The Last Empire (41 page)

On October 27, in elections boycotted by ethnic Russians and justly criticized for numerous violations of electoral law, General
Dudaev was elected president of Chechnia. His first decree declared the political sovereignty of Chechnia. It looked like the beginning of the disintegration not just of the Soviet Union but also of the Russian Federation. On November 7, Yeltsin countered with a decree proclaiming a state of emergency in Chechnia. On the following day, interior troops were dispatched to Khankala airport, near Groznyi. Fifteen hundred soldiers in police uniforms were supposed to enter Groznyi, depose the new government, and arrest Dudaev and his entourage. On November 8 the entire country learned of Yeltsin's decree on the evening news. It was out in the open.
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The Chechens refused to be intimidated and pushed for complete independence from Russia. On the following day, General Dudaev was officially inaugurated as the first president of Chechnia. One day later he issued a decree annulling Yeltsin's proclamation of a state of emergency. The local police began to go over to the rebels, who took over police and KGB installations and began arming the militia—one of Dudaev's earlier decrees had ordered the mobilization of all men age fifteen to fifty-five. Soviet military units in Chechnia were surrounded in their barracks, and Russia's railway connections with the Transcaucasian republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia were blocked.

On November 10, to attract international attention to the Russian actions in Chechnia, three armed Chechens hijacked a Soviet plane with 171 passengers on board and rerouted it to Turkey. Leaving the frightened hostages at the Ankara airport, the hijackers flew on to Groznyi, where they were welcomed as national heroes. It was the first act of terrorism perpetrated in the name of Chechen independence by the twenty-six-year-old Shamil Basaev, who had been among the defenders of the Russian White House a few months earlier. Several years later, he would lead the takeover of the Budennovsk hospital in Gorbachev's native Stavropol region of Russia, holding all its patients hostage.
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Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, who was charged by Yeltsin with overseeing the entire military operation in Chechnia, found himself in difficulty. Dudaev's successful mobilization of pro-independence forces was only one of the problems facing Rutskoi and his men. No less serious was the sabotage of their orders by Soviet authorities. The Soviet interior minister, Viktor Barannikov,
who had previously been the interior minister of Russia, voiced his opposition to the use of his forces in Chechnia. This was a major blow to Rutskoi's plans. The police and interior forces were the only asset available to the Russian leadership to enforce the state of emergency in Chechnia. The army was under Union jurisdiction, and the Russian officials decided early on not to use it in Groznyi. The KGB also was under Union jurisdiction. Without the cooperation and support of the all-Union ministries, Rutskoi had no chance of implementing Yeltsin's decree.

That realization came rather late. When Rutskoi and the Speaker of parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, began calling the Union security ministers for help, they all refused, citing Gorbachev. On November 7, Yeltsin had signed a letter to Gorbachev merely informing the Soviet president of his decision to use force in Chechnia, with no request for advice or assistance. The letter also stated that Yeltsin would be informing the secretary-general of the United Nations of his decision. Yeltsin and those around him had clearly misjudged the degree of Russia's independence from the Union. They could cut their financing of Gorbachev's office and all-Union ministries, humiliate and ridicule him in the media, and make the Soviet presidency irrelevant in economic and social affairs, but Gorbachev still held a monopoly on the representation of Moscow's international interests and controlled the Soviet armed forces, secret services, and, as it turned out, interior troops. With the security ministers unwilling to commit their troops to Yeltsin's operation, Gorbachev afforded them a perfect cover to ignore Rutskoi's commands.
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With the Chechnia operation in jeopardy, the presidium of the Russian parliament went into session to discuss the situation. On November 9 it issued two decrees. One instructed the Russian president to take full control of interior troops on the territory of the Russian Federation; the other blamed problems associated with the implementation of Yeltsin's decree on the Union ministers. “To propose that the president of the RSFSR assess the actions of the heads of the executive agencies,” read the decree. In plain language, that meant firing the Union ministers. The problem was that Yeltsin had no authority over them. After demanding in vain that the presidium of the Russian parliament court-martial Viktor Barannikov, the Union interior minister, Rutskoi finally decided to call Gorbachev.

Anatolii Cherniaev, who was in Gorbachev's office at the time, recorded in his diary that Gorbachev first listened to Rutskoi's outburst but then laid the receiver aside for ten minutes and read the papers on his desk, allowing Rutskoi to vent his frustration. Then, according to Cherniaev, he told the Russian vice president, “Aleksandr, calm down, you are not at the front. To carry out a blockade starting from the mountains, surround and block them so that not one Chechen gets through, arrest Dudaev and isolate the others—what's wrong with you? Don't you see what will come of this? . . . I have information here that no one in Chechnia is supporting Yeltsin's decree. They have all united against you. Don't go off your rocker.” Gorbachev was back in the game and once more in his element.
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With no support from the center, the Russian authorities gave the order on November 10 for the withdrawal of interior troops already in Groznyi. The Russian parliament voted to annul Yeltsin's decree proclaiming a state of emergency. Aleksandr Rutskoi, who had allegedly prepared the decree and was charged with its implementation, bore the blame for the debacle. Yeltsin ordered his press secretary, Pavel Voshchanov, to prepare a press release stating that the president had always supported a political solution to the Chechen problem. “You know, there are those among us who will crush Chechnia with tanks as easily as they bombed villages in Afghanistan!” the president told his press secretary. The reference was to Rutskoi, who, like his main adversary, General Dudaev, was an Afghanistan war veteran.
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Boris Yeltsin had spent the decisive days of the Chechnia crisis at Zavidovo, a hunting resort near Moscow. November 7 was October Revolution Day, lavishly celebrated by the Soviet elite. Yeltsin had been part and parcel of that elite too long not to develop a special regard for the holiday, which was still on the Soviet and Russian official calendars. His celebration of the event apparently lasted more than one day. On November 9, when Gorbachev wanted to convene a meeting with Yeltsin to discuss the Chechen crisis, he had to abandon the idea after reaching Yeltsin by telephone in Zavidovo: the Russian president was drunk. “As soon as I started talking to Boris Nikolaevich,” said Gorbachev to Cherniaev, “I grasped after a few seconds that talking was pointless: he was incoherent.” Gorbachev later told Khasbulatov, who had called to demand the restoration of
order in Chechnia, that the meeting had to be postponed because Yeltsin was “not himself.”
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Yeltsin's decision, whether conscious or unconscious, to isolate himself at the most crucial moment in the first Chechen crisis and leave the implementation of his decree to his assistants clearly had a major impact on its outcome. The man who had mobilized his forces to resist the proclamation of a state of emergency a few months earlier was nowhere to be found when it came time to carry out the same thing in one of the Russian territories. Only he could wrest the armed forces away from Gorbachev, but he refused or was incapable, for the moment, of doing so. Like Gorbachev in the Baltics earlier that year, Yeltsin in Chechnia was not willing to give full support to his hard-liners. In both cases, external factors played a role: Bush had stayed Gorbachev's hand, and now Gorbachev had stayed Yeltsin's.

The new Russia's first show of force had ended in an embarrassing public display of the limits of Yeltsin's power. Gorbachev, on the other hand, could relish his victory. According to Cherniaev, “Yeltsin's fumble with the state of emergency for Chechnia ‘inspired' him.” But Gorbachev was not prepared to exploit his opponent's faux pas to the full. He told his advisers, “I will save him; that affair cannot be allowed to impair his authority.” Yeltsin's cooperation was crucial to Gorbachev's struggle for survival—his own and that of the Soviet Union. Without Yeltsin's support, there would be no Union. In his memoirs, Gorbachev recalled what he told Yeltsin with regard to the events in Chechnia: “Remember, our state is held together by two rings. One is the USSR, the other is the Russian Federation. If the first is broken, problems for the other will follow.”
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THE NEW UNION TREATY
was finally placed on the agenda of the State Council, which was scheduled to meet on November 14, a few days after the Chechnia debacle. On the eve of the meeting Gorbachev allowed his chief negotiator on the treaty, Georgii Shakhnazarov, to go to London to participate in a dialogue with former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger organized by the Japanese newspaper
Yomiuri Shimbun
. It was a notable change of heart for Gorbachev, who only a few weeks earlier had refused Shakhnazarov's request to visit the United States, claiming, “What's wrong with you? What do you mean, the USA? We'll sign the Union treaty, and you can go the day after that.”
Shakhnazarov had protested that the treaty would not be signed before December. Gorbachev disagreed. But now he let his assistant go.
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In late October, on the day after Yeltsin's economic reform speech in parliament, Shakhnazarov had given Gorbachev a memo that directly challenged the latter's vision of the new Union as a single state with a strong center and a constitution binding on all. “At this moment it is practically impossible to revive the Union state,” wrote Shakhnazarov.

Except for Nazarbayev [[Kazakhstan]] and Niyazov [[Turkmenistan]], practically all the republics have irrevocably decided to prove to themselves and the whole world that they are independent. With his last statement Yeltsin, too, has crossed the Rubicon. And he is right, of course: Russia has no other way out. It should not grab its fleeing partners by the coattails, not plead with them or compel them but look after itself. Once Russia revives, they will come back, and if not all of them do, then let them go with God. It will suffice to hold on to the states contiguous with Russia in the zone of its political and economic influence.”

This was the program presented to Shakhnazarov by Gennadii Burbulis, Sergei Shakhrai, and the other Russian negotiators. It would eventually become the basis for Russian policy vis-à-vis the former Soviet republics.

Shakhnazarov also argued that it was futile to insist on the revival of a strong Union center and that Gorbachev would be better off focusing on the role allocated to him by Yeltsin and other republican leaders—that of commander in chief of the armed forces, chief negotiator on nuclear issues, coordinator of the republics' international policy, and intermediary in disputes between the members of the new union. “Mikhail Sergeevich,” wrote Shakhnazarov, “this is one of those fateful moments that may resound very heavily for the country and for you as the individual who brought about a historic change of course. Not to recognize the need at least temporarily to renounce excessive demands concerning the Union state would mean committing a tragic error.”
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Shakhnazarov not only set forth his disagreements with Gorbachev and proposed his solutions but also submitted his de facto resignation. “Conscience does not allow me to continue a line that I consider
mistaken and fruitless,” he wrote in the memo. Gorbachev did not accept the resignation: instead, he let Shakhnazarov go debate with Kissinger. If an aide could not be counted on for complete support when the treaty came up for a crucial discussion at the State Council, then it was safer to send him off to London. The problem was that Shakhnazarov was not the only aide who had lost faith in Gorbachev's strategy. On November 13, one day before the fateful council meeting at Gorbachev's retreat at Novo-Ogarevo, Anatolii Cherniaev noted in his diary, “The union treaty that will be on the agenda in Novo-Ogarevo will not pass. I have read the new version! But Kravchuk will not come at all . . . And no one will come from Ukraine. Revenko [[Gorbachev's chief of staff]] made long entreaties to all the presidents to show up. . . . And by evening it was still not clear whether they would do so. All this looks like a rearguard action on Gorbachev's part.” Despite the open and secret defections of his most trusted aides, Gorbachev remained undeterred. He would fight to the end to have the State Council pass his version of the union treaty, which provided for a strong Union center.
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The discussion of the treaty by the State Council on November 14 initially confirmed Shakhnazarov's worst fears. With the support of other republican leaders, Yeltsin protested against the creation of a union state with its own constitution. Even though Kravchuk had stopped attending State Council meetings back in October, Yeltsin had no problem in gaining the support of most leaders of the republics (they included Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan), who kept coming to Moscow. Gorbachev, who had officially agreed to conduct negotiations on the basis of the confederative idea, openly moved away from the federation/confederation dichotomy. “A union state,” he told the gathering. “I insist categorically. If we do not create a union state, my prognosis is trouble for you.”