Anatolii Cherniaev, who had not been summoned for consultations, heard the statement on television. He was more than skeptical that anything would come of Gorbachev’s proposals. In his diary, he recorded, “Even if the people’s deputies collect half the signatures [[required to authorize a referendum]], that will be of no avail. Nicholas II was man enough to renounce the throne. Three hundred years of dynastic rule. M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] cannot understand that his day is done. He should have left the scene long ago . . . to maintain his dignity and respect for what he has accomplished in history.”7
On the other side of the globe, in Washington, George Bush and members of his staff were following the drama unfolding in Moscow with concern. “We were somewhat surprised by December 8, by the meeting of Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich,” recalled National Security Council staffer Nicholas Burns. “We did not expect a definitive statement that they would secede from the Soviet Union. . . . We were surprised, but we knew that this was probably going to be the end, that if these three republics were determined to leave there was very little way that the Soviet Union would hold together. I think it was the first time it became very, very clear that the Soviet Union was going to be disintegrating rather shortly.” What worried the American president most was the possible involvement of the military in a clash between Gorbachev, on one hand, and Yeltsin and his allies in the republics, on the other.
On the evening of December 9, Bush dictated into his tape recorder, “Now we hear from Gorbachev, saying that the whole deal by Yeltsin is illegal. ‘We need a referendum, we need the people to speak.’ And, I find myself on this Monday night, worrying about military action. Where was the Army—they’ve been silent. What will happen? Can this get out of hand? Will Gorbachev resign? Will he try to fight back? Will Yeltsin have thought this out properly? It’s tough—a very tough situation.” The last time Bush had had such worries was during the August coup. Back then he could not reach Gorbachev and believed for some time that Yeltsin was out of reach as well. He could now call both of them, but what good would that do under the circumstances?8
Bush’s concern about the possible involvement of the military was anything but a figment of his imagination. One thing that Gorbachev still had going for him was his formal title of commander in chief of Soviet military forces, and he was not above using that trump card in his confrontation with Yeltsin. On the morning of December 9, he had called Marshal Shaposhnikov in an effort to rebuild relations, which had been damaged during their telephone confrontation the previous night over the news from Viskuli. On Tuesday, December 10, Gorbachev summoned district military commanders to the Ministry of Defense. Speaking in Shaposhnikov’s presence but over his head, Gorbachev called on the military brass to support him as commander in chief in preserving the Soviet Union. He could not help but lecture them on the importance of Soviet patriotism. It did not work. Shaposhnikov and his supporters were clearly consolidating their position in the ministry. On that day, Shaposhnikov removed two deputy ministers of defense from their posts. Gorbachev returned from the meeting with little hope that the army would support him. His aides later admitted that the generals’ attitude had been hostile.9
According to a Russian proverb, “Bad news does not travel alone.” That same day, December 10, Gorbachev learned that the parliaments of not only rebellious Ukraine but also the much more cautious Belarus had ratified the Belavezha Accords. In Ukraine the ratification came with a number of amendments—twelve altogether—that put in question even the few “integrationist” articles smuggled into the agreements by Yeltsin’s Young Turks at Viskuli. Kravchuk managed to sell the agreement to parliament but faced strong opposition to any proposal that would put Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit. Even some members of his cabinet, including Defense Minister Kostiantyn Morozov, opposed the agreement.10 In Belarus, the agreement was met with mild criticism from both pro-Union and pro-independence politicians. But most deputies supported the agreement. This was true even of Aliaksandr Lukashenka, the future president of Belarus, who would later denounce the Belavezha Accords. “He congratulated me and shook my hand with the words ‘Way to go, guys! You’ve done really well,’” recalled the Belarusian foreign minister, Petr Kravchenka, writing about his exchange with Lukashenka on the day of the ratification.11
After returning from the Ministry of Defense, where he was rebuffed by the generals, Gorbachev gathered his advisers from the Political Consultative Committee—a body he had created in the fall to improve his political standing—for a discussion of the rapidly deteriorating situation. With the military option off the table and the republics beginning to ratify the Belavezha Accords, Gorbachev’s hopes of saving the Union and staying in power were dwindling with unprecedented speed. He opened the meeting with another piece of depressing news: without so much as consulting him, Yeltsin had subordinated the service responsible for government communications to himself. “They took over, and that’s all there is to it,” Gorbachev told his allies.
The main question on the agenda was what to do next. Yevgenii Primakov, the new head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, now separated from the KGB, summarized the situation: “We have no means of settling this by force. We can’t rely on the army. International powers will cooperate with the republics.”
But Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze told Gorbachev what he wanted to hear: “Resignation will be interpreted as an abdication of responsibility.”
Gorbachev was prompt to agree: “They would say that I ran away.” The Soviet president decided to stay and fight, against all odds.12
The next day, December 11, witnessed a further weakening of Gorbachev’s position. Alarmed by his rival’s meeting with the commanders, Yeltsin arranged his own meeting with the military brass. It went exceptionally well for the Russian president. “At first we did not know how we would react,” recalled one of the participants in both meetings, “but Mr. Yeltsin knew what to say—after all, he has fought an election, and Mr. Gorbachev hasn’t.” Yeltsin also could promise the military what Gorbachev could not—a significant raise in officers’ salaries, which had been reduced to virtually nothing by the high inflation of the previous months. Furthermore, he vowed to lead society out of the political and economic chaos prevailing under Gorbachev. That same day, Yeltsin delivered another blow to Gorbachev’s plans. The Russian parliament adopted a resolution recalling their deputies from the Union parliament, forestalling Gorbachev’s use of it as an instrument against the Belavezha Accords. Gorbachev protested, but to no avail.13
On the next day, December 12, following the example of their Ukrainian and Belarusian colleagues, the Russian deputies voted to denounce the union treaty of 1922 and ratify the Agreement on the Establishment of a Commonwealth of Independent States. Yeltsin called on the deputies to support both proposals. He presented the Belavezha Agreement not as an empire killer but as an empire savior. “In today’s conditions,” he said, “only a Commonwealth of Independent States can ensure the preservation of the political, legal, and economic space built up over the centuries but now almost lost.” Yeltsin also assured the deputies that the Commonwealth was open for other Soviet republics to join: “We have sought to take account of the interests not only of the three republics but of all possible future members of the Commonwealth. I cannot agree that it is based on any ethnic principle. We treat peoples of various nationalities with equal respect.” The Russian deputies supported Yeltsin: 188 voted in favor, 7 abstained, and only 6 voted against, including the head of the now banned Russian Communist Party, S. A. Polozkov.14
As Yeltsin was addressing the Russian parliament, Gorbachev met with journalists to deny rumors of his imminent resignation. “What right do we have to slice up the Fatherland like a pie?” he said to them. “We come into this world for sixty or seventy years, but our state was built over ten centuries; generations will live after us, yet we have begun slicing up the Fatherland like a pie. So what: will we slice the pie, drink, and have a snack? No, do not
expect that of me.” His last hope was the session of the Union parliament scheduled to meet later that day. It was a faint hope. Gorbachev was unable to address the session for lack of a quorum. “In the afternoon,” wrote Gorbachev’s aide Vadim Medvedev in his diary, “an attempt was made to convene a session of the Supreme Soviet. But it no longer has legal status, as a number of republics have recalled their deputies.” Then came the results of the vote in the Russian parliament—a devastating blow. “I believe it was after the Russian parliament’s decision to approve the Minsk agreement that Gorbachev decided not to resist the process that had taken on its own momentum,” wrote Gorbachev’s interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, in his memoirs.15
Even before the Belavezha meeting, one of Gorbachev’s advisers, Nikolai Portugalov, had prepared a memo arguing in favor of Gorbachev’s resignation in anticipation of the collapse of the Union structures. “The name and authority of the President of the USSR, a great Russian reformer, should in no case be associated, either now or in history, with the catastrophe that is about to befall our Fatherland,” wrote Portugalov. He called on Gorbachev to follow in the footsteps of French president Charles de Gaulle and step down after explaining to the Soviet public his disagreement with the new leaders of the republics. “That way out is not only the most dignified but also the most rational, the most politically appropriate, for it alone preserves the real possibility of a return to power at the call of the Fatherland and its peoples.” How could that come about? Portugalov explained, “Yeltsin’s popularity continues to fall; Gorbachev’s popularity will rise as his prophecy [[of economic and political collapse]] begins to come true. The West will give him material assistance.”16
It is not clear whether Gorbachev actually read this memo. But on the evening of December 12, the day the Russian parliament voted to approve the Belavezha Agreement and dissolve the Union, Gorbachev called in Anatolii Cherniaev, whom he knew to be in favor of his resignation. “He was sorrowful,” wrote Cherniaev, continuing his account. “He asked about my impressions of the Russian parliament, which had ratified the Belavezha Agreement. . . . He was taken aback by the insults of the cosmonaut Sevastianov, who had declared from the rostrum of parliament that the document was weak, but it was a good thing that the ‘Gorbachev era’ was over. . . . He asked for a ‘handwritten’ draft of a farewell speech to the people.” Rumors of Gorbachev’s impending resignation had flooded Moscow since the day of the Belavezha Accords, but this was the first sign that Gorbachev was preparing for such an eventuality.17
ON DECEMBER 12, the day Gorbachev asked Cherniaev to prepare his resignation speech, James Baker woke up at 4:30 a.m., concerned about a line in a speech that he was to deliver later that day. It was 2:30 p.m. in Moscow; the Russian parliament was voting to ratify the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and it was that new and unknown entity that would not let Baker rest. He suddenly realized that the draft of his speech announcing a major shift in American foreign policy made no mention whatever of the Commonwealth. The text referred to the emerging post-Soviet space as “Russia, Ukraine and the other republics.” Should he include the Commonwealth as well? Was it a viable institution? How long would it last, or would it be replaced by something else? No one knew. Baker called his aide Margaret Tutwiler, awakening her at that early hour and asking whether the text of the speech had been released to the press. It had not, allowing Baker to make a last-minute change. He came up with what he later called a “painful phrase”: “Russia, Ukraine, the other republics and any common entities.”18
The venue selected for the speech was meant to underscore its message of a significant change in policy. Princeton, New Jersey, was not only the home of Princeton University, from which Baker had earned his undergraduate degree in 1952, but also the base of operations for the Cold War’s most famous thinker on international relations, George F. Kennan. The eighty-seven-year-old dean of international relations and intellectual father of “containment,” which had defined US policy toward the USSR for a good part of the Cold War, was sitting in the front row, waiting to hear Baker’s speech. The secretary of state began by praising Kennan for designing a policy that had borne fruit—containment, he argued, had worked. The Soviet Union was no more. “The state that Lenin founded and Stalin built held within itself the seeds of its demise,” declared Baker.
The Soviet collapse, he went on, had brought a new world into existence, and the United States had to take advantage of the “new Russian Revolution” to build long-term relations with its former adversary.
If during the Cold War we faced each other as two scorpions in a bottle, now the Western nations and the former Soviet republics stand as awkward climbers on a steep mountain. Held together by a common rope, a fall toward fascism or total chaos in the former Soviet Union will pull the West down too. Yet equally important, a strong and steady pull by us now can help the Russians, Ukrainians and their neighbors to gain their footing, so that they, too, can climb above to enduring democracy and freedom. Surely we must strengthen the rope, not sever it.
Baker later wrote that he wanted to achieve two major goals in Princeton: to signal a departure from Cold War policies and to declare a shift in US relations with the Soviet Union, from the center and Gorbachev to the republics. Baker declared that the United States was prepared to deal only with those leaders who abided by a set of principles including the establishment of centralized control over the Soviet nuclear arsenals, nuclear disarmament on the part of all republics except Russia, and commitment to democracy and a market economy. Accordingly, Western and particularly American aid to the republics would depend on their leaders abiding by those principles. The secretary of state spent most of his time explaining the need for American assistance and describing its nature and extent. He paid special attention to humanitarian aid, claiming that the winter of 1991–1992 could become as crucial to the course of world history as the Russian winters of 1812, 1917, and 1941. The first helped defeat Napoleon, the second brought the Bolsheviks to power, and the third contributed to the defeat of Nazism. If the winter of 1991 turned out to be cold and hungry, it might well nullify the accomplishments of what Baker called a “new Russian Revolution.”19
The university setting of Baker’s speech, along with a good part of its content—humanitarian aid and economic assistance to a European enemy turned ally—and, finally, its rhetoric of support for freedom and democracy could not but remind one of a speech delivered forty-four years earlier by another secretary of state, George Marshall. In 1947, Marshall went to a commencement ceremony at Harvard University to announce a massive aid package intended to rebuild a Europe devastated by World War II, while securing its democratic future and alliance with the United States. That historical parallel was not lost on James Baker. He had begun to advocate a major economic aid package for the nascent democratic republics in September 1991, after visiting Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Almaty in the aftermath of the August coup. At that time, he wrote to President Bush about the need for strong support of democratic leaders and their policies in the crumbling USSR. “What may be at stake is the equivalent of the postwar recovery of Germany and Japan as democratic allies, only this time after a long Cold War rather than a short, hot one,” he wrote from Moscow, drawing a parallel between the aftermaths of two wars and implicitly advocating a similar American response.20
Baker’s aides in the State Department had increased their efforts to push through a major economic assistance package after the Ukrainian referendum. The notes prepared for Baker prior to his meeting with Bush on December 4 read as follows: “A pivotal point. We have to help the democrats—succeed. Next few months may determine their fate. We can’t look like we did nothing to help them. Can’t be unilateral effort. Need to catalyze and mobilize others.” Baker added the word “republics” where his assistants referred to the “democrats.” He also made a marginal comment on the reference to the $400 million to be spent on dismantling the Soviet nuclear arsenals: “We spent trillio
ns over 40 years. This is a small investment in our security.”
It is not clear how much success Baker had with the president on December 4, but the notes prepared for his planned meeting with Bush on December 11 included an impatient appeal to the latter to throw his support behind a major economic assistance package that would create “pockets of success” in places where democratic reformers were active, such as St. Petersburg, ruled by Anatolii Sobchak. The appeal, drafted by one of Baker’s aides, used the parallel of the American victories in World War II and the Cold War to drive its point home. Oddly enough, the point was attributed to Gorbachev’s economic adviser, Grigorii Yavlinsky:
I watched your Pearl Harbor speech, and one line struck me very hard. You said, “we crushed totalitarianism, and when that was done, we helped our enemies give birth to democracies. We reached out, both in Europe and in Asia. We made our enemies our friends, and we healed their wounds, and in the process, we lifted ourselves up.” I was struck because I think we face the same situation today. We’ve won the Cold War peacefully. Now, we have to decide, as Yavlinsky says, what to do with the people we’ve defeated. . . . We face a great opportunity and equally great danger.
The author of the notes tried to convince Bush to do what Harry Truman had done—to go to the American people and sell a major new plan of economic assistance abroad. “You have passed the first two tests—liberating Eastern Europe and liberating Kuwait—but now historians will view those as footnotes to your reaction to present crisis,” went the notes, appealing to Bush’s sense of history. “You need to make the case to the American people about why internationalism, not isolationism, is the road to peace and prosperity. . . . [[T]]hey need to know that as Commander-in-Chief you are doing everything you can to make sure those nuclear weapons do not get loose. Nukes scare people. They trust you do something about it.”21
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