The Last Empire (13 page)

What Bush said next was less to the liking of the Ukrainian opposition. The president's speech, while carefully crafted so as not to offend Ukrainian sensibilities, confirmed the worst predictions of Drach and his colleagues about the political import of Bush's visit to Kyiv. “Some people have urged the United States to choose between supporting President Gorbachev and supporting independence-minded leaders throughout the U.S.S.R.,” stated the president. “I consider this a false choice. In fairness, President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things, and his policies of glasnost, perestroika, and democratization point toward the goals of freedom, democracy, and economic liberty.” The president then explained his understanding of “freedom,” which was disheartening to Rukh:
“Freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” There was no doubt remaining: the United States would not support Ukraine's drive for independence—its proponents were on their own.
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Bush's speech reflected current thinking in the White House. Nicholas Burns later recalled:

I do not think anyone thought on the American side in summer 1991 of any realistic possibility that the Soviet Union would disintegrate. . . . There was relative trust between Gorbachev and Bush, we were working together on most issues fairly well, and we were very anxious to visit Kyiv to demonstrate our interest in the republics. . . . We wanted to a see a gradual weakening of the Soviet structure and gradual change and reform because we feared that if we put our direct support behind nationalist movements, it could turn to violence, which could compromise control over nuclear weapons in some republics, and we felt that stable decline was in our interest.
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The speech produced a mixed reaction in the Ukrainian parliament. The communist majority welcomed Bush's cautious approach; the pro-democratic opposition rejected it, as did their backers in the United States. Bush tried to placate Ukrainian Americans when he stated in his speech to the Ukrainian parliament, “If you saw me waving like mad from my limousine, it was in the thought that maybe some of those people along the line were people from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or Detroit, where so many Ukrainian-Americans live, where so many Ukrainian-Americans are with me in the remarks I've made here today.” He thought that the speech, which was about to be reprinted in Ukrainian newspapers in the United States, would make his voters happy. That was a miscalculation, to say the least.
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The Ukrainian American community had been mobilized by recent developments in Ukraine and did not support Gorbachev or the Ukrainian communist leadership. They supported Rukh, and if Rukh was unhappy, so were Ukrainian Americans. Few were aware of Gorbachev's attempts to stop Bush from visiting Kyiv and the efforts that Bush and his team had applied to make the visit possible.
On Sunday, August 4, three days after Bush's visit to Kyiv, a group of Ukrainian protesters marched to the White House with such slogans as “I am a Ukrainian American. I do not support George Bush” and “Mr. Bush: Ukrainian independence equals freedom for all minorities.” Following an hour-long demonstration, the leaders submitted their grievances to the White House. Their letter ended with a direct threat to defeat Bush at the next election: “Mr. President, we have come to the sad conclusion that in this visit to Kiev, Ukraine, you have done Mr. Gorbachev's bidding well. However, Ukraine will become independent, in spite of the Gorbachev-Bush coalition, as sure as the sun rises. And we, your fellow Americans who you claimed were with you on your performance in Kiev, were not and are not with you. We will take the lesson we have learned to the election polls in 1992.”
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Negative reaction to Bush's speech would not be limited to the Ukrainian American community. The most damaging criticism came in an article by William Safire, a
New York Times
columnist and former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, who called Bush's “dismaying ‘Chicken Kiev' speech” one of the administration's greatest blunders. According to Safire, Bush had “lectured the Ukrainians against self-determination, foolishly placing Washington on the side of Moscow centralism and against the tide of history.” Safire's derisory phrase, “‘Chicken Kiev' speech,” caught the imagination of the American public as a metaphor for indecisiveness in Bush's foreign policy. In a book of memoirs written jointly with President Bush, Scowcroft claimed that the president's reference to local despotism was directed not toward Ukraine but toward Moldova (Moldavia) and other Soviet republics. Jack Matlock, who had probably invested the greatest effort in the visit, discerned ill will on Safire's part, but also possible atonement. It was Safire, noted Matlock, who had drafted President Nixon's speech of 1972 that referred to Kyiv as the “mother of all Russian cities.”
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ON AUGUST
1, 1991, there was virtually nothing, apart from the protests of former political prisoners and intellectuals hardly known outside Ukraine, to indicate trouble ahead for Bush and his advisers. After a round of applause from the communist majority in the Ukrainian parliament, the president and his entourage left the building in the company of Leonid Kravchuk and his aides. Their limousines proceeded to Babyn Yar (Russian: Babii Yar), a ravine near the
medieval Church of St. Cyril and the site of one of the most horrendous massacres of the Holocaust. “The long, slow, twenty-minute motorcade to Babi Yar was the best of the trip to Bush,” read the media pool report on the event. “Ukrainians lined the streets, five and six deep. Unlike the Muscovites, they were smiling. They waved at Bush and everyone else in the motorcade.”
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On the slopes of Babyn Yar on the outskirts of Kyiv, in late September 1941, the Nazi Sonderkommando 4a gunned down close to thirty-four thousand of Kyiv's Jews in the course of two days. The executions were carried out in broad daylight. Gramophone music played by the Nazis failed to drown out the cries of the victims, and the experience brutalized the city's inhabitants. These were the first days of the German occupation and the first victims of Babyn Yar. Before the Red Army recaptured Kyiv in the fall of 1943, more than seventy thousand new victims—Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists, Roma, civilian hostages, and psychiatric patients—were executed on the slopes of Babyn Yar. Before their departure the Nazis tried to conceal their crimes, exhuming bodies, burning them, and then scattering the ashes. They could not erase the memories of the survivors.

The Soviets investigated and documented the executions—at the Nuremberg war crimes trials they reported some one hundred thousand victims—but the original report was doctored to conceal the fact that the first victims were Jews and that they were killed as part of what would become known as the Holocaust. The Soviets treated all victims as undifferentiated citizens of the USSR. A documentary novel titled
Babii Yar
, by the talented Kyiv writer Anatolii Kuznetsov, was published in 1966, with a quarter of its text deleted by the censors. It was not published in full until 1970, after Kuznetsov emigrated to the West. In 1976, a monument was finally erected at Babyn Yar to commemorate the victims of the massacres. According to the official version of events, it commemorated Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet citizens in general.
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It was against the background of the Soviet-era memorial that George Bush was preparing to deliver his speech honoring the dead. “Look closely at the great bronze and granite monument that will form a backdrop for Bush's speech,” read the advance pool report for the media. “At its top is the figure of a woman bending her head to kiss her child. Only from the rear of the monument is the true
horror and tragedy of the scene revealed—the woman's hands are tied behind her.”

In his speech at the memorial, Bush welcomed the new politics of memory in Ukraine that finally made it possible to recognize the victims of the Holocaust in their own right. “For many years, the tragedy of Babi Yar went unacknowledged, but no more,” he said. “You soon will place a plaque on this site that acknowledges the genocide against Jews, the slaughter of gypsies, the wanton murder of Communists, Christians—of anyone who dared oppose the Nazi madman's fantasies.” As he had done in his speech to parliament, Bush found a way to acknowledge the contribution made to the reevaluation of Soviet history by Mikhail Gorbachev and support his embattled partner in the Kremlin. He linked him to no less a figure in American history than Lincoln: “Abraham Lincoln once said: We cannot escape history. Mikhail Gorbachev has promoted truth in history.”

“I was choked up when we went to the memorial at Babi Yar, where the Nazi occupiers had killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Jews and others,” Bush later recalled. “Midway through my speech I faltered as I described the horrors of a day fifty years earlier.” The president's speech was indeed full of heartbreaking details of the massacre, including the use of gramophones by the Nazi executioners. Barbara Bush listened to the speech seated next to simply dressed elderly women of peasant appearance, survivors of Babyn Yar, and those who had helped save their lives. Leonid Kravchuk was trying to calm his own emotions. As an eight-year-old boy in German-occupied Ukraine, he witnessed mass execution of Jews by Nazi machine gunners. A few months after Bush's visit, speaking at the ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre, he would deliver part of his speech in Yiddish, and in a later interview he would state that not all his countrymen had behaved as they should have under the circumstances. The reference was to Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust.
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Bush's speech was very well received by those present at the ceremony. Ivan Drach and other Rukh leaders, who were among the first in Ukraine to recognize the significance of Babyn Yar in the Holocaust, welcomed the visit. The Ukrainian-Jewish alliance against the Soviet empire developed by political dissidents of both peoples
in the Gulag was becoming a political reality thanks to Rukh, whose policies were heavily influenced by former dissidents. Rukh was in the forefront of those battling the still widespread anti-Semitism in Ukraine, and its political platform advocated Ukrainian-Jewish cooperation against the dictates of the center.
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The only people who seemed out of place at the ceremony were Gorbachev's representatives accompanying Bush on his trip to Kyiv—Vice President Gennadii Yanaev and the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Viktor Komplektov. Because all speeches in the course of the visit were delivered in either Ukrainian or English and all business was transacted in those languages, the Russian visitors were almost completely at a loss. Komplektov remarked during Bush's speech in parliament “that it was good that he understood English, otherwise he would have been unable to follow what was going on.” According to his short biography in the president's briefing book, Yanaev spoke “some English.” If that was indeed the case, it was not apparent in Kyiv. The Ukrainian officials spoke perfect Russian, but their switch to Ukrainian had symbolic meaning for the now officially sovereign republic.

The Americans went along and brought a Ukrainian interpreter. They also accommodated the Ukrainian request for a separate meeting between President Bush and Leonid Kravchuk that was not attended by Yanaev. According to Ed Hewett of the National Security Council, the Soviet vice president, who did not speak Ukrainian and probably did not understand most of what was said in English, was treated by the Ukrainian officials more like the “chairman of the All-Union Leprosy Association” than as a representative of the Union center. He was visibly bored and annoyed during the luncheon hosted by Kravchuk. But times had changed: it was now the center's turn to make itself useful to the republics, and Yanaev understood the new rules of the game.
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AT ABOUT
7:00
P.M. LOCAL TIME
, Air Force One took off from Boryspil airport and headed for Washington. The visit was finally over. A major milestone had been reached on the long road to nuclear disarmament, a new policy formulated on the national self-determination of the Soviet republics, democracy supported, and help given to a friend in the Kremlin in order to maintain control over
the crumbling former superpower. In Yanaev's Moscow-bound plane, Matlock and the Soviet vice president “toasted what had seemed to be a very successful visit by the American president.” George Bush was looking forward to a well-deserved rest on his Maine estate in Kennebunkport. It had been a busy July. August promised to be slow and restful. That was the hope, never to be fulfilled.
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II.

THE TANKS OF AUGUST

4

THE PRISONER OF THE CRIMEA

“M
IKHAIL, I HOPE YOU'RE WELL
,” were the first words of the virtual message that George Bush dictated into his small tape recorder. In his years as president, Bush kept an audio diary, with which he often shared thoughts and emotions that he did not wish to make public. On the evening of August 19, 1991, as he dictated another entry into his tape recorder, the president's mind was far from American shores: he was thinking of Mikhail Gorbachev. “I hope they've not mistreated you,” continued the president. “You've led your country in a fantastically constructive way. You've been attacked from the right and from the left, but you deserve enormous credit. Now we don't know what the hell has happened to you, where you are, what condition you are in, but we were right to support you, I am proud we have supported you, and there will be a lot of talking heads on television telling us what's been wrong, but you have done what's right and strong and good for your country.”
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