The Last Empire (37 page)

While Yeltsin vacationed in Sochi, the struggling Soviet president gained unexpected support from two of his staunchest allies: the mayors of Moscow, Gavriil Popov, and of St. Petersburg, Anatolii Sobchak. Their millions of citizens depended on food supplies from
the Union republics to survive the winter, which required the prompt restoration of all-Union ties. Gorbachev was their only hope to achieve that. “Leningrad has been taken off the Union and republican supply network; we have ceased to receive provisions from Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” reported Sobchak at a meeting of Gorbachev's political council on October 2. “In return for what we supply, I could feed ten Leningrads. If this does not change, I will forbid the shipping of tractors to Ukraine and cut off supplies to the republics that do not carry out their obligations.” Vladimir Putin, then Sobchak's aide in charge of foreign relations, later recalled Sobchak's anger at what was going on in Moscow. “What are they doing? Why are they destroying the country?” he said to Putin.
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Although the republican leaders in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan had serious reservations about plans to create a new union, most of them agreed on the need for an economic agreement to reestablish a common market. Gorbachev originally declared that the economic treaty would be signed before the political one. But with only a few days left before a meeting of republican prime ministers scheduled for October 1 to discuss the economic treaty, he abruptly changed course and began to insist that the political treaty be signed before the economic one. His hope was that economic necessity would force the republican leaders to endorse his draft union treaty.

This sudden shift of position created consternation not only among the republican leaders but also in Gorbachev's own camp. Grigorii Yavlinsky, the chief architect of the economic agreement, was prepared to resign. When he told Anatolii Cherniaev what was going on, Gorbachev's loyal aide exploded. “What has he done? Has he gone off his rocker?” wrote Cherniaev in his diary. “There will be no union treaty! What is wrong with him: does he not see that Russia is provoking this so that [[the other republics will]] go off in all directions, and then Russia, ‘in splendid isolation,' will proceed to dictate its conditions to them, to ‘save' them by getting around Gorbachev, who will be completely unnecessary!!!”
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Gorbachev apparently believed that he could get away with sudden shifts like the one described by Cherniaev because both the Russian president and the republican leaders needed him. The republics were uneasy about Yeltsin's hegemonic behavior and wanted the center to restrain Russia's growing ambitions. Yeltsin, on the other
hand, needed the center as an instrument through which he could influence the behavior of the republics. Feeling the shift in the political situation, Gorbachev again began to use the tactic that had worked so well with the party apparatchiks—threatening resignation. “I will not take part in a funeral for the Union,” he told Yeltsin a few days before the Russian president's departure for Sochi. The tactic did not work. It actually backfired. Nazarbayev, the host of the economic forum, which took place on October 1, 1991, rejected Gorbachev's proposal to link an economic agreement with a political one, maintaining that the economic agreement should be primarily among the republics. Gorbachev was effectively shut out of the meeting, which turned out to be a success: the prime ministers of eight Soviet republics, including Russia and Kazakhstan, initialed a treaty intended to restore commercial and economic ties between the republics.
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AS HE HAD OFTEN DONE
in the past, Gorbachev refused to give up. He insisted on adding a political treaty to the agenda of a State Council meeting scheduled for October 11 that involved the heads of the republics and was to discuss economic cooperation. He also asked his advisers to send the new draft union treaty to the republics. Prepared by Shakhnazarov and Sergei Shakhrai, who represented Yeltsin, the draft reflected a confederal vision. But before it went to the republics, Gorbachev insisted on further changes. He wanted to replace references to a “union of states” with “union state,” add provisions for a union constitution, and arrange for the election of the union president by popular vote, not by the parliamentary assembly. Shakhnazarov was opposed to making any changes, reminding Gorbachev that he had already agreed to a confederation, which meant a “union of states,” not a “union state.” Gorbachev was not pleased, retorting, “You are going to lecture me? I don't need you to tell me that: I studied it in university. . . . The point now is not the wording but the essence of the matter. Be so good as to write ‘union state.' I do not want to hear any objections.” The draft with Gorbachev's changes was sent to the republics.
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To Gorbachev's great disappointment, the political treaty was removed from the agenda of the State Council meeting of October 11. Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine told Gorbachev that the Ukrainian parliament had voted to suspend its participation in negotiations on the new union treaty until the referendum of December 1, when
Ukrainians would vote on their independence. Gorbachev was visibly upset by this major change in Ukraine's position. Kravchuk had previously taken part in the discussions on the premise that if the referendum did not confirm parliament's vote for independence, Ukraine would join the Union, which Kravchuk envisioned as a confederation. Now Ukraine was withdrawing from negotiations altogether. Gorbachev proposed that the State Council issue an appeal to the Ukrainian parliament, asking it to suspend its decision not to participate in the preparation of the treaty.

“The Ukrainian parliament will confirm its decision,” responded Kravchuk.

“God be with you, and we will cleanse our soul!” was Gorbachev's reply.
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With political union off the table, the economic agreement took center stage at the State Council deliberations on October 11. The presentation on the agreement was made by Grigorii Yavlinsky, Gorbachev's main economic adviser. This was Yavlinsky's third attempt to convince those in power to accept his vision of economic transformation. The first one was undertaken in 1990 with the development of the 500 Days Program for the market transformation of the Soviet economy. After initially embracing the program, Gorbachev had abandoned it in the fall of that year. In July 1991, working with Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University, Yavlinsky had prepared another plan for economic reform to be presented at the G-7 summit in London. It was dismissed by first world leaders as insufficient. Now Yavlinsky presented a revised program, adjusted to the new circumstances of a crumbling Union.

Anatolii Cherniaev, who attended the meeting, thought Yavlinsky did an excellent job of presenting the draft treaty to the council. He termed Yavlinsky's performance “literacy instruction and cultural enlightenment for the illiterate republican presidents.” Cherniaev was appalled by what he regarded as the inability of the republican leaders to grasp the basic principles of a market economy. “The primitivism is striking,” recorded Gorbachev's aide in his diary. Cherniaev was perfectly right to note that few of the republican leaders, who had risen through party ranks under the Soviet command economy, had a good knowledge of the principles of a market economy. But they clearly understood the interests of their republics and their own interests as
leaders when they insisted on joint republican control over the central bank, despite Yavlinsky's best efforts to persuade them otherwise.
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The position taken by the leaders of the republics boded nothing good for the common financial space, and it did not sit well with Cherniaev or with Boris Pankin, the Soviet foreign minister (and also a product of the Moscow liberal establishment), both of whom attended the meeting. Pankin later expressed in his memoirs the shock he felt on witnessing the debates at the State Council: the formerly all-powerful center “was now squeezed into a single room, and a good half of it was represented by the leaders of independent republics.” Pankin looked with horror upon the new leaders defining the fate of whatever was left of his country. “Who were these unfamiliar new men on the State Council? Who were these new khans from the outer regions of the Soviet Union?” he wrote in retrospect.

Pankin characterized Kravchuk, who reminded him of one of Gogol's characters, as a “plumpish” man with a “strong sense of self-satisfaction and self-importance.” Ayaz Mutalibov, the leader of Azerbaijan, struck Pankin as “a teenage street thug who had grown up and lost touch with his bad companions but never quite shed his old habits.” Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan reminded him of “a chairman of a first-class collective farm,” and Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan, of “a local educator from the 1920s.” The forty-six-year-old Akaev was in fact one of the leading Soviet specialists in optics and a former head of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences. He was also the only Central Asian president who opposed the coup. To Pankin, all the republican presidents shared one key trait—they were provincials who had no idea how to run a great country.
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Both Pankin and Cherniaev felt desperate. For decades they and their cohort of educated and liberal-minded apparatchiks had had to serve party bosses sent to Moscow by the provincial party elite. In Gorbachev, they had finally found a provincial with an amazing aptitude for learning and changing both himself and the country according to their standards. But Gorbachev was now sinking fast, along with the country they loved. Before their very eyes, power was devolving to a pack of colonial administrators whom they found even less enlightened than the old elite, which had acquired some elements of imperial sophistication after spending years in Moscow. The barbarians were taking over Rome.

Yeltsin, who had just returned to Moscow from his Sochi vacation, sat silent for most of the State Council meeting. “Throughout the six hours of the State Council, Yeltsin, as sullen as he was wont to be at the Politburo, did not open his mouth,” noted Cherniaev in his diary. The Russian president had good reason for his attitude. Although he had privately endorsed the Burbulis Memorandum, which set Russia on the path of economic reform irrespective of the wishes and economic needs of other republics, he was politically in no position to come out against the agreement, which allowed the republics to issue currency on their own terms and, as Burbulis believed, flood Russia with worthless rubles and deplete it of its resources. One reason for Yeltsin's silence was that his government was still divided on the issue of economic reform. Another was the promise he had given Gorbachev to support the economic agreement. And then there was a promise he gave to President Bush.

George Bush had unexpectedly called Yeltsin in Sochi late in the evening of October 8, two days before Yeltsin's return to Moscow. He repeated his previous offer to Yeltsin: the Russian leader could come to the United States for medical treatment if necessary. But that was not the main reason for his call. The White House was alarmed by news from the US embassy in Moscow indicating that the Russian government was withdrawing its support for the economic treaty. “Clearly this is an internal matter, not really any of my business,” said Bush. “But I just wanted to share one thought with you. Some voluntary economic union could be an important step for clarifying who owns what, and who's in charge, thus facilitating humanitarian assistance, and any economic investment which might be forthcoming.” Bush was trying to cajole the Russian president into the economic union with a promise of humanitarian help.

Yeltsin admitted to Bush that his government was split on the issue but promised that he would do his best to sign the economic treaty. Knowing Bush's attachment to Gorbachev, or perhaps even suspecting that Bush might be acting on behalf of the Soviet president, Yeltsin stressed that he was working together with Gorbachev. “I called President Gorbachev,” Yeltsin told Bush, “and we agreed that on October 11 we will get together in Moscow, hear reports, and then Russia will sign the treaty.” Yeltsin presented this as an actual sacrifice of Russia's interests. “We understand we have the least to gain; as
a matter of fact we might even lose something,” he told Bush. “But we'll sign because of the bigger political goal—to save the Union. As President I do have that right, even though it may be tough to get through the Supreme Soviet for approval.”
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On the face of it, Yeltsin kept his promise to Bush. On the evening of October 18 the Russian president went to the Kremlin along with the leaders of the other republics to sign the treaty declaring the creation of an economic community of “independent states.” An uneasy compromise was reached on control of the central bank and coinage of currency: the all-Union bank was to be administered by a commission of representatives of the central and republican banks, but the latter had to accept limits on the amount of currency they could issue. There was no indication, however, that Yeltsin intended to honor the treaty: he said right away that Russia would not ratify the treaty unless thirty additional agreements on specific issues important to Russia were signed as well.
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Earlier that day the Russian president had given a speech that threw a wrench into the restoration of the former Union. He announced that Russia was cutting off funds to most all-Union ministries, noting that “the task is to do away with the remains of the unitary imperial structures as quickly as possible and create inexpensive interrepublican ones.” In September, Russia had nationalized oil and gas enterprises on its territory and taken over the revenue they had previously contributed to all-Union coffers. By enriching Russia and bankrupting the Union, the Russian leaders gained a potent new weapon to use against the center. In mid-October, the Russian parliament voted to declare the decisions of all-Union bodies, including Gorbachev's State Council, nonbinding on the Russian Federation. Yeltsin issued a similar decree with regard to Gosplan, the all-Union economic planning body. Bush's call made Yeltsin sign the economic agreement, but there was little that the American president could do to ensure that Yeltsin would actually honor it or that his actions would not lead to the further weakening of the Union.
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