What Yeltsin presented to Bush was nothing if not a bold new policy: Russia was no longer threatening Ukraine with dismemberment, as it had in late August. On the contrary, it was embracing Ukrainian independence and would negotiate a union deal with a sovereign Ukraine behind Gorbachev’s back. It was clear that this would trash Gorbachev’s hopes for a reformed Soviet Union, but it was not at all clear what the new union between Russia and Ukraine would mean in practice. What would be its conditions, and would Russia be able to offer the Ukrainian elites something they could not get from Gorbachev and had failed to attain under de facto independence? And if the two leaders found a compromise, would it satisfy the Muslim republics? No one, including Yeltsin, seemed to know the answers to those questions. The hope was that they would be provided during the forthcoming meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents.
Yeltsin issued a statement recognizing Ukrainian independence on December 2, when the initial results of the referendum were made public. Russia became the third country to do so, after Poland and Canada. Yeltsin wanted Kravchuk to negotiate with him, not with Gorbachev, and he needed clarity vis-à-vis Ukraine before embarking on radical reform in Russia. The Russian president wanted to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart outside Moscow and out of Gorbachev’s sight, and an opportunity conveniently presented itself soon after the Ukrainian referendum. It came in the form of Yeltsin’s official visit to Belarus, which Yeltsin and the Speaker of the Belarusian parliament, Stanislaŭ Shushkevich, had discussed between sessions of one of the meetings of the State Council chaired by Gorbachev at Novo-Ogarevo. The visit was originally planned for November 29 but then postponed with an eye to the Ukrainian referendum. It would now take place on December 7 and would become the single most important event, after the Ukrainian referendum, to decide the fate of the Soviet Union.2
ON THE MORNING of Saturday, December 7, Yeltsin arrived in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at the head of the Russian delegation, which included the second most powerful Russian government official, State Secretary Gennadii Burbulis; Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, in charge of economic reform; Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Kozyrev; and Yeltsin’s legal adviser, Sergei Shakhrai. At forty-six, Burbulis was the oldest in the group of advisers. The two youngest, Gaidar and Shakhrai, had turned thirty-five. The official goal of the visit was to sign agreements between Russia and Belarus, with the supply of Russian oil and gas heading the agenda. But in his speech to the Belarusian parliament, Yeltsin let the deputies know that his visit to Minsk was only the first leg of the trip and that fostering Russo-Belarusian cooperation was only one of its aims. “The leaders of the Slavic republics will consider four or five variants of the Union treaty,” said Yeltsin to the Belarusian parliamentarians. “Perhaps the meeting of the three heads of state will be historic.”3
What variants did Yeltsin have in mind? One of them came from his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, who drafted a four-page memo for his boss on the possible structure of a reformed union. It was, however, put together in haste and was anything but a blueprint for future policy. On the night before he left for Minsk, Kozyrev had met at the Savoy Hotel in Moscow with his primary contact in the West during the August coup, Allen Weinstein, a former history professor at Boston University and the director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy. The Russian foreign minister quizzed his American friend on the differences between federation, association, and commonwealth. On the same day, while taking part in a meeting with the visiting Hungarian prime minister, József Antall, Gennadii Burbulis drew up schemes for the future organization of the post-Soviet space. One scheme suggested a loose confederation of all the former Soviet republics except the Baltics; another, a union of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly Kazakhstan.4
The idea of a Slavic union had first been proposed by one of Russia’s best-known authors of the Soviet era, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A former prisoner of Stalin’s forced-labor camps, author of The Gulag Archipelago, which was widely acclaimed in the West and prohibited in the Soviet Union, and a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Solzhenitsyn had been expelled by the Soviet authorities in 1974. Living in exile in Vermont, in 1990 he wrote a treatise titled “Rebuilding Russia.” It began with the following statement: “The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.” Solzhenitsyn was an old-style Russian nationalist who still thought of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians in prerevolutionary terms, as part of one Russian nation. He suggested that the Russians, as he broadly defined them, should slough off the burden of empire and create a state of their own, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the northern portions of Kazakhstan colonized by Slavs, which Solzhenitsyn called “Southern Siberia.”5
“Rebuilding Russia” was published in September 1990 in the largest-circulation Soviet newspaper, Komsomol’skaia pravda (Komsomol Truth), and was widely discussed in the USSR. A few months later, the idea took on very practical significance when the leaders of the three Slavic republics and Kazakhstan sent Gorbachev a memorandum proposing the creation of a union of sovereign states that other Soviet republics could join. Gorbachev killed the idea, executed his political turn to the right, and, after the use of military force in the Baltics, became a virtual hostage of the hard-liners in the old Soviet leadership. In March 1991 Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and the Belarusian leaders began negotiations on the creation of a Slavic union. These came to a halt after Gorbachev’s defection from the hard-liners’ camp and his sudden overture to the republican leaders, which included endorsement of a new union treaty.
Yeltsin suggested the idea of a Slavic union to Gorbachev immediately after the Ukrainian referendum, but the Soviet leader would not listen. He needed the Central Asian republics to save his own union project and maintain his hold on power. In Yeltsin’s camp, meanwhile, no one knew what to expect from Kyiv. Burbulis later remembered that after the referendum, when he and others in the Russian government began “to write and call all those Ukrainian freemen, we soon got the feeling that we had to get organized, as the key question was, above all, how to deal with Ukraine in its euphoria.”6
KRAVCHUK FLEW TO MINSK with a small number of advisers for a rendezvous with the Russian president on the afternoon of December 7, the same day Yeltsin arrived in Belarus. On the morning of that day Kravchuk met with a special representative of President Bush, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Niles. He told the American visitor that he was taking with him to Minsk a package of proposals that could lead to the signing of bilateral agreements with Russia and Belarus and potentially to the creation of a community of states akin to the European Union. Judging by Kravchuk’s memoirs, the Ukrainian leadership wanted only one thing at that point: to make its independence a political reality. But to achieve that, the Ukrainians needed Russian cooperation. The referendum results were Kravchuk’s main trump card in the fast-approaching political contest with Yeltsin. “At this meeting,” remembered Kravchuk later, “the difference in principle consisted in the fact that I arrived armed with the results of the expression of all-Ukrainian will. Moreover, I already possessed the status of president.”7
Among those accompanying the freshly minted Ukrainian president on his trip to Minsk was Prime Minister Vitold Fokin, a fifty-nine-year-old mining engineer from eastern Ukraine. Like Yeltsin’s former prime minister, Ivan Silaev, Fokin was a product of the Soviet planned-economy apparatus, and although he supported the idea of Ukraine’s economic autonomy and even independence, he was concerned about the consequences of the disintegration of a single economic space encompassing the former Soviet republics. The Ukrainian nationaldemocratic forces were represented by two members of the oppositional bloc in the Ukrainian parliament. They came from the republic’s intellectual establishment. Academician Mykhailo Holubets, who specialized in forestry and ecology, and Volodymyr Kryzhanivsky, a constructio
n designer, had entered politics during the first free elections in the spring of 1990. In parliament they joined the nationaldemocratic People’s Council and were in opposition to Kravchuk and his communist base before the August coup.
In Minsk the Ukrainian delegation was welcomed by the Speaker of the Belarusian parliament, Stanislaŭ Shushkevich. “We were given a very warm welcome at the airport,” recalled Mykhailo Holubets. “The head of the Supreme Council of Belarus, Stanislaŭ Shushkevich, a professor of physics, is an extraordinarily pleasant man, a marvelous diplomat, and a wise head of state.” Holubets clearly recognized a kindred spirit. Shushkevich’s rise to the highest post in the republic was the result of perestroika and, ultimately, of the failure of the coup. Born in Minsk in 1934, Shushkevich had dedicated most of his life to research and teaching, gaining a second doctorate in radioelectronics at the age of thirty-six—a major accomplishment by the standards of the time. In 1986 he became vice president of his alma mater, Belarusian State University.
Perestroika gave a tremendous boost to Shushkevich’s career. In 1989 he was elected to the all-Union parliament, where he joined the democratic Interregional Group, led by one of the most prominent Soviet dissidents and the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov; a historian and communist apparatchik turned radical critic of the communist regime, Yurii Afanasiev; and the future democratically elected mayors of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Gavriil Popov and Anatolii Sobchak. In the following year he was also elected to the Belarusian parliament, where he became first deputy Speaker. In August 1991 Shushkevich resisted the coup and signed an appeal against the plotters. In September, as the hard-liners lost control of parliament in the aftermath of the coup, Shushkevich was elected Speaker of parliament and de facto head of the Belarusian state.8
Belarus was known in the USSR as a major producer of electronics for the Soviet military-industrial complex. It was considered a well-to-do republic, partly because of the achievements of its dairy farming, which supplied the local population with milk, butter, and cheese at a time when those products were in short supply in other parts of the Soviet Union. The Belarusian agricultural idyll came to an abrupt and tragic end on April 26, 1986, with the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, just south of the Belarusian border in neighboring Ukraine. In the first days after the disaster, prevailing winds brought close to 70 percent of the station’s radioactive material to Belarus, poisoning one-fifth of its arable land. Still self-sufficient in agricultural production, Belarus was heavily dependent on Russia and other republics when it came to energy. Ensuring supplies of Russian oil and gas was therefore the main concern of the Belarusian leaders during Yeltsin’s visit to Minsk in December 1991.9
When the Ukrainian plane landed in Minsk on the afternoon of December 7, Shushkevich suggested to Kravchuk the Belarusian agenda for the political component of the forthcoming meeting: issuing a declaration stating that Gorbachev had lost the capacity to rule, that negotiations on the new union treaty had reached an impasse, and that the economic and political situation was becoming ever more grim. Shushkevich had discussed this idea with Yeltsin earlier in the day, when the Russian president arrived in Minsk. But Kravchuk seemed unimpressed and told Shushkevich that there was no need for him to come to Belarus for such a statement. Shushkevich did not know what to say. He had nothing else on his agenda. He told Kravchuk that Yeltsin would join them later in the day at the Viskuli hunting lodge in western Belarus.10
“Why Viskuli?” asked the surprised Kravchuk. Shushkevich responded that it would be pleasant to escape the pressure of everyday government business and the attention of journalists. Viskuli was one of the state-run hunting lodges built for the top Soviet leadership during the Khrushchev era. It is only eight kilometers from the Polish border, in the Belarusian part of the Belavezha Forest. Before World War I the region was part of the Russian Empire, and during the interwar period it belonged to Poland. It went to the USSR on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. During World War II, the Belavezha Forest was a theater of partisan warfare and served as a refuge for local Jews fleeing the Holocaust.11
In 1957, during Nikita Khrushchev’s rule, the Belavezha Forest was declared a state reserve. That year Khrushchev first went there for his hunting vacation. The locals later remembered Khrushchev as a good marksman, second only to his Hungarian counterpart Janos Kádar. Another politician who loved coming to Viskuli was Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev. The game most prized by Belavezha hunters was a rare breed of European bison known in Polish and Belarusian as the zubr (wisent). Few hunters managed to kill a zubr, most being satisfied with wild hogs, but all of them tried a variety of buffalo-grass vodka called Zubrovka. In June 1991, Belavezha was suggested to Gorbachev as a venue for his meeting with German chancellor Helmut Kohl, but they met in Kyiv instead. In December, the Belarusian hosts prepared unlimited supplies of Zubrovka for the forthcoming Slavic summit in Viskuli.12
On arrival in Viskuli, the Ukrainian delegation went hunting without waiting for Yeltsin to arrive—a show of “insubordination” that was duly noted by Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov. He wrote later about the Ukrainian president, “He always sought to make a show of ‘independent’ behavior; to emphasize his own independence. By contrast, Stanislaŭ Shushkevich, as host, received his guests with demonstrative friendliness.” Shushkevich did his best to smooth over the jarring effect of Yeltsin’s “goodwill gift” presented to the Belarusian parliament earlier in the day. It was a seventeenth-century tsarist charter to the Belarusian city of Orsha, taking it under Russian protection. What Yeltsin and his advisers regarded as an instance of Russo-Belarusian friendship to be emulated in the future was perceived by the democratic opposition in the Belarusian parliament as a symbol of Russian imperialism. Yeltsin’s gift was met with shouts of “Shame!” The Russian president was at a loss and later blamed advisers for the incident.13
Yeltsin came to Viskuli in the company of the Belarusian prime minister, Viacheslaŭ Kebich. In the Belarusian power tandem, consisting of the Speaker of parliament and the prime minister, the latter was the more powerful figure. Like Kravchuk, the fifty-five-year-old Kebich had been born in what was then interwar Poland, but his career, linked with industry rather than ideology, resembled that of Yeltsin more than that of Kravchuk. Kebich rose through the ranks of Soviet industrial management to become the first director of a Minsk high-tech enterprise and then secretary of the Minsk city committee of the Communist Party. At the beginning of Gorbachev’s perestroika, he became deputy head of the Belarusian government, and in 1990 he was appointed prime minister. Kebich was the establishment candidate for Speaker of the Belarusian parliament in September 1991, but in the postcoup atmosphere he failed to gain the support of the suddenly radicalized deputies and accepted Shushkevich’s election as a temporary compromise. With Shushkevich formally at the top, Kebich maintained control over the Belarusian government, composed of former managers of industrial enterprises and party apparatchiks. He hoped to become president of Belarus once such a post was established, as it had been in Russia and now in Ukraine.14
THE TRIPARTITE SLAVIC SUMMIT began on the evening of December 7, 1991, with dinner for the three delegations. Yeltsin was late for dinner, making the others wait for him. Once he joined the group, the Russian president found himself sitting directly across from Kravchuk, and the two immediately formed a nexus, reducing the other participants, including the leaders of Belarus, to the role of witnesses to the negotiation process. Their conversation lasted more than an hour. Others participated only with occasional remarks or attempts to influence the tone of the conversation by delivering toasts hailing the friendship of the three East Slavic nations.
Yeltsin began by honoring the promise he had given Gorbachev a few days earlier, when he informed the Soviet president about his forthcoming meeting with the Ukrainian and Belarusian leaders. He placed on the table the text of the union treaty negotiated by Gorb
achev and republican leaders in Novo-Ogarevo a few weeks earlier and on behalf of the Soviet president invited Kravchuk to sign it. Yeltsin added that he would sign immediately after Kravchuk. “I recall that Kravchuk smiled wryly after hearing out that preamble,” wrote the Belarusian foreign minister, Petr Kravchenka, subsequently recording his observations. The deal offered by Gorbachev and brought to Viskuli by Yeltsin offered Ukraine the right to modify the text of the agreement, but only after signing it. It was a trap, even if Kravchuk had been prepared to join the Union on his particular conditions. But he was not. Gorbachev offered nothing new, and Yeltsin brought nothing to Belavezha but Gorbachev’s agreement. Kravchuk said no.15
Kravchuk then reached for his main negotiating weapon. To recapture the initiative, he presented Yeltsin and Shushkevich with the results of the Ukrainian referendum. “I did not even expect,” he recalled later, “that the Russians and Belarusians would be so impressed by the results of the vote, especially in the traditionally Russian-speaking regions—the Crimea and southern and eastern Ukraine. The fact that most non-Ukrainians (and there were fourteen million of them in the republic) gave such active support to political sovereignty turned out to be a true discovery for them.”
According to Kravchuk, Yeltsin was particularly impressed. “What, did the Donbas also vote for it?” he asked.
“Yes,” responded Kravchuk, “there is no region in which the votes were fewer than half. As you see, the situation has changed substantially. We have to look for another solution.”
Yeltsin then took a different tack, referring to the common history, traditions of friendship, and economic ties linking Russia and Ukraine. Petr Kravchenka was under the impression that the Russian president was sincere in his attempt to save whatever was left of the Union. “But Kravchuk was unyielding,” recalled Kravchenka. “Smiling and calm, he parried Yeltsin’s arguments and proposals. Kravchuk did not want to sign anything! His argumentation was as simple as could be. He said that Ukraine had already determined its path in the referendum, and that path was independence. The Soviet Union no longer existed, and parliament would not allow him to create new unions of any kind. And Ukraine needed no such unions: the Ukrainians did not want to exchange one yoke for another.”16
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