The Last Empire (52 page)

After agreeing on the title of the document, the experts did not know where to start. Gaidar saved the situation by producing the draft of a Russo-Belarusian treaty: the Russian delegation had taken it along for bilateral negotiations with the Belarusians in Minsk. “Gaidar took his text,” recalled Kravchenka, “and, with our help, began to rework it from a bilateral to a multilateral one. That work took a good deal of time and continued until about five in the morning.” Gaidar wrote out the whole text by hand: there were no typewriters or typists in the residence. At 5:00 a.m. the security people left the premises in search of both. They would not come back for hours. By the time the draft was ready and the participants in the night session could finally go to bed, it was 6:00 a.m. Moscow time, and they heard Radio Moscow beginning its daily broadcast with the Soviet anthem. As the choir
sang the familiar words, “Great Rus' has forever bound together the indissoluble union of free republics,” the representatives of Great and White Russia collapsed onto their beds, completely exhausted by the efforts they had made to turn the “eternal” union into a timebound one. It was the beginning of the last day of the existence of the USSR.
²⁰

The new round of negotiations began on the morning of December 8, after breakfast, which witnessed a curious show of Russo-Belarusian friendship. Yeltsin presented Shushkevich with a watch in gratitude for what he called “support of the Russian president.” The previous evening, Yeltsin had almost fallen down the stairs after dinner but was supported at the last moment by Shushkevich. Before breakfast, the Russian and Belarusian experts showed the draft agreement on which they had worked all night to their well-rested Ukrainian counterparts. The latter approved the draft with one caveat—the commonwealth was to be one of “independent” rather than “democratic” states. Everyone agreed: full democracy was still a dream for most of the Soviet republics.
²¹

After breakfast, which included “Soviet”-brand champagne, the three Slavic leaders gathered in the billiard room, which had been turned into a conference hall. The format chosen for the negotiations, with Yeltsin and Burbulis speaking for Russia, Shushkevich and Kebich for Belarus, and Kravchuk and Fokin for Ukraine, was advantageous to the Ukrainian president. Yeltsin's influential aides, including Gaidar, Kozyrev, and Shakhrai, would be in the adjacent room along with their less prepared Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts. Kravchuk immediately took control of the whole negotiating process, volunteering to draft the new agreement and all but ignoring the draft prepared by the Russo-Belarusian team of experts the previous night. “I took a blank sheet of paper, a pen, and said that I would write,” remembered Kravchuk later. “That was how we began. We wrote and edited ourselves, without assistants. According to the old protocol, there had never been anything like it—heads of state writing government documents themselves.”
²²

The previous night, Kravchuk had refused to let his people join the Russo-Belarusian expert working group. In fact, he believed that he had no one to dispatch, recalling later, “I had no experts.” If his prime minister, Vitold Fokin, was loath to bury the Soviet Union, his Rukh advisers were more than eager to do so but lacked political experience and legal expertise. Kravchuk could rely on his negotiating
skills and the results of the Ukrainian referendum, Yeltsin's hatred of Gorbachev, and the desire of the Young Turks to move ahead with Russian economic reform as soon as possible. During the working dinner of the previous night he had played his cards well, singlehandedly winning the first round of negotiations with his flat refusal to sign Gorbachev's treaty or join any kind of reformed union. That forced Yeltsin to switch gears and start thinking about a different kind of agreement. Kravchuk now managed to present the very idea of an agreement as a concession on his part. Letting his people join the Russians and Belarusians in drafting the agreement would have meant committing himself to a particular draft, becoming part of the process; Kravchuk wanted to remain the arbitrator of its results.
²³

Kravchuk had with him brief handwritten notes. These were the old drafts of the Slavic union treaty prepared on his and Yeltsin's initiative in early 1991 but rejected by Gorbachev. They had been revised in the fall of 1991 by Kravchuk's experts in the Ukrainian parliament, and he had studied them the previous night: he did not go to bed until three o'clock in the morning. His main counterpart on the Russian side turned out to be Burbulis, who had notes of his own hidden in one of his pockets. The principals, with the document prepared during the night session by the Russian and Belarusian experts in front of them and handwritten notes besides, began to discuss its text article by article. The Ukrainian delegate Mykhailo Holubets, who spent the morning of December 8 in the advisers' room, remembered later that for the first thirty or forty minutes there was no sound from the billiard room. Then, clearly concerned by something, Burbulis and Fokin came out for brief consultations with the experts. Another fifteen minutes passed, and finally the experts heard a “hurrah”—the principals had agreed on the first article of the treaty. At Yeltsin's initiative they raised glasses of champagne in triumph. The process went smoothly after that.
²⁴

The Agreement on the Establishment of a Commonwealth of Independent States consisted of fourteen articles. The three leaders agreed to create the Commonwealth and recognize the territorial integrity and existing borders of each now independent republic. They declared their desire to establish joint control over their nuclear arsenals. They also declared their willingness to reduce their armed forces and strive for complete nuclear disarmament. The prospective
members of the Commonwealth were given the right to declare neutrality and nuclear-free status. Membership in the Commonwealth was open to all Soviet republics and other countries that shared the goals and principles declared in the agreement. The coordinating bodies of the Commonwealth were to be located not in Moscow—the capital of Russia, the old tsarist empire, and the vanishing USSR—but in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

The three leaders guaranteed the fulfillment of the international agreements and obligations of the Soviet Union, while declaring Soviet laws null and void on the territory of their states from the moment the agreement was signed. “The operation of agencies of the former USSR on the territory of member states of the Commonwealth is terminated,” read the final paragraph of the agreement. It was a natural concluding statement for a document that began with the following declaration: “We, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation (RSFSR), and Ukraine, as founding states of the USSR that signed the union treaty of 1922 . . . hereby establish that the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality ceases its existence.”
²⁵

The idea that the three founding republics of the Union could not just leave it but had to dissolve it altogether belonged to Yeltsin's legal adviser Sergei Shakhrai. The Soviet constitution guaranteed the right of republics to leave the Union—a right realized in September 1991, after long struggle, by the three Baltic republics. But Shakhrai's argument went further: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus were not only leaving the Union but dissolving it. The Soviet Union had been formed in December 1922 by four Soviet socialist republics: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Federation, which included the future republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. When the Transcaucasian Federation was abolished in 1936, it was up to the three remaining founding members of the Union to decide the question of its future existence—so went Shakhrai's argument.
²⁶

According to Kebich, the statement on the dissolution of the Soviet Union was added to the document at the initiative of Burbulis after the whole text had already been approved by the principals. Burbulis allegedly told a surprised Yeltsin that the document lacked an article. “We should begin by denouncing the union treaty of 1922,” argued Burbulis. “Only then will our accords be absolutely correct
from the legal viewpoint.” The principals agreed. If leaving the Union along with Russia and Belarus was good enough for Kravchuk, that solution did not satisfy Yeltsin, as it not only divorced Russia from a good part of its former empire without giving it any legal means of maintaining influence there but also left Gorbachev in charge of the rump Union. If Russia left the USSR but the Union was not dissolved, then Gorbachev could stay in Moscow, the seat of the Union and the capital of a Russia no longer in the Union. The struggle between him and the Russian president would continue, becoming uglier than ever. Dissolving the Union completely was the only solution that satisfied Yeltsin and his team.
²⁷

THE SIGNING CEREMONY
in Viskuli took place at 2:00 p.m. in the lobby of the hunting lodge. Tables were brought from other rooms and chairs from the living quarters. Kebich was assigned to find a tablecloth, which was eventually located in the dining hall. His next task was to prepare the journalists for what was promised to be a very short ceremony. Yakov Alekseichik, one of the few media representatives in attendance, noticed that Yeltsin was “not quite in good form.” The “Soviet”-brand champagne with which Yeltsin had celebrated every article in the agreement was clearly affecting something more than the process of dissolving the Soviet Union. The newspaper reporters were advised not to ask Yeltsin any questions. But once the ceremony was over, Yeltsin, who was in a good mood, decided to say a few words to the journalists. At that moment, the spokesman for the Belarusian prime minister, following his superior's earlier instructions, suddenly interrupted Yeltsin: “Boris Nikolaevich, there is no need to say anything: everything is clear!” Yeltsin was taken aback. “Well, if it's all clear to you . . . ,” he said to the journalists, and abruptly left the room. The press conference was over.
²⁸

Kravchuk remembered Yeltsin being under a lot of stress that day. He was thinking ahead and counting his allies and enemies in the now inevitable clash with Gorbachev. “Boris Nikolaevich was visibly nervous,” wrote Kravchuk in his memoirs. “He was afraid that Gorbachev might win Nazarbayev over to his side.” Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan was the most influential Central Asian leader, and Gorbachev had previously countered initiatives from the Slavic leaders by drawing support from the Central Asian republics.
Moreover, Kazakhstan was the only other republic (apart from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) with nuclear arms on its territory. It also had a large Slavic population and had been regarded in the past as a possible member of a Slav-dominated union. Yeltsin ordered his people to call Almaty, then the capital of Kazakhstan, but they were informed that Nazarbayev was in the air, on his way to Moscow. “I urged Boris Nikolaevich not to worry, sensing that this process could no longer be reversed,” remembered Kravchuk later. His assurances did not have the desired effect.
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Yeltsin was adamant: he insisted on speaking with Nazarbayev before the Kazakh leader met Gorbachev in Moscow. He placed his chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, in charge of making the arrangements, but there was little Korzhakov could do before Nazarbayev landed in Moscow. His attempt to convince the head of air traffic control at Vnukovo airport in Moscow to call Nazarbayev's airplane failed, as the general bluntly replied that he had a different boss and would not accept orders from the head of Yeltsin's security detail. In his memoirs, Korzhakov wrote, “Dual power is fraught with danger because people do not recognize a single authority in that period. Gorbachev was no longer taken seriously; people mocked him. But Yeltsin did not have access to the levers of power.” Later it became known that on Gorbachev's orders air traffic controllers had been prohibited from connecting anyone with the president of Kazakhstan while he was en route.
³⁰

Yeltsin finally reached Nazarbayev by phone after the Kazakh leader landed in Moscow. He did his best to persuade him that the Commonwealth was in fact a realization of his idea of 1990 about forming a quadripartite union. Nazarbayev promised to come to Viskuli. Kebich even sent a car to the airport to meet his old friend, but there was no sign of Nazarbayev. First came the news that he had to refuel his plane, then that he would go not to Viskuli but to Minsk, and not immediately but on the following day. Rumor had it that Gorbachev had convinced him to stay in Moscow by offering him the post of prime minister of the crumbling USSR. “The news that Nazarbayev would not come depressed everyone,” recalled Petr Kravchenka, the Belarusian foreign minister. “At that point we could only start guessing what arguments Gorbachev had found to make Nazarbayev change his plans. Was Gorbachev getting ready to resort
to outright force? And here the head of Belarusian KGB, Eduard Shirkovsky, made an ominous comment: ‘After all, it would take just one battalion to nail all of us here.'”
³¹

Shirkovsky was not joking. Earlier that day he had approached Prime Minister ViacheslaÅ­ Kebich: “Viacheslav Frantsevich, this is a coup d'état pure and simple! I have reported everything to Moscow, to the Committee [[for State Security]] . . . I am awaiting Gorbachev's command.”

Kebich was petrified when he heard this. “I would not call myself one of the timid sort,” he remembered later. “But that report gave me the creeps, and my hands went cold.” Kebich asked the secret police chief, “Do you think the command will come?”

The KGB man had no doubt: “Of course! We're faced with high treason, betrayal, if we are to call things by their right names. Don't misunderstand me: I could not help reacting. I swore an oath.”