The Last Empire (53 page)

That was not what Kebich wanted to hear. “You might at least have warned me!” he said.

Shirkovsky replied, “I was afraid that you wouldn't agree. And I didn't want to involve you anyway. If anything happens, I'll take full responsibility.” Clearly, he was doing his best to serve two masters.
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Kebich never told Shushkevich about his exchange with Shirkovsky. It is not out of the question, however, that he said something to Yeltsin or Kravchuk. Yeltsin and the others decided that it was time to leave Belavezha. With Nazarbayev remaining in Moscow, there was no doubt that Gorbachev knew about the outcome of the Viskuli negotiations. Communications between Viskuli and the rest of the world were now restored: the journalists had been given an opportunity to send their reports to their press agencies and newspapers. Publicity was the best means of preventing a possible assault. While the delegates gathered in the lobby of the hunting lodge waiting for departure to the airport, the leaders of the now independent states met in Yeltsin's quarters. The first call they made was to the man who had real power to arrest them, the Soviet minister of defense, Yevgenii Shaposhnikov. In the aftermath of the August coup, it was Yeltsin who had insisted on Shaposhnikov's appointment to that post, and in the months leading up to the Viskuli meeting, the minister had demonstrated his loyalty to the Russian president.

Yeltsin reached Shaposhnikov by phone sometime before 10:00 p.m. Moscow time. He informed the Union minister that the three Slavic countries were forming a new entity—the Commonwealth of Independent States. Over the phone, he quoted parts of the agreement dealing with the military. Shaposhnikov was pleased with the section on strategic forces, which were to remain united under a single command. Yeltsin had one more argument in his arsenal to cement Shaposhnikov's loyalty to him and steer him away from Gorbachev. Among the documents that the three Slavic presidents signed that day was a decree on the formation of the Commonwealth Defense Council. The council's own first decree appointed Shaposhnikov commander in chief of the Commonwealth's strategic forces. He accepted the nomination. He believed that “the initiative of the leaders of the three republics has evidently made things more definite and helped society make its way out of the dead end in which it found itself.”
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Immediately after his conversation with Yeltsin, Shaposhnikov was reached by the surprisingly well-informed Gorbachev. “Well, what's new?” he asked. “After all, you've just spoken with Yeltsin. What's going on in Belarus?” Shaposhnikov did not know what to say. “He wriggled and squirmed like a grass snake on a frying pan,” remembered Gorbachev later, “and finally said that they had telephoned him to ask how he envisaged the joint armed forces in a future state structure. It was of course a lie.” According to Shaposhnikov, Gorbachev told him, “I warn you, don't butt into what doesn't concern you!” He then hung up the receiver. Sergei Shakhrai later claimed that Gorbachev tried to reach the commanders of the military districts that evening. With the de facto defection of the minister of defense, he was apparently trying to rally support from Shaposhnikov's subordinates. He failed. Gaidar later commented that Gorbachev could not find one regiment loyal to him. Yeltsin and his people were also talking to military commanders on the ground. One such call from Viskuli was mistakenly directed to Gorbachev's press secretary, Andrei Grachev—Yeltsin's aides were trying to get in touch with Pavel Grachev, Shaposhnikov's first deputy and Yeltsin's savior during the August coup.
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In Viskuli, with Shaposhnikov on their side, the three leaders considered calling Gorbachev. Yeltsin refused to do so, and the task was given to Shushkevich, as host of the meeting. But before Shushkevich was able to reach Gorbachev, Yeltsin placed a call to
none other than President George Bush. According to Kebich, Yeltsin deliberately called Bush before anyone could speak to Gorbachev, He allegedly told those who suggested talking to Gorbachev first, “By no means! First of all, the USSR no longer exists, Gorbachev is not the president and cannot tell us what to do. And second, to avoid any surprises, it's best that he find out about it as a fait accompli that can no longer be reversed.” Shushkevich supported the idea. According to Kebich, he saw the call to Washington as a guarantee against possible retaliation from Moscow. Kravchuk later explained the call in the same terms. “It was done so that the world would know where we were and what documents we were approving,” he remembered later. “For any eventuality, as they say.”
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It was soon after 10:00 p.m. Moscow time that Yeltsin reached Bush in Washington. The Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, who placed the call, first had to explain who he was and why he was calling—he was still a little-known figure in Washington. According to the American memorandum of the conversation, the call lasted for almost half an hour, from 1:08 to 1:36 p.m. Washington time. Yeltsin informed Bush about the decision reached in Belarus. He put special emphasis on the desire of the Slavic leaders to maintain joint control over nuclear arms and their acceptance of the international obligations of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin told Bush that he had just spoken with Shaposhnikov and obtained the approval of Nazarbayev, who was supposed to fly to Minsk to sign the agreements. Whether Yeltsin was still under the impression that Nazarbayev would attend or was simply spinning the situation in the way that worked best for him, he spoke to Bush on behalf of four Soviet republics, not three. “This is very serious,” said Yeltsin. “These four states form 90 percent of the national product of the Soviet Union.” Yeltsin admitted that Gorbachev had not yet been informed of their decisions. As always, Bush was very cautious. He let Yeltsin do the talking, responding to his monologue with an occasional “I see.” He promised to study the text of the agreement and then give his reaction to it. Yeltsin's main goal was accomplished: Bush had received the message and had not rejected the initiative out of hand.
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Shushkevich had the most thankless task imaginable: telling Gorbachev that the country over which he thought he presided had ceased to exist. He later remembered,

I informed him in a few words: “We've signed such and such a declaration, and its contents come down to the following . . . We hope for a constructive continuation of this approach and see no other.” Gorbachev: “Do you realize what you've done?! Do you understand that the world community will condemn you? Angrily!” I could already hear Yeltsin talking to Bush, “Greetings, George!' and Kozyrev interpreting. Gorbachev continued: ‘Once Bush finds out about this, what then?” And I said, “Boris Nikolaevich has already told him; he reacted normally . . . ” And then, at the other end of the line, Gorbachev silently made a scene. . . . And we said goodbye.

Gorbachev was furious and demanded to talk to Yeltsin. “What you have done behind my back with the consent of the US President is a crying shame, a disgrace!” said Gorbachev to Yeltsin, according to his memoirs.
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Gorbachev wanted to see all three Slavic leaders in Moscow the next day. Neither Kravchuk nor Shushkevich was eager to go to Moscow. Yeltsin, for his part, had no choice. It was agreed that he would speak to Gorbachev on their behalf. “I can't stand to go back,” said Yeltsin to Kravchuk before leaving Viskuli. Someone pointed out to him and Kravchuk that their planes could be shot down on Gorbachev's orders once they left the Viskuli-area air base. According to rumors that reached American diplomats, Yeltsin arrived in Moscow early in the morning of December 9 completely drunk and had to be carried off the plane.

In the Soviet (now Russian) capital, Gorbachev's loyal aide Anatolii Cherniaev listened to the midnight news. “Midnight,” he recorded in his diary. “The radio has just reported that Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich have declared the end of the existence of the Soviet Union as an object of international law.”
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The Ukrainian president's plane was registered as flying to Moscow, while in fact it set off for Kyiv. While in Viskuli, as a precaution, Kravchuk had placed no calls and did not tell his family about his travel plans. When he finally reached his residence outside Kyiv, he saw armed men on the premises. He did not know what to expect and was prepared for the worst. It turned out that the men had been sent to protect him. Once safely home, he told his wife what
had happened in Viskuli. “So we're no longer in the Union?” asked Antonina Kravchuk. “What, is it all over?” He answered, “So it would seem.” Kravchuk did not return a call from Gorbachev that night. He no longer felt that the Soviet president was his boss.
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The Belarusian leaders decided to stay in Viskuli rather than fly to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, which the three Slavic leaders had designated as the capital of the Commonwealth as well. They went to bed immediately after returning to the hunting lodge. In the nearby village of Kameniuki, on the edge of the Belavezha Forest, the head of the game reserve, Sergei Baliuk, came home late at night and awakened his wife with the shocking news: “The Soviet Union has fallen apart!” For a while his wife could not comprehend the news. “Half awake, I could make no sense of what had happened or what to do,” recalled Nadezhda Baliuk. “But he was so agitated and nervous, constantly repeating, ‘There is no more Soviet Union, no more.'”
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VI.

FAREWELL TO THE EMPIRE

16

OUT OF THE WOODS

S
HORTLY BEFORE NOON ON MONDAY, DECEMBER
9, 1991, the day after the signing of the Belavezha Agreement, Boris Yeltsin arrived at the Kremlin in a heavily guarded procession of automobiles. He was coming to see Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the now allegedly defunct Soviet Union. Yeltsin's bodyguards were prepared for the worst. Their chief, Colonel Aleksandr Korzhakov, had a gun in the front seat of his Niva sport utility vehicle, the Soviet equivalent of a Jeep. Korzhakov and a subordinate accompanied Yeltsin to Gorbachev's office and remained in the reception room face-to-face with Gorbachev's own bodyguards throughout the meeting, which lasted almost two hours. The concern was that what Gorbachev had refused or been unable to do in Belavezha—arrest the instigators of the dissolution of the USSR—he would start now, in the Kremlin. Before the meeting, Yeltsin had called the Soviet leader and asked for a guarantee of safe conduct. “What, have you gone crazy?” exclaimed Gorbachev. “Not I, perhaps, but someone else,” responded Yeltsin.
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When Gorbachev's aide Vadim Medvedev had reached his boss by mobile phone on his way to the Kremlin earlier that day, the Soviet president showed his bellicose attitude. As Medvedev reported about a paper that he had prepared at Gorbachev's request on economic reasons for maintaining the Union, Gorbachev responded, “What's needed now are not arguments but something
else.” Gorbachev had begun the day by meeting with his legal experts. “Mikhail Sergeevich is in a rage, saying that he will resign; that he will tell them all where to go, and so on . . . that he will ‘show them,'” Anatolii Cherniaev learned from one of the Kremlin staffers who attended the meeting. But when the Russian vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, taken aback by the Belavezha decisions, rushed to Gorbachev's office and demanded the arrest of the “drunken threesome” on charges of treason, Gorbachev refused. He instead asked Georgii Shakhnazarov to draft an address to the nation “dotting all the
I
's and speaking plainly about the role of Kravchuk and the other participants in the Minsk agreements.”
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Gorbachev had expected Kravchuk, along with Yeltsin and Shushkevich, to come to his office. “Let them explain it to the whole country, to the world, and to me,” said Gorbachev to his press secretary, Andrei Grachev. “I have already spoken with Nazarbayev—he is outraged and also waiting for an explanation from Yeltsin.” Nazarbayev and Yeltsin were supposed to see Gorbachev at noon, but neither Shushkevich nor Kravchuk showed any inclination to do likewise. The Belarusian Speaker called Gorbachev's chief of staff, Heorhii Revenko, to let him know that he was not coming. According to Revenko, Shushkevich told him, “almost sobbing,” that he had to catch up on sleep and think things through—everything had gone so quickly in Belavezha. He would come, however, if Gorbachev and Yeltsin decided that they needed him. A few minutes later, Gorbachev would cite that vague promise to tell Kravchuk that Shushkevich was coming to Moscow.

Kravchuk had never returned Gorbachev's midnight call, so the Soviet leader decided to call him again. “So, are you coming to Moscow?” was Gorbachev's first question. When Kravchuk gave a polite but negative answer, Gorbachev used every argument he could think of to change his mind. “What is this?” Kravchuk later remembered Gorbachev saying. “You are a member of the [[State]] Council [[of the USSR]]. How can you? . . . The Union still exists.” Kravchuk responded that the Union was no more. “Does that mean you're not coming?” asked Gorbachev, rather shocked. The usually polite and evasive Kravchuk was direct this time and said no. To himself, he thought, “Enough traveling for me and the others.” The conversation was over. “Well, all right,” said Gorbachev with a sigh of disappointment, and
he hung up the receiver. Kravchuk later remembered that one reason not to travel to Moscow was his suspicion that a trap was being set. “I felt,” he wrote in his memoirs, “that they would not let us go; that they would keep us there until we renounced the agreement signed at the Belavezha reserve.” The possibility of arrest had also been on Yeltsin's mind ever since he departed Viskuli.
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