Christmas in Moscow. Gorbachev reads his resignation speech. Now it is official: the last empire has disappeared from the political map of the world. Kremlin, Moscow, December 25, 1991. (ITAR-TASS Photo Agency)
The storyteller. President Bush reads Christmas stories to his grandchildren on December 24, 1991. Next day he would fly to Washington to address to the nation on the occasion of Gorbachev’s resignation and declare American victory in the Cold War. (George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)
V.
VOX POPULI
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ANTICIPATION
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV WAS SITTING in his office at the government resort of Novo-Ogarevo. It was the afternoon of November 25, eleven days after the previous meeting of the State Council and the day of its next meeting. This time he had done it—he had not just threatened to walk out on a meeting but had actually done so. Now he was anxious to learn what the next minutes would bring. Much had changed in and around Moscow since November 14, when he put Yeltsin and other leaders of the republics in front of television cameras and had them say that there would be some form of union in the future.
The main change was in the mood of the policy makers. Everyone was awaiting the Ukrainian referendum, scheduled for December 1, and everyone except Gorbachev was predicting a landslide in favor of independence. That was the opinion of the Ukrainian leaders, Boris Yeltsin and his fellow leaders of the republics, and George Bush and his advisers in Washington. Within the next few days, the Ukrainian factor would dramatically change the balance of forces between the republics, their relations with Gorbachev, and Bush’s relations with the Soviet leader. The first sign of the coming change was the behavior of the presidents of the republics who gathered in Novo-Ogarevo on November 25 to discuss the new union treaty proposed by Gorbachev.
On that day, they were supposed to endorse the text of the union treaty that they had debated and agreed upon at the previous meeting of the State Council. Problems began, as always, with Yeltsin, who again raised the question of the nature of the future union. He claimed that the term agreed on last time, “confederative state,” was meaningless. The treaty should stipulate instead the creation of a union or confederation of sovereign states: otherwise the Russian parliament would not ratify it.
The leaders of Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan supported Yeltsin. They refused to endorse the treaty and offered instead to submit it to their parliaments without their signatures, effectively dissociating themselves from the text. Gorbachev was furious, accusing Yeltsin of going back on his word given at the previous meeting. “So what?” responded Yeltsin, who told the media the day after the November 14 meeting that he had compromised too much. “Time is passing. In groups and committees of the [[Russian]] Supreme Soviet . . . [[the text]] was discussed, and they say that such a draft will not make it through.” As if that were not enough, Yeltsin pointed to the elephant in the room—the absence of representatives from Ukraine. He doubted that Ukraine would agree to join a “confederative state.” “There will be no union without Ukraine,” declared Yeltsin.
The Speaker of the Belarusian parliament, the fifty-six-year-old Stanislaŭ Shushkevich, a member of the Belarusian democratic opposition and an opponent of the August coup, argued that the republican leaders needed ten more days to study the treaty because of its importance. The postponement would also make it possible for Ukraine to join. “Let’s wait until December 1,” suggested Yeltsin. Gorbachev tried to turn the Ukrainian factor around. “If we decline,” he said, referring to the endorsement of the union treaty, “it will be a gift to the separatists.” His argument fell on deaf ears. Gorbachev finally lost his nerve and decided to resort to his tried-and-true maneuver of threatening to leave. “If you consider the agreement unnecessary, say so clearly,” he told the republican presidents. “Perhaps you should meet separately and decide. Or stay here, and we shall leave you. . . . Get a feeling for what is more important to you—the people or the separatists.” With a few more parting words, he left the room, accompanied by his assistants.
Gorbachev spent close to an hour in his office. Would the rebel republican leaders come to their senses and call him back? In April, he had walked out of a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party after a motion was made to vote on his ouster as general secretary. The committee backed down, annulling the vote, and Gorbachev regained control of the party. But the situation now was more complex. No one was trying to unseat him either as leader of a long-gone party or as head of a state in shambles. They were simply refusing to rebuild the state, and without it he had no role to play and no country to rule. They were also reluctant to come to his office and invite him back. Clearly, the republican leaders had decided to take their time and not rush after him.
After discussing the situation, they sent their representatives to Gorbachev—Yeltsin, whom Gorbachev considered, not without reason, the main culprit of the revolt, and the more agreeable Shushkevich. Yeltsin was not happy to go, but Shushkevich had a hidden agenda. As they made their way to Gorbachev’s office through the glassed-in corridor of the building, enjoying the golden forest panorama, Shushkevich reminded Yeltsin about his earlier invitation to visit Belarus to discuss economic relations between the two republics. He offered to host the Russian president at a government hunting resort called Belavezha (White Tower), near Brest. Yeltsin agreed.
“So we’ve come to the khan of the Union—take us under your high hand,” said Yeltsin to Gorbachev on entering his office. Gorbachev, apparently feeling relieved and vindicated, responded in the same vein: “You see, Tsar Boris, everything can be settled by honest cooperation.” They were alluding to late-medieval Russian history, when the country’s rulers recognized the suzerainty of the khans of the Golden Horde. The parallel was inaccurate, to be sure: the Russian princes began to call themselves tsars only after throwing off the overlordship of the khans. The tsars recognized no authority above their own, and “Tsar Boris” was not about to deviate from that tradition. As Gorbachev later told his advisers, Yeltsin spoke to him “turning up his nose, almost spitting.” What Yeltsin and Shushkevich brought Gorbachev was at best a face-saving proposal: the republican leaders would leave the reference to a “confederative” state in the text of the union treaty, but it would go to the republican parliaments for discussion without their signatures. This was not the kind of compromise for which Gorbachev had been hoping.
Gorbachev returned to the conference room to continue the meeting. After it was over, he went in front of the television cameras to present the State Council’s decision to send the treaty to the parliaments for discussion as an endorsement of the document. Few were taken in by the move and the play on words. As Gorbachev later recalled, journalists asked, “Who was responsible, who disrupted the endorsement.” He was silent. Privately he was sure that Yeltsin had not acted alone. According to Anatolii Cherniaev, the Soviet president had long suspected a “conspiracy between Yeltsin and Kravchuk to bring down the Union from both sides.”1
GORBACHEV HAD ALREADY FOUND the Ukrainian leadership obstinate earlier. After the coup, as the Ukrainian elite closed ranks around Kravchuk and polls showed growing public support for independence, Kravchuk grew bolder. His visit to Canada and the United States in September left no doubt of his commitment to independence. The last meeting of the State Council that he attended, in October, dealt with economic issues, not the union treaty. At that meeting, he told the council that the Ukrainian parliament had passed a resolution suspending the republic’s participation in negotiations on the new union treaty until after the referendum. The Ukrainian deputies had indeed voted to boycott all Union institutions, opting for direct ties with individual republics. As far as they were concerned, the Union was effectively dead.2
But Gorbachev thought otherwise. He never gave up on the rebellious republic. The son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, he regarded the prospect of a Russo-Ukrainian breakup as a personal tragedy. Although Gorbachev considered him
self a Russian, he knew and loved to sing Ukrainian folk songs. He also believed that he understood the mood of Ukrainian society better than anyone else. “Don’t be silly, Leonid Makarovych!” he would tell Kravchuk over the phone. “Your referendum will certainly fail: in March, 70 percent voted for the Union.” Gorbachev was referring to the Ukrainian vote in support of renewed union during the all-Union referendum of March 1991. There were some sinister notes in Gorbachev’s appeals for Russo-Ukrainian unity. Again and again in his private conversations with aides and foreign leaders, as well as in his public appeals, he threatened Ukrainians with the possibility of ethnic conflict, de facto raising tensions, if not inciting actual conflict, among Ukraine’s minorities.3
Using the ethnic card to derail the referendum was an idea proposed to Gorbachev by his adviser Georgii Shakhnazarov in a memo of October 10, 1991. Shakhnazarov was disappointed that after the disintegration of the Communist Party there was no political force in Ukraine prepared to stop what he called the “Galician nationalists.” He was also unhappy that the Russian leadership decided not to press territorial claims against Ukraine. Shakhnazarov proposed that Gorbachev “not only publicly repeat but also lend an official tone to Russia’s position with regard to the Crimea, the Donbas, and southern Ukraine.” He wrote, “It should be stated plainly and clearly, without constraint, that those regions are historical parts of Russia, and it does not intend to renounce them if Ukraine should wish to cease being part of the Union.”
Among Shakhnazarov’s other suggestions was the launching of an anti-independence campaign in the Crimea and southern and eastern Ukraine. “In agreement with Comrade [[Nikolai]] Bagrov,” wrote Shakhnazarov with reference to the head of the Crimean parliament, “to activize work in the Crimea. The whole population of the republic should know that if Ukraine announces its exit from the Union, the Crimea will cease to be part of Ukraine the very next day and will be annexed to Russia.” Shakhnazarov suggested the creation of a special group in the presidential administration headed by the well-known Ukrainian poet Borys Oliinyk and sending scores of Russian celebrities on anti-independence tours in Ukraine. Gorbachev, who in previous years had used state funds to set up and support bogus political parties advancing his own political agenda, now had no resources to implement even half of Shakhnazarov’s proposals; by October, speeches and interviews were all that were left to him. In his discussions with George Bush in Madrid in late October, Gorbachev referred to Ukraine’s Russian problem, suggesting it as one of the reasons Ukraine would not leave the Union.4
BY THE TIME OF THE MADRID CONFERENCE in late October and early November, Ukrainians featured ever more prominently not only on Gorbachev’s agenda but also on Bush’s domestic radar. Gorbachev’s interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, later remembered that during the dinner hosted by King Juan Carlos of Spain, who made such a favorable impression on Gorbachev, Bush peppered the Soviet president with questions about Ukraine. “Do you think Kravchuk will win the elections?” he asked Gorbachev, who assured Bush that Kravchuk would indeed win. “And do you think after that he will join you in some kind of Union or association?” came the next question. Gorbachev responded that he was not sure about Kravchuk, but he knew that Ukraine and Russia would stay together: “These two nations are branches of the same tree. No one will be able to tear them apart.” Bush changed the subject to the coming presidential elections in the United States. Palazhchenko, who noted Bush’s visible concern about their outcome, saw no connection between these subjects of dinner conversation—the Ukrainian and American presidential elections. In fact, there was one.5
The president’s relations with the Ukrainian community in the United States had never recovered from his “Chicken Kiev” blunder in August. On November 5, Ukrainian attacks on the president, earlier regarded as little more than a political nuisance, grew into a major political problem. On that day, in a special election to the US Senate, Pennsylvania voters defeated Dick Thornburgh, the former US attorney general and Bush’s handpicked candidate to replace Senator John Heinz, who had died in a plane crash earlier that year. The Democratic candidate, Harris Wofford, whose campaign was run by Bill Clinton’s future electoral gurus Paul Begala and James Carville, came from behind to score a decisive victory over the Republican favorite. The loss was a major embarrassment for President Bush: Thornburgh had resigned as attorney general, convinced that he would win the seat.
Since Thornburgh was considered to be the president’s man, Democratic strategists had done their best to link him to Bush, whose popularity was slumping in the polls after having reached an all-time high immediately after the Gulf War. The economy, which had begun a slide into recession, was the main culprit, but political issues were also involved. The polls showed that voters of East European descent, who had supported the Republican Party during the Cold War, were now switching sides in response to what they regarded as the administration’s indecisiveness, first on the issue of Baltic independence and now on that of Ukraine, Armenia, and other Soviet republics. Democratic hopefuls for the presidency were jumping on the ethnic bandwagon. Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas criticized the administration for not supporting the republics’ drive for independence. Something had to be done immediately to stop the defection of East European voters from the Republican camp.6
Having supported the Republican Party in the Cold War, Ukrainian Americans now believed that the party was betraying them. After Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” speech, they had promised retaliation at the voting booths, declaring strong opposition to the administration in their newspapers and at their meeting halls. Their traditional Republican allies were unable to get the attention of the White House. A letter of September 16 to President Bush from Senator Hank Brown (R-Colo.), urging the White House to recognize Ukrainian independence on the basis of the parliamentary declaration, went unanswered.
Ukrainian community leaders mobilized their followers to lobby not only Republican but also Democratic representatives. Their lobbying efforts on the Hill finally came to fruition on November 21, when the US Senate passed a resolution sponsored by Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) urging the administration to recognize Ukraine following the December 1 referendum. DeConcini was not shy about attacking his Republican opponents in the administration. “After supporting Baltic independence for 50 years, to our country’s shame, the U.S. government was only the 37th to finally recognize those brave nations,” declared DeConcini. “This pattern of hypocrisy must not be repeated with respect to Ukraine.”7
The Ukrainian Weekly, the leading Ukrainian American newspaper, which was usually well disposed toward the administration, was now full of articles and letters attacking Bush for not helping Ukraine and, indeed, hindering its drive toward independence. “It Would Be Prudent, George,” read the headline of the newspaper’s editorial on November 24, demanding speedy American recognition of Ukrainian independence. Writing in the same issue, Myron B. Kuropas, the newspaper’s columnist and former special assistant to President Gerald R. Ford, took aim at Bush’s national security adviser, General Brent Scowcroft.
“It was he who, because of personal slight, underestimated Boris Yeltsin’s popular appeal in Russia. It is he who helped write President Bush’s remarks in Kiev. It is he who out of admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev is fighting to preserve the Soviet Union,” wrote Kuropas. He was wrong about Scowcroft’s admiration for Gorbachev as the main source of his thinking about the fate of the Soviet Union. But Scowcroft indeed despised Yeltsin, had coauthored Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” speech, and upon his return from Madrid had declared to his aides that although Gorbachev was now a mere ghost of the former center, US policy had to be conducted in such a way as not to do him any harm.8
That was about to change. Throughout the last two weeks of November, the US national security policy team held numerous meetings to discuss the situation. There was agreement on one point: everyone expected an overwhelming vote for independence in Ukraine and knew that it would mark a watershed in US
policy toward the Soviet Union. But there was little else on which Bush’s foreign policy advisers could agree. The lines drawn between the Department of Defense and the State Department in September remained almost intact. Dick Cheney, pushing as always for closer ties with the republics, was now urging the speedy recognition of Ukraine. Stephen Hadley, then an assistant to Paul Wolfowitz in the Defense Department, said later, “We had a view that without Ukraine a retrograde Russia would never reconstitute the Soviet Union. It would never become the threat posed by the Soviet Union because of the enormous resources and population and geography of Ukraine. So that would become an important element of U.S. policy—putting aside all the principles that were all-important—from the strategic standpoint an independent Ukraine became an insurance policy.”9
James Baker advocated a more cautious approach that would benefit the Soviet center and Gorbachev. Baker’s main authority on the issue was still Eduard Shevardnadze, whom Gorbachev had called back to government in mid-November to replace Boris Pankin. Shevardnadze, who had much more weight in both internal Soviet and international politics than his predecessor, was concerned about a possible Russo-Ukrainian conflict over the Crimea and eastern Ukraine—the potential problem to which Gorbachev had alerted Bush in Madrid. Baker wanted to postpone recognition of Ukraine, even if its people voted for independence, and to use such recognition as a carrot with which the United States could influence the policies of Ukrainian leaders on such sensitive issues as nuclear arms.
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