The Last Empire

by Serhii Plokhy

  WHAT TO DO WITH the Soviet Union was the question at the top of President Bush’s agenda when he returned from vacation in early September. The problem was that neither Bush nor his advisers had a clear vision of what they should do next: the White House was as reactive as ever in its treatment of the rapidly developing situation. There was a belief that this was the only reasonable position under the circumstances. Perhaps it was. The president, by his own admission, “did not consider it at all useful for the United States to pretend we could play a major role in determining the outcome of what was transpiring in the Soviet Union.” Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, were concerned that too much activity on the part of the United States could result in another coup. “Demands or statements by the United States could be counterproductive and galvanize opposition to the changes among the Soviet hard-liners,” wrote Bush and Scowcroft later.14

  On September 5, the day the Congress in Moscow decided to ditch the Soviet constitution and dissolve itself, Bush convened the National Security Council. Security issues—cuts to nuclear arsenals and security of the Soviet stockpiles—dominated the agenda, but a good part of the meeting was devoted to discussing the broader Soviet strategy that the White House so far lacked. The president opened the meeting by stating that “with the Baltics free at last, and the rush of other independence declarations, it was a complex situation.” Indeed it was. The administration made a clear distinction between its policy toward the Baltic republics and that toward the rest of the Soviet Union. What was good for the Baltics was considered bad for Ukraine. But even if one opted to side with the center against the republics, where was that center to be found—with Yeltsin and his young revolutionaries or with Gorbachev and his seasoned liberal reformers? The press had long been criticizing Bush for backing Gorbachev and neglecting Yeltsin. Should he fully engage with Yeltsin now? “Although Yeltsin was a hero, a genuine hero, how would he look a month from now?” wrote the president and his national security adviser years later, recalling the dilemma.15

  That day Bush asked his aides for advice but also let them know that he preferred caution. “We should not act just for the sake of appearing busy,” he told the gathering. The only person in the room who seemed to be out of sympathy with Bush’s cautious approach was the fifty-year-old secretary of defense, Richard Cheney, who took part in the National Security Council meeting. Unlike Scowcroft and the president, Cheney believed that the United States could and should influence the situation in the Soviet Union. “I assume these developments are far from over,” he told the gathering. “We could get an authoritarian regime still. I am concerned that a year or so from now, if it all goes sour, how we can answer why we didn’t do more.” He favored a proactive strategy: “We ought to lead and shape the events.”16

  Cheney pushed for strengthening the administration’s ties with the Soviet republics, which would in fact encourage the dissolution of the USSR, which in turn would diminish the Soviet threat and, in time, the Pentagon’s budget. The secretary of defense did not make a distinction between the independence of the Baltic states and that of Ukraine. He believed that the United States should support the new nations if they wanted to be independent. For the time being, he suggested opening American consulates in all the Soviet republics. For him, the fact that American and G-7 humanitarian aid was channeled through the center—a point raised by Scowcroft—was “an example of old thinking.” In their memoirs, Bush and Scowcroft characterized Cheney’s proposal as nothing but “a thinly disguised effort to encourage the breakup of the USSR.”

  It fell eventually to James Baker, who was a personal friend of Bush’s and, as everyone in the White House knew, exercised significant influence on his thinking, to respond to Cheney’s challenge. Like Cheney, Baker believed that the American position could influence developments in the Soviet Union. “While events will be determined on the ground, our words will—as they clearly did during the coup—have a great impact on how leaders act,” read a memo prepared for Baker by his staffers. Before the meeting of the National Security Council, Baker had released to the press five principles on which US policy in the region was to be based. It was a message to the leaders of the former Soviet republics about American expectations of them. These included the peaceful character of national self-determination; inviolability of existing borders; respect for democracy and the rule of law; respect for human rights, especially those of ethnic minorities; and, last but not least, respect for the international obligations of the USSR—the State Department was decidedly opposed to scrapping the START agreement that had just been negotiated with Gorbachev.

  Baker and his State Department advisers did not want to let Gorbachev down after what he had done to improve Soviet-American relations. To them, Gorbachev and the people around him were known, likable, and predictable. No one in the State Department was well acquainted with Boris Yeltsin or his minister of foreign affairs, Andrei Kozyrev, not to mention the leaders of the other republics. People close to Eduard Shevardnadze had warned the US secretary of state that the center was collapsing and nationalism was on the rise. A State Department memo prepared for Baker after the coup pointed to “the real possibility that these current declarations of independence will now lead to territorial, economic and military disputes between republics.” “We ought to wait on the consulates [[for the republics]] and do what we can to strengthen the center,” said Baker at the NSC meeting. He was also eager to point out the potential problems that the disintegration of the Soviet Union might entail, especially the prospect of violence and bloodshed, as well as the possibility of nuclear proliferation.17

  Cheney was not convinced by what he heard. He felt that the administration was missing emerging opportunities. “What should we be doing now to engage Ukraine?” he asked, raising the major problem presented by the declaration of independence on the part of the Soviet Union’s second-largest republic. “We are reacting.”

  President Bush asked whether Ukraine would join the Union. “Out,” answered Cheney. “The voluntary breakup of the Soviet Union is in our interest. If it’s a voluntary association, it will happen. If democracy fails, we’re better off if they’re small,” he argued.

  Baker responded, “The peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union is in our interest. We do not want another Yugoslavia.”

  Scowcroft, siding with Baker, asked the secretary of state whether he would support the Union if the alternative was bloodshed. “Peaceful change of borders is what we’re interested in, along the lines of [[the]] Helsinki [[Accords]],” came the predictable answer.

  Scowcroft followed up, “But if there’s bloodshed associated with the breakup, then should we oppose the breakup?” Baker advocated a continuation of existing policy, working with republican leaders without encouraging a breakup. Cheney disagreed: in his view, more could be achieved by intensifying contacts with the republics.

  The only agenda item on which President Bush suggested action that day—an extremely important item—was nuclear disarmament. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, who took part in the meeting, believed that as long as nuclear arms were in the hands of the Soviet military and not the politicians, they were safe. Powell’s years of involvement in nuclear diplomacy had introduced him to many top Soviet commanders, whom he now tended to trust. He distrusted the new wave of political leaders and did not favor the transfer of nuclear weapons from other republics to Russia. With the center still in place and the army still in control, the United States had one—perhaps final—opportunity to achieve something in nuclear diplomacy with the USSR. Bush asked Cheney to prepare a proposal for the reduction of nuclear arsenals. This would help save money and show that the Bush administration was not merely reacting to developments in the Soviet Union. Bush decided to push as hard as possible in an already familiar direction—that of nuclear disarmament. That was what the American people wanted, and Gorbachev was still in a position to deliver. They would try to keep the Soviet Union go
ing as long as possible.18

  JAMES BAKER CAME TO appreciate the scope of the changes in the Soviet Union since the collapse of the coup when he flew to Moscow for the September 10 opening of a human rights conference under the auspices of the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). He found the experience “surreal.” Next to the Russian White House, he saw barricades and flowers placed in memory of the three young men who had died less than three weeks earlier. At the conference, he listened to a speech by the foreign minister of Lithuania. “If two months ago,” he wrote to George Bush, “someone had told us an independent Lithuanian Foreign Minister would be making a very positive speech to a CSCE meeting in Moscow in September, we would have asked what he was smoking.”

  Human rights had been a thorn in the side of the Soviet foreign policy establishment ever since the Helsinki Accords of 1975, when the Soviet Union accepted the obligation to respect human rights on its territory. Ignoring those obligations, the Soviet authorities had jailed political dissidents who tried to monitor human rights in the USSR. This turned the issue into a tool of Western propaganda against the USSR and a dirty word in the Soviet political lexicon. It was only under Gorbachev that Soviet officials began to warm up to the idea of respect for human rights. With dissidents released from prison, running popular fronts, and even taking power in the Baltics and other Soviet republics, the human rights conference in Moscow underscored the enormousness of the change taking place in the Soviet Union.19

  There was much to please and amaze American and other Western visitors to Moscow in September 1991. Human rights were just one example; openness to Westerners was another. James Baker would meet with Ivan Silaev, Yeltsin’s prime minister and de facto head of the new Union government, in the same office (previously occupied by Stalin) where the now imprisoned prime minister Valentin Pavlov and the hard-liners had plotted their move against Gorbachev on the night of August 18. Baker also visited the old office of the former head of the KGB, Vladimir Kriuchkov. The new man in charge of the building, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin’s liberal appointee Vadim Bakatin, awaited the American secretary of state at the curb and welcomed him inside after admitting to the press that he was “a little nervous.”

  Gorbachev and Yeltsin were as friendly to the American visitor as their subordinates and the leaders of the republics were. Baker was eager to return to the American precoup agenda and push for things that President Bush had not managed to obtain from Gorbachev at the Moscow summit. With the Baltics finally free, these included canceling Soviet aid to the Moscow-backed regimes in Afghanistan and Cuba. “Given the highly uncertain Soviet future,” recalled Baker, “we were in even more of a hurry to ‘lock in’ gains then and there.” He made it apparent to Gorbachev and Yeltsin that American economic aid depended on the withdrawal of Soviet support for Cuba and Afghanistan. “They jumped at my offer, and indeed were almost competitive in trying to be cooperative,” wrote Baker in his memoirs. Gorbachev, who no longer represented the Communist Party, told the American secretary of state, “Yes, we spent eighty-two billion dollars on ideology.”

  Baker was amazed when Gorbachev agreed not only to terminate Soviet aid to Cuba but also to announce his decision at the joint press conference they were about to hold in the Kremlin. This was done without consulting Fidel Castro. It was a major coup for American foreign policy: all Soviet army servicemen were to be withdrawn from Cuba, and aid would be cut off as of January 1, 1992. The same deadline was set for the ending of Soviet aid to Afghanistan. Upon hearing Baker’s request, Yeltsin responded, “I will tell Gorbachev to do it.” He then called the Soviet president and assured Baker that the deadline would be accepted. The agreement, in which both the Soviet Union and the United States committed themselves to ending assistance to their respective clients in Afghanistan, was announced in Moscow the next day.

  The pro-Soviet Afghan leader Mohammad Najibullah was informed of the withdrawal of the annual Soviet aid package six hours before the Moscow announcement, and he presented a brave face. Najibullah would be out of power in a few months and hanged by the Taliban in September 1996. Pictures of his corpse in the world media were a sign of trouble to come, but in September 1991 no one predicted the subsequent tragic turn of events in Afghanistan. Baker could take satisfaction in a major victory. When the US ambassador, Bob Strauss, passed him a piece of paper with a note reading, “These 2 meetings today are really pretty historic!” Baker returned it with his own comment: “That’s the understatement of the day!”20

  Why were the Soviets so accommodating? The new Soviet foreign minister, Boris Pankin, the only Soviet ambassador to publicly condemn the coup before it was over, who was then rewarded with the top diplomatic job, explained the concessions to the United States as follows:

  We looked to the US for economic assistance and were prepared to make many concessions to achieve it—hence our compliance with independence for the Baltic states. Our retreat from the Third World and downgrading of our relations with Cuba fit the same pattern. On the one hand we could no longer afford to maintain these kinds of relationship; on the other we strove to present their abandonment as badges of good intent. Both the Americans and we dressed up our statements in terms of détente, but for our part it was economic imperatives that drove us, as the Americans perfectly well understood.

  Pankin had good reasons to emphasize the economic factor when he sat down a few years later to write his memoirs and tried to recall, analyze, and justify his foreign policy. Even so, the same memoirs indicate that there was something more than pure realpolitik driving Soviet behavior in the international arena in the fateful autumn of 1991. The other important factor was an ideological revolution that led to the rejection of anything related to the former communist vision of the world and the international role of the USSR. This revolution, which had been brewing for years among liberally inclined officials in the offices of the International Department of the Central Committee and the corridors of the Foreign Ministry, was unleashed by the failure of the coup.

  Not only Yeltsin but also Gorbachev was in full agreement with the new trend. At his first meeting with Pankin, Gorbachev said, “We must change priorities, get rid of prejudices. Yasser Arafat, Gaddafi—they call themselves our friends, but only because they dream of us returning to the past. Enough double standards.” Communist ideology was thus all but expunged from Soviet foreign policy. The liberal thinking closely associated with newfound Soviet admiration for the economic and cultural achievements of the United States became central to the Soviet foreign policy process.21

  “We longed to be accepted,” wrote Pankin. “In those days the common obsession that gripped our entire leadership was with the idea of becoming a ‘civilized state.’” The desire for acceptance informed Pankin’s behavior during his first meeting with Baker. He began by handing Baker a copy of an internal memo that he had prepared for Gorbachev, spelling out Soviet readiness to reverse every position taken on issues ranging from Afghanistan to Eastern Europe, Israel, and Cuba. Pankin probably wanted to indicate that henceforth Soviet diplomacy would have no secrets from the “civilized world.” As the surprised Baker examined the memo, Pankin told him, “I hope we can come to a common understanding on many of these issues. But I want to make one request: even if the agreement we reach is closer to your original position than to ours, please avoid the temptation to tell the press that these are concessions extracted by you. All this stems from the ideas and positions of the people who are running our foreign policy today.”22

  This sounded like an aspiration to be more Catholic than the pope. Baker was probably in no position to appreciate the full scope of ideological reasons for this fire sale of Soviet foreign policy assets, but the economic ones were quite apparent. Ivan Silaev, who headed the Economic Committee now functioning as the interim Union government, told Baker that the economic situation was “grave.” His main task was not to improve it—that was beyond the government’s capacity—but to prevent it from growing worse. Gavr
iil Popov, the democratic mayor of Moscow and a staunch supporter of Yeltsin during the coup, told Baker that in reality there was no central government. The republics and large municipalities such as Moscow were on their own. “Moscow cannot support itself through the winter,” he admitted, and then asked for help, mentioning in particular eggs, powdered milk, and mashed-potato mix. “Some of this material is stored by your army, which throws it out after three years. But a three-year shelf life is all right for us.” Baker was stunned. “It was a sobering admission of the problems faced by the country whose leader once talked about ‘burying’ the West,” he wrote in his memoirs. The mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatolii Sobchak, and his aide Vladimir Putin, whom Baker visited on his brief stop in the former imperial capital, were equally concerned about the coming winter.

  After meeting with the new democratic leaders, who wanted change but were clearly unprepared to govern the country, Baker wrote to Bush suggesting a Marshall Plan for the Soviet Union in all but name. “The simple fact is we have a tremendous stake in the success of the democrats here. Their success will change the world in a way that reflects both our values and our hopes. . . . The democrats’ failure would produce a world that is far more threatening and dangerous, and I have little doubt that if they are unable to begin to deliver the goods, they will be supplanted by an authoritarian leader of the xenophobic right wing.”23