HIGH ABOVE THE ATLANTIC, on a US aircraft heading for Washington, James Baker took a call from distant Almaty. Nursultan Nazarbayev was calling the secretary of state to report on the results of the summit. “The Alma-Ata meeting is over,” he told Baker. “Eleven republics participated in the meeting.” He added that the Central Asian republics had joined the Commonwealth, while Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan had agreed to maintain unified control over their nuclear arsenals. Tactical nuclear weapons would soon be transferred to Russia, and the rest of the nuclear republics would become nuclear-free by the end of the decade.
Baker was more than pleased. “Let me tell you how grateful I am for your call and your very full report,” he told the Kazakh president. “It is consistent with everything that you and I discussed with the Republic leaders.” Nazarbayev thanked Baker but said that his achievement had not come easily. “You have done remarkably well,” responded Baker. He promised the former communist boss speedy recognition of his republic’s independence.33
“Time will determine the true meaning of the agreements signed in Alma-Ata,” declared the Moscow newspaper Izvestiia. If the long-term significance of the meeting was still unclear to participants and observers, its importance was grasped instantaneously by someone whose immediate future depended directly on its outcome. On the following day, Gorbachev’s aide Anatolii Cherniaev noted in his diary, “Yesterday was the day of the Alma-Ata slaughter. A turning point, evidently, comparable to October 25, 1917, and with equally undetermined consequences.” Cherniaev was referring to the Bolshevik takeover in St. Petersburg seventy-four years earlier—an event that had changed the fate of his country and the history of the world. He and his boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, were about to enter the final, and probably the most dramatic, if not tragic, stage of their political careers.34
18
CHRISTMAS IN MOSCOW
ON THE MORNING OF MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, the first workday since his return to Moscow from Almaty, Boris Yeltsin went to see Mikhail Gorbachev to complete the unfinished business of the transfer of power. Yeltsin no longer feared for his safety, as he had after Belavezha. Armed with the Almaty decision on the liquidation of all institutions of the former USSR and the agreement of all the republican leaders to hand over to Russia Soviet assets and legal rights abroad, Yeltsin was eager to clear the decks and remove Gorbachev from the scene as soon as possible. Their original agreement, reached only a few days earlier, stipulated that the transfer of power would take place before mid-January. In Almaty the republican presidents had agreed that proposals on the liquidation of Soviet institutions be submitted for their next meeting in Minsk on December 30. But Yeltsin did not want to wait even for that date. He was apparently eager to come to Minsk as the sole leader of Russia, as Kravchuk was of Ukraine or as Islam Karimov, whose presidential elections were scheduled for December 29, would be of Uzbekistan.
Yeltsin had discussed Gorbachev’s future with the republican presidents in Almaty. All had agreed that he should be treated with respect and allowed to step down with a retirement package appropriate to his presidential status. Yeltsin had asked the presidents to share the expense of supporting Gorbachev in retirement. But Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, later recalled that even though Gorbachev was president of the USSR as a whole, “they all delicately avoided the problem, hinting that Russia was a rich country and could feed Gorbachev and all his retinue.” At the press conference in Almaty, Yeltsin declared that the presidents had decided not to treat Gorbachev as his Soviet predecessors had been treated, that is, as an enemy of the people, only to be rehabilitated afterward, but rather to deal with him in a civilized manner. “Civilized manner” was a general term, and, given that Gorbachev was “assigned” to Yeltsin at Almaty, it was up to the Russian president to define exactly what it meant.1
When Yeltsin arrived at the Kremlin on December 23, Soviet and American television producers who happened to be on the scene asked the two presidents for permission to film their greetings: Gorbachev agreed, but Yeltsin refused. There would be no handshake before the television cameras. Yeltsin showed who was boss by appearing at Gorbachev’s quarters on short notice and making his former patron postpone all his plans for the day. By that time, Gorbachev was all but resigned to his fate. He had earlier told Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany that if the Commonwealth was approved in its current form at the Almaty summit, he would resign. His open letter to the summit participants had been his last attempt to influence politics in the crumbling Soviet Union and perhaps prolong his own political life. It achieved neither.
After the letter was published in the media, Gorbachev had focused on his plan B, which was resignation. As the republican presidents were gathering in the Almaty Palace of Friendship to begin their summit, Gorbachev summoned to his office his two remaining political allies, Aleksandr Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze, along with his aide and speechwriter Anatolii Cherniaev. He asked them to help him edit his resignation speech, and they spent two hours working on the text. It would be their last speechwriting assignment for Gorbachev. “We became engrossed in the editing,” noted Cherniaev in his diary, “as if . . . we were composing another speech for the Supreme Soviet, or something of the sort. Arguing over words, we seemed to forget that we were preparing a death notice.”2
WHEN YELTSIN SHOWED UP unexpectedly on the morning of December 23, Gorbachev was getting ready to tape his final address to the citizens of an already nonexistent Soviet Union. The taping had to be canceled. The meeting began in the former Politburo Walnut Room with only Gorbachev and Yeltsin present, but after some time the heads of the two presidential administrations were called in to take account of the agreements made by the two presidents. The negotiations were anything but pleasant or easy. According to various reports, they lasted from six to eight hours. Yeltsin and Gorbachev eventually agreed on the timetable for the transition of power. Gorbachev would deliver his resignation speech in two days, on the evening of December 25. After that, he would sign decrees relinquishing his posts as president of the USSR and commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces. Yeltsin and Shaposhnikov would visit him afterward to take possession of his nuclear briefcase. Gorbachev’s aides were then supposed to vacate their offices in four days, by December 29. The red Soviet flag would be lowered on the Kremlin tower for the last time on December 31. The Kremlin would begin the new year with a new flag and a new master.
As the meeting proceeded, Gorbachev called in Aleksandr Yakovlev to facilitate the negotiations. One of the intellectual fathers of perestroika, he had been abandoned by Gorbachev in the summer of 1990 to appease the hard-liners in the Soviet leadership. He was subsequently expelled from the Politburo and then from the party. Yakovlev returned to Gorbachev after the failed August coup, in which he gave vocal support to Yeltsin. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin trusted Yakovlev, which made him an ideal intermediary in one of the most sensitive discussions ever to take place between the two rivals. Yakovlev later remembered that both men behaved with dignity and that the tone of the meeting was “businesslike, with mutual respect.” He also added a qualifier: “They argued at times, but without irritation.”
With Yakovlev’s help, the two presidents agreed on a political cease-fire. Gorbachev would not criticize Yeltsin during the most difficult months of the coming economic reform. Yeltsin would allow Gorbachev to create and run his own foundation, which was supposed to support research on social, political, and economic matters but stay out of politics per se. For days before the meeting, Gorbachev had fantasized about a “RAND Corporation” of his own, funded by Western foundations, which would cooperate with think tanks in the West. He invited Cherniaev and his other aides and allies, including Yakovlev, to work for the new foundation. They had their doubts, but Yakovlev helped Gorbachev negotiate a deal with Yeltsin according to which the latter turned over to the future foundation a complex of buildings administered before the coup by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and used as trainin
g grounds for foreign communist cadres. It included classrooms, cafeterias, gyms, and a hotel. “At that point, Yeltsin obviously had no idea of the actual dimensions of the complex,” recalled his bodyguard and confidant Aleksandr Korzhakov.3
The meeting also involved the transfer of the presidential archive. In Yakovlev’s presence, Gorbachev turned over to the new master of the Kremlin the contents of one of his safes—secret documents that had been passed on from one head of party and state to another since Joseph Stalin. They included the map that accompanied the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and the materials of the internal investigation of the Katyn Forest massacre of tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war by NKVD troops in the spring of 1940. Gorbachev had publicly claimed that there were no documents in the Soviet archives on the fate of the Polish officers, but the materials had been in his safe all along. There were other, no less sensitive documents, including KGB reports on Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which showed that the KGB had nothing to do with the plot.
Yeltsin later claimed that he refused to take the documents and thereby continue the conspiracy to keep the party’s dirty laundry secret. “Those were foreign-policy matters, one more sordid than the other,” confided Yeltsin later to the former Soviet foreign minister Boris Pankin. “I said: ‘Stop. Please! Just hand these papers to the Archives, and they’ll make you sign for them. I do not intend to be held responsible for them. Why should I take charge of all these matters? You are no longer the general secretary, while I have not been one, and will not be.’” It was an attempt to make a clean break with the past. Yeltsin’s aides, who collected the files once the meeting was over, would indeed turn them over to the archives. At least, most of them. Aleksandr Korzhakov later wrote that Yeltsin kept some of the documents in his personal safe. The break with the past was not as clean as it seemed at first glance.4
Then there was the issue of Gorbachev’s retirement. The negotiators agreed that he would retire with his current salary, which, although extremely high by Soviet standards four thousand rubles—amounted to a mere $40 at the black-market exchange rate at the time. He was also assigned a country house located on a sixteen-hectare wooded lot outside Moscow, an apartment somewhat smaller than the one he occupied at the time, two cars, and a staff of twenty, including cooks, waiters, custodians, and bodyguards. Yeltsin also allowed some members of Gorbachev’s circle, including the former Russian prime minister, Ivan Silaev, to privatize their state dachas at a significant discount. One thing Yeltsin did not promise Gorbachev was immunity from prosecution. Two days later, he told the media that if Gorbachev felt he was guilty of something, the time to confess was immediately.
At the end of the meeting, the clearly exhausted Gorbachev retired to a private room behind his office. “God grant that no one find himself in his position,” Yakovlev said to Yeltsin. The two stayed for another hour. As Yakovlev later recalled, they “drank and talked heart to heart.” When Yakovlev went to check on Gorbachev in the private room, he found his boss in distress. “He was lying on the couch, with tears in his eyes,” recalled Yakovlev. “You see, Sash, this is how it is,” said Gorbachev, calling Yakovlev by his nickname. “I consoled him as best I could,” wrote Yakovlev later. “But I, too, felt a tightness in my throat. I was overcome with tears of pity for him. I was choked by the feeling that something unjust had happened. A man who just yesterday had been the tsar of cardinal changes in the world and in his own country, who had decided the fates of billions of people on earth, was now the helpless victim of history’s latest caprice.” Gorbachev asked for water. He wanted to be alone. Yakovlev left the room.5
Yeltsin left Gorbachev’s quarters more confident than ever. Yakovlev watched as Yeltsin “firmly paced the parquet floor, as if on a parade square.” He wrote in his memoirs, “It was a conqueror’s march.” Upon returning to his office with the secret documents from Gorbachev’s archive brought along by his aides, Yeltsin placed a call to George Bush. He wanted to report on the results of the Almaty summit and the transition of power he had just accomplished.
“Hello, Boris, Merry Christmas,” Yeltsin heard at the other end of the line. He wished Bush a merry Christmas in return. He then turned to business. The news on the unified nuclear command and the pledges of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to become nonnuclear states were the centerpieces of his presentation on the Almaty summit. He also told Bush about Gorbachev’s retirement package. “Gorbachev is satisfied,” Yeltsin reported to Bush. “As we agreed with you, we are thus trying to show respect for him. I repeat that he is satisfied, and I have already signed the decree on all these matters.”
Yeltsin next addressed the question of control over the nuclear button. “After President Gorbachev announces his resignation on December 25, nuclear control will be passed to the President of Russia in the presence of Shaposhnikov. There will be no single second break in control of the button.” Bush expressed his appreciation.
After delivering the kind of news he knew Bush wanted to hear, Yeltsin used the opportunity to lobby the American president for speedy recognition of his new country and transfer of the Soviet seat in the United Nations Security Council to Russia. He also wanted to speed up the delivery of American humanitarian aid. Bush promised to work on all three issues. He also agreed in principle to Yeltsin’s proposal for a bilateral summit. Yeltsin had completed his coup. In all but name, he was now the sole master of the Kremlin.6
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1991, officially his last day in office, Gorbachev intended to follow the scenario agreed upon with Yeltsin two days earlier. At 7:00 p.m. he would give his farewell speech, then sign the resignation decrees and, finally, transfer the nuclear codes.
The choice of Christmas Day for Gorbachev’s farewell address was somewhat accidental. When Yeltsin’s unexpected visit to Gorbachev on December 23 derailed the planned taping of the resignation speech, the Soviet president had suggested to the head of the USSR Television and Radio Administration, Yegor Yakovlev, that he do a live broadcast in the next day or two. He wanted to get it over with as soon as possible and suggested December 24. But Yakovlev advised his boss to wait one more day. He told him that Christmas Eve was the most important part of the holiday, and he wanted television viewers to celebrate that day in peace.
The viewers Yegor Yakovlev had in mind were all abroad. Orthodox Christmas, to be celebrated thirteen days later according to the Julian calendar, would not come until January 7. Yakovlev had good reason to worry about Western viewers and forget his own domestic audience. Despite his title, he was no longer in control of the Soviet television industry—his realm was now ruled by Yeltsin’s people. The only crews he could provide for taping in the last days of Gorbachev’s rule were American ones. “If, in those final days, Yegor Yakovlev had not brought in ABC, which was literally spending its days in the hallways, filming anything that turned up . . . then M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] would have remained in an information blockade until his very last in the Kremlin,” noted Anatolii Cherniaev in his diary. The ABC team he had in mind was led by a legend of American broadcasting, Ted Koppel. Apart from Koppel and his ABC team, there was CNN, which had obtained exclusive rights to broadcast Gorbachev’s resignation speech outside the USSR. The CNN team was led by its then president, Tom Johnson.7
Working with the American producers and cameramen was no easy task for Gorbachev’s officials, since it involved both linguistic and cultural barriers. Gorbachev and the people around him believed that Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, was the more important holiday in the West. That belief came from their own Eastern Christian tradition: in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other historically Orthodox countries of the region, the main celebration of the holiday takes place at Christmas Eve dinner. And there turned out to be another complication—to the staffers’ surprise, not everyone in the West celebrated Christmas.
On the morning of December 25, when a friendly Kremlin official approached Koppel and his ABC pro
ducer, Rick Kaplan, offering Christmas greetings, Kaplan, who was Jewish, responded, “To me you have to say ‘Happy Hanukkah.’” The official was confused, never having heard the word. “Why would I have to say Happy Honecker?” he asked Kaplan, having in mind the ousted East German communist leader Erich Honecker, whose name was all over the Soviet press as he sought to avoid extradition from the crumbling USSR to a now united Germany. The Americans laughed. No, Kaplan was not talking about Honecker: he was referring to a Jewish holiday all but unknown in Russia.8
Gorbachev’s aides realized that they had chosen the wrong date for the resignation speech when they tried to place Gorbachev’s final call in his capacity as president of the USSR to George Bush at Camp David. The US embassy in Moscow was closed for the holiday, and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs was already in Yeltsin’s hands. Gorbachev’s interpreter, Pavel Palazhchenko, managed to reach the State Department’s operations desk by using a regular Moscow telephone line. He scheduled the call for 10:00 a.m. EST, which was 5:00 p.m. in Moscow—two hours before Gorbachev’s resignation speech. The call came through soon after George and Barbara Bush, together with their children and grandchildren, had finished opening their Christmas presents.
“Merry Christmas to you, Barbara and your family,” began Gorbachev. “I had been thinking about when to make my statement, Tuesday or today. I finally decided to do it today, at the end of the day.” Anatolii Cherniaev, who was present during the conversation and pleased that Bush had agreed to take a call on Christmas Day, was also happy with the tone of the conversation. He recorded his impressions in his diary: “M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] conversed in an almost familiar manner . . . ‘Russian style’ . . . ‘as friends.’ . . . But Bush also ‘departed’ from his reserve for the first time, offering many words of praise.” According to the American transcript of the conversation, Bush recalled one of Gorbachev’s visits to Camp David. “The horseshoe pit where you threw that ringer is still in good shape,” he said. “Our friendship is as strong as ever and will continue to be as events unfold. There is no question about that,” he told the Soviet president.9
The Last Empire Page 45
