The Last Empire

by Serhii Plokhy

  “Reforms in Russia are the path to democracy, not to empire,” continued Yeltsin, taking up the subject of relations between the Union center and the republics. He announced that Russia would cease to finance most Union ministries by November 1, a mere three days after his speech. Interrepublican institutions would be limited to coordinating relations among the republics, and Russia would not allow the restoration of the old all-powerful center. But Yeltsin was not giving up on the Union entirely. He encouraged Ukraine, whose leadership refused to sign the economic treaty, to join the economic union and threatened that any republics conducting a policy of “artificial” separation from Russia would be charged world prices for Russian resources. He hoped that the former Soviet republics would also sign a political agreement. In the absence of such an agreement, said Yeltsin, Russia would declare itself the legal successor of the USSR and take over all-Union institutions and property—a move opposed by the leaders of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, among others.31

  On the following day, Yeltsin asked the Russian parliament to grant him special powers for a year. There would be no elections in 1992, no matter what the results of the transformation. He would personally lead the government and bear full responsibility for the success of the reform. All his requests were granted. “The most popular president is finally prepared for the most unpopular measures. The kamikaze group will be led by Yeltsin,” ran the lead article in Nezavisimaia gazeta.

  The reaction in the non-Russian republics was cautious at best. “Uzbekistan receives some 60 percent of its goods from beyond its borders; a great deal comes from Russia,” said Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. “Hence the liberalization of prices in the RSFSR will affect Uzbekistan, and we will be obliged to take defensive measures.” That sounded like an end not only to the old Soviet Union but also to the economic agreement that was supposed to keep the common market in existence.32

  The Russian ark was leaving the Soviet dock.

  12

  THE SURVIVOR

  IN LATE OCTOBER THE CUSTODIANS OF the Palacio Real de Madrid, the official residence of the king of Spain, received a request from the state administration to remove one of its most magnificent paintings from its walls. The canvas, which featured Charles V, the early-sixteenth-century Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain, was not going for restoration. It was to be stored in a warehouse. The palace was being readied for the opening of an international summit on the Middle East scheduled for October 29, and the depiction of a Christian ruler massacring Muslims was clearly inappropriate for the occasion. Madrid had been chosen over Washington, Cairo, Geneva, and The Hague as the most appropriate venue for the first high-level meeting between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in more than forty years. They agreed to meet with the leaders of Egypt, Syria, and other countries of the region to discuss peace—the beginning of a process that would ultimately lead to the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the longest peace in recent Israeli history.1

  There would have been no Madrid conference without the new spirit of cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two Cold War superpowers that had competed in the Middle East for decades, funding and arming opposing sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict. George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev served as official cosponsors of the conference. “President Bush and President Gorbachev request your acceptance of this invitation,” read the letter addressed to potential participants, including the heads of European and Middle Eastern states and the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. They all agreed to come or send high-level delegations.

  The agreement to call a conference was reached during George H. W. Bush’s visit to Moscow in July. Paving the road to Madrid had begun eight months earlier in Paris. European heads of state met there in November 1990 with the leaders of the United States and Canada for what was dubbed the peace conference of the Cold War. They took advantage of recent developments in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the disappearance of the Iron Curtain to approve the Charter of Paris for a New Europe—a document that bridged the East-West divide in institutional and ideological terms, laying solid foundations for the establishment of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.2

  James Baker believed that it was there and then that the Cold War had indeed come to an end. His belief was based not so much on the signed Charter of Paris as on the actions of the Soviet Union, whose leaders had agreed for the first time since the Yalta Conference of 1945 to work together with the United States in solving a major international crisis—the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq a few months earlier. In Paris, responding to a direct request from President Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to cosponsor a resolution of the United Nations Security Council authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein. Gorbachev overruled his hard-line advisers and kept his word, giving Bush and an international coalition of states the opportunity to attack Saddam, drive him out of Kuwait, and place Iraq under siege.3

  After the United States’ victory in the Gulf War, the American stake in the region grew tremendously, creating an opportunity for Washington to push for a peace conference between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Soviet Union supported the initiative, which took on new momentum after the failure of the Moscow coup and the appointment of Boris Pankin as Soviet foreign minister. The Soviets, who had abrogated diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967, restored them in October 1991. To Washington’s surprise, they did so without consulting Syria, their main ally in the region. Events in the Middle East were going America’s way. That month, President Bush commented on the new Soviet policy to a visiting Middle Eastern dignitary, the emir of Bahrain: “We don’t see them coming back to threaten our interest in the Middle East.” James Baker would begin his numerous meetings with Middle Eastern leaders, from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel to President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, with the same confident phrase: “The Soviets remain fully on board.”4

  Mikhail Gorbachev was definitely on board with America’s plans for the future of the Middle East, but developments in the USSR were putting into question the commitments he was about to make in the international arena. This precarious situation echoed another recent dramatic development in international politics. The Paris summit of November 1990, which opened the road to the Madrid peace conference, turned out to be the last international conference attended by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain. While she attended the negotiations in the French capital, a vote took place in her own party caucus in the British parliament that forced her to resign. For the British, this was a reprise of the Potsdam Conference at the end of the Second World War, when Winston Churchill was abruptly removed from office by British voters. Now there were well-grounded fears that Madrid could become the last international conference of another heavyweight in international politics—Mikhail Gorbachev.

  “Reports [[arrived]] recently that he might not be around long,” recorded Bush in his diary on the eve of his departure for Madrid. “The briefing book indicates this might be my last meeting with him of this nature. Time marches on.” A few minutes earlier, Bush had dictated into his tape recorder,

  It is clear to me that things are an awful lot different regarding Gorbachev and the Center than they were. He’s growing weaker all the time. I am anxious to see what his mood is. He is still important in nuclear matters, but all the economic stuff—it looks to me like the republics have been more and more asserting themselves. It will be interesting to figure out his mood. I remember not so long ago how he couldn’t stand Yeltsin. How he up at Camp David [[in June 1990]] made clear he didn’t think Yeltsin was going anywhere. But now all that has changed.5

  Gorbachev was not in good humor as he left Moscow for Madrid on the afternoon of October 28. Yeltsin was now at the center of attention in the Soviet capital. The forthcoming US-Soviet summit and the international peace conference that would normally have dominated the news were now secondary issues. And whatever coverage made it into the media was oft
en unfavorable to Gorbachev. “‘Emissary of non-existent state’ was typical of the headlines in the Moscow press,” recalled Soviet foreign minister Boris Pankin. Gorbachev was acutely sensitive to such slights. In Madrid a reporter asked him an innocent question: “Since your departure from Moscow, who is taking your place in Moscow?” The Soviet president took offense. “I’m still the president,” he responded. “Nobody is taking my place. Everybody else is doing what they’re supposed to be doing and carrying out their functions. . . . Nobody is going to take me out of the action.”6

  Raisa Gorbacheva agreed to accompany her husband on his trip to Madrid. She had partially recovered from her August stroke, but her eyesight had deteriorated. The Crimean experience would haunt her for the rest of her life. With Yeltsin now in the Kremlin, she ceased to go there. As Gorbachev’s power visibly waned, she found the people around him less accommodating than before. She had a clash with Gorbachev’s loyal assistant Anatolii Cherniaev, who was now avoiding his boss’s wife. Initially he refused to go to Madrid for that reason, but Gorbachev made him come. On the flight to Madrid, as Cherniaev and other presidential aides discussed the summit, Raisa sat reading on a couch at the other end of the cabin.

  Her own book, I Hope, which appeared in the United States in September, made it onto the New York Times best-seller list, but there were few people present with whom to share the excitement. Barbara Bush, who had inspired her to write the book by bringing her to the Wellesley College commencement in June 1990, was not coming to Madrid. This in itself reduced the significance of the coming US-Soviet encounter, lowering its status from that of an official visit to a working visit. Until the very end, the Soviet side did not know who would be waiting for the Gorbachevs when they landed in Madrid. Then news reached the presidential plane that Prime Minister Felipe González of Spain and his wife, Carmen Romero, had come to the airport. “I sensed that this news cheered up the president a little,” remembered Boris Pankin.7

  González showed genuine respect for the Soviet president. It was a meeting of two allies and confidants, if not friends. Gorbachev had a natural affinity for González, the son of a farmer who had become general secretary of the Spanish Workers’ Party and eventually prime minister. González, for his part, had genuine respect for Gorbachev. On hearing of the August coup, he took the most principled stand of any Western leader. While François Mitterrand of France came near to accepting it as a fait accompli and Bush was indecisive at first, González immediately released a communiqué, which he drafted himself, denouncing the event as a coup d’état. Now he told Gorbachev, “Mikhail, during those days I had the impression that the West had accepted what had happened as a fait accompli and was ready to resign itself to it.”

  González believed that having once shown readiness to write Gorbachev off, the Western leaders might well do so again. “I conclude that today Western political leaders are in doubt about the ability of the Soviet Union to preserve itself and, therefore, proceed from the possible scenarios, including the disintegration of the USSR,” González told Gorbachev. “It’s quite depressing.” González’s words impressed Gorbachev strongly enough for him to reproduce them a few years later in his memoirs. During his last years in office, as things deteriorated at home, Gorbachev would take comfort in visits abroad and exchanges with his Western friends. Those times were coming to an end. Even in the West, he was no longer exactly on home turf. He was cutting a diminished and increasingly pathetic figure.8

  Alexander M. Haig, the former secretary of state in the Reagan administration, went on record with a political obituary for Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev is yesterday’s leader, to whom we owe a great debt because he didn’t resort to force to prevent the breakup of the empire, but as far as the future is concerned, is history.” Journalists on both the American and Soviet sides knew who was really running the show in Madrid. Pravda reported on a briefing in which the head of protocol of the Spanish Foreign Ministry told reporters, “The music is requested by the Americans, the ballet ensemble consists of the conference participants, and we make the stage available to them.” The same sentiment was expressed in a New York Times article that discussed, among other things, the white tent installed at the entrance to the Soviet embassy, where Bush and Gorbachev met before the conference. “The tent tactic said something about the diminution of Soviet power,” wrote Alan Cowell. “Americans proposed it, Spaniards stitched it and Soviets agreed to it.”9

  GORBACHEV MET WITH BUSH for a working lunch in the new building of the Soviet embassy on October 29, the day after his arrival in Madrid. The meeting “was warm, even cordial, especially while the cameras were rolling,” remembered Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Boris Pankin. The encounter began with the two men catching up on developments since their last meeting in July. Discussion naturally turned to the coup, raising the insecurities Gorbachev had felt at the time.

  “It was stupid to try to overthrow you,” said Bush to Gorbachev.

  “This is what generals do sometimes,” responded Gorbachev, pointing jokingly at General Scowcroft.

  “If Brent Scowcroft wants my job, or Baker for that matter, they can have it,” offered Bush.

  But the joke wore thin for Gorbachev. “I don’t want to abandon my job,” he said to Bush.

  The statement prompted Bush to raise an eventuality that could not be ignored: “This may be an improper question, but do you have a concern about a second attempted takeover?” Gorbachev answered that he believed the odds were on his side. He pinned his hopes on the signing of a new union treaty.

  While Gorbachev did his best to communicate his cautious optimism about the Soviet future to the American president, Bush showed greater interest in nuclear security than in anything else. He wanted to reduce the Soviet nuclear arsenals as much as possible while Gorbachev was still in a position to do so. “I’d like to hear your view,” said Bush. “This is a situation where the center has a role, and you have a stake.”

  Gorbachev assured Bush that there was nothing to fear. “George,” he said, “a lot of what you hear in the press is not reliable. The press may have a duty to say such things.” He went on to say that despite inflated political rhetoric, Leonid Kravchuk had committed Ukraine to seek nonnuclear status. So had Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, and Yeltsin had just recently avowed that he was in favor of central control over the military.10

  But whereas nuclear weapons were at the top of the American agenda, money headed the Soviet one. Gorbachev wanted massive US assistance. “We all understand what is at stake,” he said. “What happens with the Union will have consequences for the whole world.” Gorbachev spoke explicitly: “Let me be very frank. $10–$15 billion is not much for us, and repayment is not a serious problem.” This was not an amount that the Americans were prepared to consider. “I can tell you what I can do now,” answered Bush, “$1.5 billion for the winter while you sort out the union-republic situation. If that is insulting to you, I will go back and consult and see what might be done.” Gorbachev responded that he needed $3.5 billion to deal with the food crisis before the new harvest. James Baker joined the conversation and signaled that the United States could offer no more than Bush had just done. Allegedly, he told Gorbachev’s interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, in private, “Take a billion and a half in ready cash; take it before we reconsider. Too little? We can’t give any more.”

  That was the end of the aid package negotiations. The position of the republics with regard to the Soviet debt, which they had not taken on and were not eager to pay, concerned Bush and his advisers, who were under growing pressure to do something, if not to save Gorbachev then to protect the population of his country from possible hunger. The Bush administration was prepared to open its purse more widely than anyone could have suggested a few months earlier, but only to feed the hungry and help avert a social explosion that could bring the hard-liners back and put nuclear weapons in the wrong hands. For Gorbachev, who had tried and failed to persuade Bush to come up with major fi
nancial assistance at the July G-7 summit in London, the American proposal probably did not come as a surprise. He would later even express some satisfaction with Bush’s offer.

  Even though Bush and Gorbachev were agreed that the main task of the Madrid peace conference was to provide an opportunity for the two sides in the Middle East conflict to meet and begin discussions, the conference itself got surprisingly little attention at their preliminary meeting. Bush wanted the Soviets to keep encouraging the Syrian and Palestinian leaders to take part in the peace process. Gorbachev promised his assistance while making his own requests. The Soviet global agenda was now dwindling to the Slavic and Orthodox world, the traditional arena of the tsars and the focus of Russian foreign policy in decades to come. Gorbachev wanted the United States to persuade its Turkish allies to be more accommodating in dealing with the Greek Cypriots and to get the United Nations more involved in resolving the Yugoslav crisis, which had already claimed its first victims. He made little headway: Bush promised no support with regard to Cyprus and was skeptical about Yugoslavia.11

  Not surprisingly, most of the questions at the press conference that Bush and Gorbachev held after their meeting dealt with the situation in the Soviet Union, not the Middle East peace process. Cherniaev recorded in his diary, “Bush tried to avoid making a show of the difference in weight categories, and Mikhail Sergeevich was not one who would have allowed it. . . . He acted as if nothing was amiss.” But according to Pavel Palazhchenko, that made little impression on the audience. “As they watched Gorbachev,” he wrote later about the reaction of the American delegation, “their expressions were skeptical, cold and indifferent. . . . To them he [[was]] already a goner.” That day Palazhchenko had a feeling that “an era was definitely coming to a close.” Boris Pankin blamed Bush for showing little support for his counterpart. He felt that despite appearances, something important was missing. “It gradually dawned on me what was wrong,” Pankin recalled. “Gorbachev was irritated and concerned by media speculation about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and his own precarious position. He knew that President Bush was receiving much the same information that he was, and he expected Bush to give some indication of support, to send some signal. But Bush sent no signal.”12