ON AUGUST 1, 1991, there was virtually nothing, apart from the protests of former political prisoners and intellectuals hardly known outside Ukraine, to indicate trouble ahead for Bush and his advisers. After a round of applause from the communist majority in the Ukrainian parliament, the president and his entourage left the building in the company of Leonid Kravchuk and his aides. Their limousines proceeded to Babyn Yar (Russian: Babii Yar), a ravine near the medieval Church of St. Cyril and the site of one of the most horrendous massacres of the Holocaust. “The long, slow, twenty-minute motorcade to Babi Yar was the best of the trip to Bush,” read the media pool report on the event. “Ukrainians lined the streets, five and six deep. Unlike the Muscovites, they were smiling. They waved at Bush and everyone else in the motorcade.”28
On the slopes of Babyn Yar on the outskirts of Kyiv, in late September 1941, the Nazi Sonderkommando 4a gunned down close to thirty-four thousand of Kyiv’s Jews in the course of two days. The executions were carried out in broad daylight. Gramophone music played by the Nazis failed to drown out the cries of the victims, and the experience brutalized the city’s inhabitants. These were the first days of the German occupation and the first victims of Babyn Yar. Before the Red Army recaptured Kyiv in the fall of 1943, more than seventy thousand new victims—Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists, Roma, civilian hostages, and psychiatric patients—were executed on the slopes of Babyn Yar. Before their departure the Nazis tried to conceal their crimes, exhuming bodies, burning them, and then scattering the ashes. They could not erase the memories of the survivors.
The Soviets investigated and documented the executions—at the Nuremberg war crimes trials they reported some one hundred thousand victims—but the original report was doctored to conceal the fact that the first victims were Jews and that they were killed as part of what would become known as the Holocaust. The Soviets treated all victims as undifferentiated citizens of the USSR. A documentary novel titled Babii Yar, by the talented Kyiv writer Anatolii Kuznetsov, was published in 1966, with a quarter of its text deleted by the censors. It was not published in full until 1970, after Kuznetsov emigrated to the West. In 1976, a monument was finally erected at Babyn Yar to commemorate the victims of the massacres. According to the official version of events, it commemorated Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet citizens in general.29
It was against the background of the Soviet-era memorial that George Bush was preparing to deliver his speech honoring the dead. “Look closely at the great bronze and granite monument that will form a backdrop for Bush’s speech,” read the advance pool report for the media. “At its top is the figure of a woman bending her head to kiss her child. Only from the rear of the monument is the true horror and tragedy of the scene revealed—the woman’s hands are tied behind her.”
In his speech at the memorial, Bush welcomed the new politics of memory in Ukraine that finally made it possible to recognize the victims of the Holocaust in their own right. “For many years, the tragedy of Babi Yar went unacknowledged, but no more,” he said. “You soon will place a plaque on this site that acknowledges the genocide against Jews, the slaughter of gypsies, the wanton murder of Communists, Christians—of anyone who dared oppose the Nazi madman’s fantasies.” As he had done in his speech to parliament, Bush found a way to acknowledge the contribution made to the reevaluation of Soviet history by Mikhail Gorbachev and support his embattled partner in the Kremlin. He linked him to no less a figure in American history than Lincoln: “Abraham Lincoln once said: We cannot escape history. Mikhail Gorbachev has promoted truth in history.”
“I was choked up when we went to the memorial at Babi Yar, where the Nazi occupiers had killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Jews and others,” Bush later recalled. “Midway through my speech I faltered as I described the horrors of a day fifty years earlier.” The president’s speech was indeed full of heartbreaking details of the massacre, including the use of gramophones by the Nazi executioners. Barbara Bush listened to the speech seated next to simply dressed elderly women of peasant appearance, survivors of Babyn Yar, and those who had helped save their lives. Leonid Kravchuk was trying to calm his own emotions. As an eight-year-old boy in German-occupied Ukraine, he witnessed mass execution of Jews by Nazi machine gunners. A few months after Bush’s visit, speaking at the ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre, he would deliver part of his speech in Yiddish, and in a later interview he would state that not all his countrymen had behaved as they should have under the circumstances. The reference was to Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust.30
Bush’s speech was very well received by those present at the ceremony. Ivan Drach and other Rukh leaders, who were among the first in Ukraine to recognize the significance of Babyn Yar in the Holocaust, welcomed the visit. The Ukrainian-Jewish alliance against the Soviet empire developed by political dissidents of both peoples in the Gulag was becoming a political reality thanks to Rukh, whose policies were heavily influenced by former dissidents. Rukh was in the forefront of those battling the still widespread anti-Semitism in Ukraine, and its political platform advocated Ukrainian-Jewish cooperation against the dictates of the center.31
The only people who seemed out of place at the ceremony were Gorbachev’s representatives accompanying Bush on his trip to Kyiv—Vice President Gennadii Yanaev and the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Viktor Komplektov. Because all speeches in the course of the visit were delivered in either Ukrainian or English and all business was transacted in those languages, the Russian visitors were almost completely at a loss. Komplektov remarked during Bush’s speech in parliament “that it was good that he understood English, otherwise he would have been unable to follow what was going on.” According to his short biography in the president’s briefing book, Yanaev spoke “some English.” If that was indeed the case, it was not apparent in Kyiv. The Ukrainian officials spoke perfect Russian, but their switch to Ukrainian had symbolic meaning for the now officially sovereign republic.
The Americans went along and brought a Ukrainian interpreter. They also accommodated the Ukrainian request for a separate meeting between President Bush and Leonid Kravchuk that was not attended by Yanaev. According to Ed Hewett of the National Security Council, the Soviet vice president, who did not speak Ukrainian and probably did not understand most of what was said in English, was treated by the Ukrainian officials more like the “chairman of the All-Union Leprosy Association” than as a representative of the Union center. He was visibly bored and annoyed during the luncheon hosted by Kravchuk. But times had changed: it was now the center’s turn to make itself useful to the republics, and Yanaev understood the new rules of the game.32
AT ABOUT 7:00 P.M. LOCAL TIME, Air Force One took off from Boryspil airport and headed for Washington. The visit was finally over. A major milestone had been reached on the long road to nuclear disarmament, a new policy formulated on the national self-determination of the Soviet republics, democracy supported, and help given to a friend in the Kremlin in order to maintain control over the crumbling former superpower. In Yanaev’s Moscow-bound plane, Matlock and the Soviet vice president “toasted what had seemed to be a very successful visit by the American president.” George Bush was looking forward to a well-deserved rest on his Maine estate in Kennebunkport. It had been a busy July. August promised to be slow and restful. That was the hope, never to be fulfilled.33
II.
THE TANKS OF AUGUST
4
THE PRISONER OF THE CRIMEA
“MIKHAIL, I HOPE YOU’RE WELL,” were the first words of the virtual message that George Bush dictated into his small tape recorder. In his years as president, Bush kept an audio diary, with which he often shared thoughts and emotions that he did not wish to make public. On the evening of August 19, 1991, as he dictated another entry into his tape recorder, the president’s mind was far from American shores: he was thinking of Mikhail Gorbachev. “I hope they’ve not mistreated you,” continued the president. “You’v
e led your country in a fantastically constructive way. You’ve been attacked from the right and from the left, but you deserve enormous credit. Now we don’t know what the hell has happened to you, where you are, what condition you are in, but we were right to support you, I am proud we have supported you, and there will be a lot of talking heads on television telling us what’s been wrong, but you have done what’s right and strong and good for your country.”1
The president was gathering his thoughts about a day that he called historic in his diary. In faraway Moscow, that day had seen the declaration of a state of emergency by Gorbachev’s former allies, his ousting from power on grounds of alleged poor health, and the appearance of tanks in the streets. Bush had not expected any such turn of events after his return from Moscow a few weeks earlier. He had spent the previous night at his family estate, Walker’s Point, in Kennebunkport, Maine, with only one major item on his agenda: at 6:30 a.m., before Hurricane Bob hit the coast, he was planning to play eighteen holes of golf with Brent Scowcroft, who was staying at the Nonantum Hotel in Kennebunkport, and Roger Clemens, a celebrated pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. A few minutes after retiring, Bush was awakened by a telephone call from Scowcroft. The national security adviser was not calling about the golf game or the weather that threatened to derail it. As had been the case the previous summer, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the news had to do with international politics and threatened to kill not just the game but the whole vacation: there had been a coup in Moscow.
Half an hour earlier Scowcroft had been lying peacefully in bed reading cables. The television set was tuned to the twenty-four-hour CNN news channel, and he heard the announcer say something about Gorbachev resigning for health reasons. It did not sound right: only a few weeks earlier Scowcroft had seen Gorbachev, apparently in excellent health, and he now began to listen more carefully. The next announcement from Moscow left no further doubt: the Soviet information agency, TASS, reported on Gorbachev’s illness and the creation of a committee to deal with a state of emergency. Those in charge of the committee—a group of hard-liners led by Vice President Gennadii Yanaev—included the heads of the KGB and the military, Vladimir Kriuchkov and Marshal Dmitrii Yazov. All of them had been guests at Bush’s reception in Moscow a few weeks earlier. Scowcroft called his deputy, Robert Gates, asking him to check the news with the CIA. He then summoned the deputy press secretary, Roman Popadiuk, who was staying in the same hotel, to draft a statement in case the report was not a hoax.
Scowcroft then called the president and told him what he knew. For the time being there was no independent confirmation from any government channel, including the CIA. “My God!” was Bush’s first reaction. They discussed how to react: journalists were already knocking on the door of Popadiuk’s hotel room. “The president’s inclination was to condemn it outright, but if it turned out to be successful, we would be forced to live with the new leaders, however repulsive their behavior,” wrote Scowcroft later. “We decided he should be condemnatory without irrevocably burning his bridges.” Scowcroft was anything but optimistic: with so many powerful figures behind the reported coup, it would probably succeed. “Extra-constitutional” was the term Scowcroft suggested that the president use in any public reference to the coup. Before Bush made an attempt to go back to sleep, they agreed that Scowcroft would monitor the situation throughout the night and call him at 5:30 a.m. Popadiuk issued a brief statement to the press, admitting that the administration had no independent confirmation of what was going on in Moscow. He told Scowcroft that in the morning the president would have to speak to the press, and he could not comment on the coup from a golf course. “It might be raining in the morning anyway,” responded Scowcroft. The game was definitely off.2
The morning brought little clarity, except that there was no doubt the coup had indeed taken place. What had happened to Gorbachev? What could now be expected? What was the plotters’ agenda, and what did the coup mean for the future of Soviet-American relations and of the USSR itself? Everyone knew that the impact of such an event would be enormous, but no one could tell exactly what it would be.
As usual, the CIA covered all possible options. Its analysts suggested a 10 percent chance of a return to the pre-perestroika regime, a 45 percent chance of a stalemate between hard-liners and democrats, and a 45 percent chance that the coup would fail. The CIA was more skeptical than Scowcroft about the plotters’ chances of success, partly because its people failed to detect any major preparations: the coup had been organized at the last moment and could not have been prepared very well. Still, it was anyone’s guess how things would go. Bush spoke with Prime Minister John Major of Britain and President François Mitterrand of France. Like the American president, they had been taken completely by surprise. Bush told Mitterrand that Gorbachev too had been caught unawares. That was the line given him by Scowcroft earlier in the morning. “If they don’t know, how the hell could we know?” dictated the president into his tape recorder that day. Still, it looked bad: not only had the CIA missed signs of the coming coup, but it had left the president and his national security adviser to learn the news from CNN. “The press is saying it was an intelligence failure,” said Bush to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada later that morning.3
The State Department was unprepared as well. James Baker, on vacation in Wyoming, learned of the coup from the department’s Operations Center one hour after Scowcroft heard of it on television. As he received information from Washington and advice from his assistants, themselves on vacation and scattered all over the world, Baker made notes in his hunter’s notebook. Its small pages were marked at the top with an observation appropriate for a vacation but hardly for international crisis management: “Hunter will do anything for a buck $.” The first notes read, “No leverage. Certainly minimal”; “Will be hard to do business w/new guys for a while”; “Emphasize the lack of their political legitimacy.” After that, there appeared to be some hope that the situation could be reversed. “Yeltsin is key guy,” read one of the notes. “Should stay in touch with him. Portray us trying to get info. Touch base w/reformer.”
The American embassy in Moscow was in the middle of a transition: Jack Matlock had already left, and his replacement, Robert S. Strauss, had not yet been sworn in. A Texan with close links to Bush and no knowledge of Russian or diplomatic experience of any kind, Strauss was supposed to act as the president’s direct liaison with Gorbachev. Now it appeared that Gorbachev had been taken out of the picture before Strauss even entered the scene. Bush called the US chargé d’affaires, Jim Collins, who had already gone next door to the Russian parliament building, known in Moscow as the White House. He told the president that the building was open but there was no sign of Boris Yeltsin, who had opposed the coup. The Americans in Moscow were in no danger, reported the chargé d’affaires.
That was the only positive news Bush could give journalists crammed into a small room of the presidential compound, where they took shelter from the rain brought by Hurricane Bob. Bush expressed deep concern about the events in Moscow. He assured the reporters that the US government was carefully following the situation, but it was too early to say how things would develop. Answering a question, he noted that coups could fail: “They can take over at first, and then they run up against the will of the people.” Following Scowcroft’s advice, the president characterized the coup as “extra-constitutional” rather than unconstitutional. Bush’s praise for Gorbachev and his accomplishments sounded like an elegy. He admitted that he had not tried to reach Gorbachev by phone. His main concern was whether the plotters would continue the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe begun by Gorbachev and honor START and other agreements on the control of nuclear arms. He said that US aid would be suspended as long as “extra-constitutional” rule continued, but there would be no further sanctions unless the new leaders departed from their commitments to other countries.
Still, Bush was reluctant to burn his bridges with the coup leaders. The pre
sident found some good words to say about Vice President Yanaev and declined to support Yeltsin’s call for a general strike, despite a direct question from a journalist. Privately, Bush refused to believe that Yanaev was actually in charge of the coup. That was an impression he shared with Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany. Bush liked the Soviet vice president, whom he had met on his recent trip to Moscow and Kyiv. After coming back to Washington and learning that Yanaev was a fisherman, the president had sent him some fishing lures from his own supply. He did not know whether they had reached the purported leader of the plot. At the press conference, Bush shared his “gut feeling” that Yanaev was committed to reform but admitted that his actions pointed to the contrary. Bush noted, however—correctly, as it turned out—that it was not Yanaev but the KGB and army hard-liners who were calling the shots in the coup.4
The press conference was anything but a success, as Scowcroft immediately told the president. The reporters had been taken aback by the coolness of Bush’s reaction and compared it to his response to the Tiananmen Square massacre by the communist government of China more than two years earlier. To control the damage, Bush decided, on Scowcroft’s advice, to interrupt his vacation. He would leave Maine in front of television cameras and head for Washington to manifest his leadership and direct involvement in dealing with the international crisis. The image would change, but not the substance of the president’s response. The most important thing on the minds of administration officials that day was to look tough in front of the television cameras without provoking the coup leaders into abandoning international agreements signed by Gorbachev. Helmut Kohl told Bush that he was worried about whether the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Germany would continue. So did the East European leaders, who still had Soviet troops on their territories. The United States and its allies had managed to get much of what they wanted from Gorbachev, but would his successors continue to observe those arrangements?5
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