The Last Empire

by Serhii Plokhy

  Baker’s appeal, if it was ever presented to Bush in the form suggested by the notes, had limited success. In 1991, Bush’s administration allocated close to $4 billion in credit export guarantees for food supplies and agricultural products to be shipped to the Soviet Union. Still, the United States lagged behind the European Union, especially when it came to direct grants. Seventy percent of all aid to the Soviet Union was coming from Western Europe. By early 1992, Germany alone had allocated close to $45 billion for economic assistance to the USSR, a good part of it to help the Soviet army leave German soil. The equivalent of a Marshall Plan, for which Baker had advocated and Russian reformers had hoped, did not materialize. There were a number of reasons the Bush administration did not follow in the footsteps of Harry Truman and his advisers. The most immediate one was economic and financial hardship at home. In 1947, the US economy was riding the wave of the post–World War II boom, with the United States accounting for 35 percent of world GDP. By 1991, that share had been reduced to 20 percent, and the US economy had hit the bottom of an economic recession.22

  The Bush administration did not have the kind of bipartisan congressional support for major spending that Truman and Marshall had built up in the mid-1940s. Neither American politicians nor the general public considered the Soviet collapse an existential threat to the United States, as the rise of Soviet power had been regarded after World War II. In the fall of 1991 the United States was deep in the recession and thus in no position to spend freely. Many Americans expected the end of the Cold War to produce a financial “peace dividend,” not another drain on the economy. Even the strongest promoters of increased aid to the former Soviet Union were more than cautious about offering anything beyond humanitarian assistance. Thus, Baker urged a common effort of all Western countries to assist the former Soviet republics. “Baker Presents Steps to Aid Transition by Soviets,” ran the headline of the New York Times report by Thomas Friedman published on November 13. “But He Doesn’t Mention Any Large Increase in U.S. Funding,” specified the subtitle, cooling readers’ expectations.23

  The notes prepared for Baker on December 13 for his next meeting with the president were less than enthusiastic. Whoever wrote them had obviously run out of steam, if not hope. “You may wish to discuss your upcoming trip, especially preparing the way for humanitarian support we’ll need in the future. This could include military logistics and supplies,” read the notes. Baker’s aides were clearly unhappy with the White House’s treatment of their proposals. Dennis Ross, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and a drafter of Baker’s Princeton speech, had sent the secretary of state the text of the speech on December 6 with what Baker considered an “unusual blunt note.” The note not only advocated a shift away from the policy of containment and from Gorbachev as a relevant figure in Soviet politics but also vented frustration with other branches of the administration. “Few have understood the stake,” wrote Ross, according to a crossed-out passage in an early version of Baker’s memoirs, “and they have killed almost every good idea we’ve had in the last three months.”24

  Baker’s Princeton speech was timed to inaugurate his tour of the crumbling Soviet Union, which would include stopovers in Moscow as well as the capitals of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. It was designed to articulate American policy in the wake of the Ukrainian referendum, but events on the ground had developed so quickly that last-minute revisions were needed. As the State Department finally prepared to shift away from the center toward the republics, news of the creation of the Commonwealth added one more layer of complexity. Figuring out what exactly the Commonwealth would mean for the future of the Soviet Union, the independence of the individual republics, and the fate of the Soviet nuclear arsenals became one of the main tasks of the impending trip. “I wondered,” wrote Baker, recalling his thoughts on the eve of his departure for Moscow on December 14, “whether it would be possible to find any solid footing in a country dissolving into chaos.”25

  It was chaos indeed. Baker remembered later that the US embassy in Moscow was struggling to find gas to fuel its cars. Sheremetevo International Airport on the outskirts of Moscow, where the secretary of state landed, was one of the few Soviet airports still operating: many were closed for lack of fuel, and most flights were canceled at the others. On December 13, the issue of the New York Times that published extensive excerpts from Baker’s Princeton speech on page A24 featured an article titled “Moscow Misery” on page 1. An event recounted in the article had taken place in Yeltsin’s home city, Sverdlovsk, now renamed Yekaterinburg—the name it had before the Russian Revolution. “This week in Yekaterinburg in the Urals,” read the article, “‘people exhausted by more than 24 hours of waiting, unable to sit, get anything to eat, or obtain information in the terminal’ took charge of a plane that had been delayed for hours and ordered its crew to fly to the Crimea.” Chaos prevailed in the vast country, poor in the requisites of daily living but with no shortage of nuclear arms and a history replete with violence and disorder.26

  SOON AFTER NEWS of the Belavezha Accords shook the Kremlin and reverberated throughout the world, Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, two distinguished American foreign policy pundits, boarded a plane for Moscow to interview Mikhail Gorbachev. The invitation had come from people in Gorbachev’s immediate circle. Beschloss, the author of several books on the American presidency, and Talbott, a foreign affairs columnist for Time magazine who had translated Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs in his student years and was an expert on Russia and Eastern Europe—the area he would cover as special coordinator and then deputy secretary of state in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton, a friend from student days—accepted eagerly. The two were working on a book about the end of the Cold War, but the Soviet president wanted to give an interview to Time magazine. They could accommodate him on that. “Gorbachev tried one last time to mobilize his sole remaining constituency—his Western audience,” wrote Beschloss and Talbott later.27

  On the afternoon of December 13, when Pavel Palazhchenko brought Beschloss and Talbott, along with Time magazine Moscow bureau chief John Kohan, to Gorbachev’s office, they expected to witness (as they later wrote) Gorbachev’s swan song. They were surprised to see instead a man who was anything but defeated. Depressed the previous evening by the news of the Russian parliament’s ratification of the Belavezha Agreement, Gorbachev was back on his feet by morning. To their only half-joking question of whether he would still be in power on Monday, when Time magazine was to run part of the interview, Gorbachev responded with laughter: “On Monday? I am sure I will!”

  Gorbachev was still clearly hurt by Yeltsin’s decision to call George Bush from Belavezha before calling him. “There was no need to draw Bush into this,” he said to Beschloss and Talbott. “It’s a question of Yeltsin’s moral standards. I cannot approve or justify this kind of behavior.” More directly, Gorbachev criticized the American administration’s readiness to bypass him and establish relations with the republican leaders. He credited himself with having launched the international careers of some of those leaders. “Well, if Gorbachev is sending these people over here, that must mean that Gorbachev is finished, and we should side with the new leaders,” said the Soviet president, summarizing his understanding of Western attitudes. “Things are in flux here,” he continued, clearly offended. “While we’re still trying to figure things out, the United States seems to know everything already! I don’t think that’s loyalty—particularly toward those of us who have favored partnership and full-fledged cooperation.”28

  While Gorbachev had all but given up on his American friends, his aides still believed that they were his best bet for staying in power. On December 15, two days after the interview, Beschloss and Talbott accepted an invitation from Gorbachev’s interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, to an informal lunch in his apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. After lunch, Palazhchenko asked his wife to leave the room and then told the surprised Beschloss and Talbott that he w
anted them to write down a confidential message for the American leadership. As dictated by Palazhchenko, it read,

  The president [[Gorbachev]] is keeping all of his options open. It is possible that he might accept some role in the Commonwealth. But he will not accept it if it is done in a humiliating way. The leaders of the United States and the West should find a way to impress on Yeltsin and the others the benefits of keeping the president involved and the importance of doing so in a way that is not offensive to his dignity. At the same time, it is quite possible that he will be a private figure within a few weeks. Some people are fabricating a [[criminal]] case against him. It is important that Yeltsin not have anything to do with that and that he not permit anything to happen that would harm the president. Once again, the leaders of the United States should impress that point on him. The above is a personal view, never discussed with the president.

  Palazhchenko assured Beschloss and Talbott that he was not speaking on behalf of Gorbachev. He would not divulge the source of the message but was very precise about the addressees. The note was to be delivered to either George Bush, James Baker, or Baker’s close associate in the State Department, the director of policy planning, Dennis Ross. Palazhchenko later recalled that he had decided to send a message to the American leadership on the advice of a colleague who had extensive connections among the Soviet elite and later worked for Yeltsin. The colleague told Palazhchenko that there was “a team searching frantically for ‘compromising material,’ and the coup plotters will quite likely change their stories to help frame him.” “Him” meant Gorbachev. The instigators of the August coup did indeed claim that they had declared a state of emergency with Gorbachev’s tacit approval.29

  Palazhchenko’s initiative was the desperate act of a loyal servant trying to rescue his boss and save his own job in the process. But despite the sheer drama of his choice, he was knocking on an already open door. Two days earlier, on December 13, George Bush had conveyed to Yeltsin the American concern for Gorbachev’s future. When Yeltsin called Bush to report on the ratification of the Belavezha Agreement by the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian parliaments, the US president asked his Russian counterpart, “Boris, what do you think Gorbachev will do?”

  Yeltsin made it clear that he would not offer Gorbachev any job in the Commonwealth. “We will not have the position of President of the Commonwealth,” he told Bush. “We will all be equals.”

  Bush returned to the Gorbachev question at the very end of the conversation. “As this evolution takes place, I hope it will be in a friendly manner,” he told the Russian president.

  Yeltsin assured Bush that Gorbachev would be treated with respect. “I do guarantee, I promise you personally, Mr. President,” declared Yeltsin, “that everything will happen in a good and decent way. We will treat Gorbachev and Shevardnadze with great respect. Everything will be calm and gradual with no radical measures.”

  Bush was satisfied with the response. “Wonderful,” he said. “I am glad to hear that.”30

  Soon after that conversation, Bush made a courtesy call to Gorbachev. Gorbachev lashed out against Yeltsin and republican leaders for rejecting him by forming the Commonwealth, which he called the work of amateurs. “Gorbachev’s fury was obvious,” recalled Bush. “He spoke rapidly, recounting the events since November 25.”

  For all his outrage over what he considered a betrayal on Yeltsin’s part, Gorbachev did not preclude cooperation with the new body. “How do I see my role in the future?” he asked himself in the phone conversation with Bush. “If the Commonwealth is an amorphous organization with no mechanism for foreign policy and defense and economic interaction, then I do not see any role for myself.” The message was clear: he was ready to help, but the Commonwealth would need to have interstate bodies to coordinate its activities and thus a place for him as one of its leaders.31

  After the conversation, Bush turned to Brent Scowcroft and asked his national security adviser, “This really is the end, isn’t it?” Scowcroft agreed, “Yeah, Gorbachev is kind of a pathetic figure at this point.” In the telephone log, the transcript of the president’s teleconference with Gorbachev was marked for the first time as a conversation not with the president of the USSR but with the president of the former Soviet Union.32

  ON THE AFTERNOON of December 15, soon after Palazhchenko dictated his message to the surprised Beschloss and Talbott, the US airplane carrying James Baker and Dennis Ross—two of the possible addressees of the top-secret note—landed at Sheremetevo International Airport. Talbott, with Palazhchenko’s note in hand, rushed to the Penta Hotel in downtown Moscow to see Ross and deliver the message. He told Ross that it came from a person in Gorbachev’s entourage but did not give the name. Ross rightly assumed that the message came from Palazhchenko. His second guess was Aleksandr Yakovlev. When Ross brought Talbott’s note to Baker, who was staying in the same hotel (built for the 1980 Olympics, which had been boycotted by the United States), the secretary of state remarked to his adviser, “Well, we’ve got to follow up on this. . . . We’ve got to raise it with both Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Still, we can’t get in the middle of it.”33

  Three months had passed since Baker’s last visit to Moscow in early September. At that time he had enjoyed the warm weather and been uplifted by the general euphoria following the collapse of the August coup. The weather this time was cold and gloomy, like the political atmosphere, at least when it came to his friends in Gorbachev’s entourage. Baker’s meeting schedule reflected the new realities in and around the Kremlin. His first visit would be not with the Soviet foreign minister, his old friend Eduard Shevardnadze, but with Shevardnadze’s Russian counterpart, Andrei Kozyrev. They had first met in Brussels immediately after the coup, when Kozyrev fled Moscow to rally international support for Yeltsin’s cause. Since then his influence had grown dramatically, and by November 1991 he had eclipsed the Soviet foreign minister at that time, Boris Pankin. Shevardnadze’s return to head the Soviet Foreign Ministry on Smolensk Square in downtown Moscow did nothing to change that trend.

  Kozyrev was not looking forward to Baker’s visit. He had more than enough on his plate and did not see how the US secretary of state could help the Russian government sort out relations with its post-Soviet neighbors. “December was a terrible month, given the amount of work with the former republics,” recalled Kozyrev. “And on top of that, Baker barged in. At that point he was entirely out of place, as we were trying to take care of our own business.” Baker descended on Kozyrev’s office in the former building of the Communist Party’s Central Committee with a score of his State Department advisers. He peppered Kozyrev with questions on how the Commonwealth was supposed to work, starting with control over nuclear weapons and armed forces and ending with the formulation of a joint foreign policy and the desirability of having the Commonwealth recognized as an international entity. Kozyrev gave Baker the by now standard line that establishing the Commonwealth was a way of stopping the uncontrolled disintegration of the Soviet Union, but he offered nothing more specific.

  Kozyrev wanted diplomatic recognition by the United States of the members of the Commonwealth. Baker was in no hurry to promise recognition, which he considered the main carrot that the United States could offer Russia and other republics in exchange for satisfying US requirements on security, democracy, and market reform. He noted that Kozyrev kept referring to the USSR as a former state and was not pleased with this treatment of what he considered an existing entity. The US foreign policy team was not yet emotionally prepared to let the USSR go. Members of Baker’s staff soon began asking questions of their own, to which Kozyrev had no satisfactory answers. He later acknowledged that confusion ruled the day in the Russian leadership of the time: “Of course, we had no order at all. Everything was done on the fly. No normal government, nothing.”34

  Later that evening, Baker shared his frustration about Kozyrev and the Commonwealth with Shevardnadze. They met for a private dinner in the apartment of a Georgian friend of She
vardnadze’s, the sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. “In a room walled by boldly colored abstract paintings, we met around a white plastic table with multicolored patio furniture,” recalled Baker. In years to come, Tsereteli would become one of the most popular but also most hated sculptors in Russia—his monuments to Russian leaders would be erected in downtown Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities, their monstrosity denounced by some as a blight on the existing architectural ensemble. The characters he depicted in bronze ranged from tsars—Peter I and Nicholas II—to Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin. Sitting in Tsereteli’s bizarrely decorated and furnished apartment, Baker finally found a sympathetic ear in Shevardnadze, who shared his opinion of the Commonwealth: while it seemed the only way out of the existing impasse, nevertheless, as Baker put it, “the parties to this new Commonwealth don’t know exactly where they are going.” He was also pleased to have his old friend endorse his position that American recognition of Commonwealth member states should be contingent on their handling of military issues.35

  The next day, Baker took his questions about the Commonwealth, its future, and control over nuclear weapons to the only man in Moscow who was in a position to answer them, Boris Yeltsin, whose performance made a strong and positive impression on the American guest. Yeltsin insisted that their meeting take place in St. Catherine’s Hall in the Kremlin, where Gorbachev had received distinguished foreign officials. He brought with him not only members of his government, including the Young Turks Yegor Gaidar and Andrei Kozyrev, but also two top ministers of Gorbachev’s crumbling cabinet: the minister of defense, Marshal Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, and the minister of the interior, General Viktor Barannikov. Yeltsin’s people had intrigued journalists on the eve of the meeting by suggesting that they watch who would accompany Yeltsin. The reference was to the two Union ministers, whose appearance in Yeltsin’s entourage was designed to send a clear signal both to Baker and to the domestic audience about who was now really in charge at the Kremlin.