing to offer Russia and the other republics at the time. When Kozyrev saw Baker off at the Moscow airport on December 17—and, given the exceptionally cold weather, handed the American his fur hat—he was disappointed that Baker was leaving with a mere request for humanitarian aid and not one for a substantial economic assistance package. “And so he took off wearing my hat, clutching humanitarian assistance between his teeth, and worked on that,” recalled Kozyrev years later with obvious regret. It was a good deal, exchanging a hundred-dollar Soviet hat for hundreds of millions in American humanitarian assistance, but it was not the deal that Kozyrev had been dreaming of.
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BEFORE DEPARTING MOSCOW
, Baker had returned to the Kremlin for a meeting with the man who had changed his country and the world so dramatically that neither had a place for him any longer. There was a sensitive issue that Baker had to keep in mind while
meeting with Gorbachev in his office on the third floor of the Senate Building. Three days earlier, on December 13, when Bush had placed a courtesy call to Gorbachev, the Soviet leader told his American counterpart, “George, I think Jim Baker's Princeton speech should not have been made, especially the point that the USSR had ceased to exist. We must all be more careful during these times.” Gorbachev had confused Baker's Princeton speech with his earlier television remarks, in which the secretary of state said, “The Soviet Union as we have known it no longer exists.” Baker had made those remarks after the Belavezha summit of the three Slavic leaders and tried to be as careful as possible under the circumstances, but Bush decided to appease Gorbachev nevertheless. “I accept your criticism,” he told the Soviet president. After the conversation, Gorbachev called Anatolii Cherniaev and told him that he had given Bush “a thrashing for his conduct.”
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Baker now had to deal with the offended Gorbachev. But the meeting went unexpectedly well for him. Gorbachev did not show that his feelings were hurt and only once allowed himself to refer to American missteps, in very general fashion. “Maybe there have been some mistakes, some grave blunders on my part and some on yours,” he told Baker, who interpreted the observation as a possible reference either to the White House leak on the recognition of Ukrainian independence or to his own remarks on television. If Gorbachev showed any indignation, it was with regard to Yeltsin and the creators of the Commonwealth, whom he accused of staging a coup. Gorbachev fully understood his own precarious situation, and the difference between his demeanor and Yeltsin's could not have been more striking. “Where Yeltsin had swaggered,” recalled Baker, “Gorbachev was subdued.” Baker assured Gorbachev of American support for him. “Whatever happens, you are our friends,” he told Gorbachev and his advisers. “And it makes us very sad when we see, as we do on this visit, that you are being treated with disrespect. I'll tell you frankly: we are against it.” He did not mention Yeltsin's assurances that Gorbachev would be allowed to retire “with honor.”
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While obviously bitter about his treatment by Yeltsin, Gorbachev showed readiness to work with the republican leaders. A note prepared by Anatolii Cherniaev for his meeting with Baker said that the creation of the Commonwealth had produced a new situation. “I want myself and my longtime colleagues,” said Gorbachev, referring
to Aleksandr Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze, who were present at the meeting, “to help establish the future of the Commonwealth and continuity of succession.” He also told Baker that he had agreed with Yeltsin on a time frame for handing over power. For all their reservations about the Belavezha Accords, both Gorbachev and Baker recognized that the Commonwealth was a reality, and both attempted to board its bandwagon. But whereas Baker was a welcome guest and an important partner, Gorbachev was seen as an impostor and a party crasher from whom everyone wanted to distance himself.
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17

THE BIRTH OF EURASIA

O
N DECEMBER
17,
THE DAY JAMES BAKER
left Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin met to discuss the transition of power from Union to Commonwealth authorities. “The presidents agreed that the process of managing the transition of Union structures to their new capacity should be completed by the end of this year,” read an article in the next day's issue of the pro-Yeltsin
Rossiiskaia gazeta
(
Russian Newspaper
). “By that time, the activity of all Union structures is to be terminated: some of them are to go over to the jurisdiction of Russia, and the rest are to be liquidated.” By mid-December it had become obvious to all the political actors that there would be no new union. Even Gorbachev realized that the project was dead. Its place would be taken by the Commonwealth. According to the pollsters, its creation was supported by 68 percent of the citizens of the Russian Federation. The question that still remained unanswered was, What kind of Commonwealth?
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The answer would come from the leaders of the Slavic and Central Asian republics, who were gathering in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, on December 21 to discuss the new political reality created by the Belavezha Agreement. Yeltsin had already told Bush that the Central Asian leaders would join the Commonwealth, but it was not clear in what capacity and on what conditions. Gorbachev pinned all his hopes of staying in power on the Almaty meeting. He wanted the Central Asian presidents to turn the Commonwealth into
a much more centralized polity than the one envisioned by Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich in Viskuli. As had often been the case since 1989, he expected that the “radicalism” of Russian politicians would meet its match in the conservatism of representatives of the Central Asian republics.

Gorbachev miscalculated. While most of the Central Asian presidents, including the leaders of the two largest republics, Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, did not welcome the creation of the Slavic Commonwealth, they saw no benefit in antagonizing Russia. They bore enough grudges against the former Union and had enough ambition to become independent rulers to throw their full support behind the idea of a Commonwealth that included their republics.

WHILE GORBACHEV AND YELTSIN
had opposite expectations for the Almaty summit, it fell to James Baker to be the first outsider to test attitudes toward the Commonwealth on the part of the Central Asian leaders. On the morning of December 17, he embarked on a complicated journey that would take him from Moscow to Brussels through Central Asia, Belarus, and Ukraine. It was a punishing schedule. He would leave Moscow at 9:00 a.m. on December 17, arrive in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, at 3:30 p.m., leave it at 7:55 p.m., and arrive in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, forty minutes later. His last appearance before the press was scheduled for 11:38 p.m. that same day. The next morning he was to fly to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, arriving there at 1:00 p.m. and going on to Kyiv, with his arrival scheduled for 5:55 p.m. He was to leave Kyiv on the morning of December 19 at 6:45 a.m. in order to make a 9:00 a.m. meeting in Brussels.
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