The Last Empire (34 page)

There was much to please and amaze American and other Western visitors to Moscow in September 1991. Human rights were just one example; openness to Westerners was another. James Baker would meet with Ivan Silaev, Yeltsin's prime minister and de facto head of the new Union government, in the same office (previously occupied by Stalin) where the now imprisoned prime minister Valentin Pavlov and the hard-liners had plotted their move against Gorbachev on the night of August 18. Baker also visited the old office of the former head of the KGB, Vladimir Kriuchkov. The new man in charge of the building, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin's liberal appointee Vadim Bakatin, awaited the American secretary of state at the curb and welcomed him inside after admitting to the press that he was “a little nervous.”

Gorbachev and Yeltsin were as friendly to the American visitor as their subordinates and the leaders of the republics were. Baker was eager to return to the American precoup agenda and push for things that President Bush had not managed to obtain from Gorbachev at the Moscow summit. With the Baltics finally free, these included canceling Soviet aid to the Moscow-backed regimes in Afghanistan and Cuba. “Given the highly uncertain Soviet future,” recalled Baker, “we were in even more of a hurry to ‘lock in' gains then and there.” He made it apparent to Gorbachev and Yeltsin that American economic aid depended on the withdrawal of Soviet support for Cuba and Afghanistan. “They jumped at my offer, and indeed were almost competitive in trying to be cooperative,” wrote Baker in his memoirs. Gorbachev, who no longer represented the Communist Party, told the
American secretary of state, “Yes, we spent eighty-two billion dollars on ideology.”

Baker was amazed when Gorbachev agreed not only to terminate Soviet aid to Cuba but also to announce his decision at the joint press conference they were about to hold in the Kremlin. This was done without consulting Fidel Castro. It was a major coup for American foreign policy: all Soviet army servicemen were to be withdrawn from Cuba, and aid would be cut off as of January 1, 1992. The same deadline was set for the ending of Soviet aid to Afghanistan. Upon hearing Baker's request, Yeltsin responded, “I will tell Gorbachev to do it.” He then called the Soviet president and assured Baker that the deadline would be accepted. The agreement, in which both the Soviet Union and the United States committed themselves to ending assistance to their respective clients in Afghanistan, was announced in Moscow the next day.

The pro-Soviet Afghan leader Mohammad Najibullah was informed of the withdrawal of the annual Soviet aid package six hours before the Moscow announcement, and he presented a brave face. Najibullah would be out of power in a few months and hanged by the Taliban in September 1996. Pictures of his corpse in the world media were a sign of trouble to come, but in September 1991 no one predicted the subsequent tragic turn of events in Afghanistan. Baker could take satisfaction in a major victory. When the US ambassador, Bob Strauss, passed him a piece of paper with a note reading, “These 2 meetings today are really pretty historic!” Baker returned it with his own comment: “That's the understatement of the day!”
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Why were the Soviets so accommodating? The new Soviet foreign minister, Boris Pankin, the only Soviet ambassador to publicly condemn the coup before it was over, who was then rewarded with the top diplomatic job, explained the concessions to the United States as follows:

We looked to the US for economic assistance and were prepared to make many concessions to achieve it—hence our compliance with independence for the Baltic states. Our retreat from the Third World and downgrading of our relations with Cuba fit the same pattern. On the one hand we could no longer afford to maintain these kinds of relationship; on the other we strove to present their
abandonment as badges of good intent. Both the Americans and we dressed up our statements in terms of détente, but for our part it was economic imperatives that drove us, as the Americans perfectly well understood.

Pankin had good reasons to emphasize the economic factor when he sat down a few years later to write his memoirs and tried to recall, analyze, and justify his foreign policy. Even so, the same memoirs indicate that there was something more than pure realpolitik driving Soviet behavior in the international arena in the fateful autumn of 1991. The other important factor was an ideological revolution that led to the rejection of anything related to the former communist vision of the world and the international role of the USSR. This revolution, which had been brewing for years among liberally inclined officials in the offices of the International Department of the Central Committee and the corridors of the Foreign Ministry, was unleashed by the failure of the coup.

Not only Yeltsin but also Gorbachev was in full agreement with the new trend. At his first meeting with Pankin, Gorbachev said, “We must change priorities, get rid of prejudices. Yasser Arafat, Gaddafi—they call themselves our friends, but only because they dream of us returning to the past. Enough double standards.” Communist ideology was thus all but expunged from Soviet foreign policy. The liberal thinking closely associated with newfound Soviet admiration for the economic and cultural achievements of the United States became central to the Soviet foreign policy process.
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“We longed to be accepted,” wrote Pankin. “In those days the common obsession that gripped our entire leadership was with the idea of becoming a ‘civilized state.'” The desire for acceptance informed Pankin's behavior during his first meeting with Baker. He began by handing Baker a copy of an internal memo that he had prepared for Gorbachev, spelling out Soviet readiness to reverse every position taken on issues ranging from Afghanistan to Eastern Europe, Israel, and Cuba. Pankin probably wanted to indicate that henceforth Soviet diplomacy would have no secrets from the “civilized world.” As the surprised Baker examined the memo, Pankin told him, “I hope we can come to a common understanding on many of these issues. But I want to make one request: even if the agreement we reach is closer to your original
position than to ours, please avoid the temptation to tell the press that these are concessions extracted by you. All this stems from the ideas and positions of the people who are running our foreign policy today.”
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This sounded like an aspiration to be more Catholic than the pope. Baker was probably in no position to appreciate the full scope of ideological reasons for this fire sale of Soviet foreign policy assets, but the economic ones were quite apparent. Ivan Silaev, who headed the Economic Committee now functioning as the interim Union government, told Baker that the economic situation was “grave.” His main task was not to improve it—that was beyond the government's capacity—but to prevent it from growing worse. Gavriil Popov, the democratic mayor of Moscow and a staunch supporter of Yeltsin during the coup, told Baker that in reality there was no central government. The republics and large municipalities such as Moscow were on their own. “Moscow cannot support itself through the winter,” he admitted, and then asked for help, mentioning in particular eggs, powdered milk, and mashed-potato mix. “Some of this material is stored by your army, which throws it out after three years. But a three-year shelf life is all right for us.” Baker was stunned. “It was a sobering admission of the problems faced by the country whose leader once talked about ‘burying' the West,” he wrote in his memoirs. The mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatolii Sobchak, and his aide Vladimir Putin, whom Baker visited on his brief stop in the former imperial capital, were equally concerned about the coming winter.

After meeting with the new democratic leaders, who wanted change but were clearly unprepared to govern the country, Baker wrote to Bush suggesting a Marshall Plan for the Soviet Union in all but name. “The simple fact is we have a tremendous stake in the success of the democrats here. Their success will change the world in a way that reflects both our values and our hopes. . . . The democrats' failure would produce a world that is far more threatening and dangerous, and I have little doubt that if they are unable to begin to deliver the goods, they will be supplanted by an authoritarian leader of the xenophobic right wing.”
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THE BIG ISSUE
that came up in almost all Baker's discussions in Moscow was that of relations between the center and the republics. The new minister of defense, Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, asked Baker,
“Please do not be in a hurry to recognize all these new republics.” Baker was not. With no clear strategy enunciated by the Bush White House, he was free to conduct his own policy. Baker's talks in Moscow and St. Petersburg seemed to confirm his earlier assumption that the democrats were concentrated in the center; helping the center therefore meant helping democracy. Baker told everyone in the Soviet Union who would listen that some arrangement had to be made between the center and the republics so that the West would know with whom to deal on economic reform and humanitarian aid.

Baker managed to host a dinner for the prime ministers of the republics. It was a striking difference from March 1991, when the initiative of the US ambassador, Jack Matlock, to gather the leaders of the republics for a meeting at his embassy had been torpedoed by Gorbachev and his people. Now Baker was the only political leader trusted by the heads of the republics to be an honest broker. He used the occasion to smooth over contradictions and alleviate tension and distrust between the new cohorts of Soviet leaders. He acted as a go-between for the center and the republican leaders. By assuring Prime Minister Vitold Fokin of Ukraine that humanitarian aid would be distributed to all the republics, Baker obtained his commitment that Ukraine would sign the economic treaty with Russia and the other post-Soviet republics.
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What Baker did in Moscow vis-à-vis the republics had the full support of the president. George Bush did almost everything diplomatically possible to keep the Soviet Union alive. It was no easy task. He got an opportunity to assess the dimensions of the problem on September 25, when he welcomed his former Kyiv host, Leonid Kravchuk, the head of the Ukrainian parliament, to the White House. Three days earlier, five thousand demonstrators representing local Ukrainian American organizations had gathered in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, to manifest their support for Ukrainian independence and urge Bush, then still under attack for his “Chicken Kiev” speech, to change his attitude toward independence for the Soviet republics. “You were last with the Baltics. Be first with Ukraine,” read one of the demonstrators' signs.

Bush found Kravchuk more self-confident and much less agreeable than he had been in Kyiv less than two months earlier. During Bush's visit, Kravchuk had agreed with him on the need to resist what the
American president called “suicidal nationalism.” Bush was still in the same frame of mind, opposing independence for every Soviet republic except the Baltics, but Kravchuk had clearly shifted position. His support for Ukrainian independence had become something more than a tactical move by a party apparatchik threatened by the democratic victory in Moscow. “Independence is forged by the people. And on December 1 [[the date of the impending referendum]] the people will confirm our independence and we will begin building a new nation—Ukraine,” he told the North American media.
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Having embarked on selling the idea of Ukrainian independence to the world, Kravchuk used his invitation to the White House as an opportunity to make his case to the world's most powerful political leader. His verdict on the Soviet Union was not the one that Bush and his advisers wanted to hear: “The Soviet Union is virtually disintegrating. There is no national government. There is no Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.” Kravchuk concluded his presentation by stating, “The Union cannot exist in any serious form. There is a struggle for power there, and we cannot be part of a union in which there are some members more powerful than others.” His reference was clearly to the Gorbachev-Yeltsin alliance and the role that Russia aspired to play in the new Union. Kravchuk requested support for Ukrainian democracy, which he understood as the drive for national independence. He also wanted direct diplomatic ties, the opening of a Ukrainian trade mission in the United States, and eventually the recognition of Ukrainian independence. Kravchuk did not come only to ask for favors. He had also something to offer: Ukraine, he said, aspired to be a nuclear-free country.

Bush was not impressed. In his memoirs he wrote that Kravchuk “did not seem to grasp the implications and complexities of what he was proposing.” On the previous day Bush had met with the Soviet foreign minister, Boris Pankin, who assured him that while the immediate postcoup period had seen a rush for independence by the republics, in the last few weeks republican leaders had realized that they had to work together. That was not the impression one would get from talking to Kravchuk. According to Bush's memoirs, the Ukrainian leader gave him “a taste of the dissatisfaction the republics felt for the Union.” Bush promised Kravchuk support for democracy and economic reform, as well as food and humanitarian assistance.
He also gave him what was by now the standard American line on center-republic relations: the United States did not presume to shape the changes taking place in the Soviet Union but wanted political clarity there. It also wanted a viable economic plan. Recognition of Ukraine, unlike that of the Baltic states, would have to await the results of the referendum.

The conversation, scheduled for forty-five minutes, had now lasted an hour and a half, and Bush signaled that time was running out. Kravchuk rushed to make his final plea—one that took Bush by surprise. Thanking him for the offer of food and humanitarian aid, Kravchuk said that Ukraine needed investment and technology instead. This was very different from what Bush and Baker heard from the representatives of the Soviet center, who were begging for food supplies. “We have a difficult situation,” said Kravchuk. “The Soviet Union has received food assistance, but Ukraine has not. Now we must pay these [[all-Union]] debts. While the Soviet Union was getting assistance, we were sending 60,000 tons of meat and milk to the Soviet Union [[at nominal prices]]. . . . Our request is that you give us credits. We'll buy technology. We'll invite businessmen to invest in Ukraine. We'll work.” Kravchuk's statement reflected the simple fact that Ukraine was a food-producing republic, not a food-importing one, and its interests differed from those of other republics. Commerce and investment, not food aid, was Ukraine's highest priority.