The Last Empire (58 page)

The visit to Kyrgyzstan was first on Baker's itinerary. “In a region more prone to warlords than Jeffersonian democrats, the president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, was an anomaly who genuinely believed in democracy and free markets,” wrote Baker in his memoirs, explaining the rationale behind his stopover in Bishkek. “I felt my visit there would be an important symbol for Akaev and the Muslims in this region that the United States was ready to support their reforms.” A former president of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences, Akaev indeed stood out among the new generation of republican leaders, all of
whom, with the notable exception of his fellow scientist StanislaÅ­ Shushkevich of Belarus, were former Communist Party bosses. And the US secretary of state's visit was indeed a big boost for him and his country, which was about to be born. As Baker later remembered, when the president of Kyrgyzstan saw him descending from his plane at the Bishkek airport, he “had his hands clasped in fists above his head as though he had just won the welterweight boxing title.”

What Akaev told Baker was exactly what he wanted to hear from a Central Asian republican leader: Akaev was all for the Commonwealth, as he considered Russian help essential in dealing with the threat posed by radical Islam and the growing influence of neighboring China. He did not plan to acquire nuclear arms and did not think that his country needed a military force of more than a thousand troops. Kyrgyzstan would be armed instead with the five principles that Baker had proclaimed in the wake of the August coup as guidelines for the post-Soviet governments. In short, Kyrgyzstan would become a willing and enthusiastic participant in the new world order envisioned by the US secretary of state. Baker left Bishkek for Almaty thinking that “with our enormous moral authority with many of these republics and their leaders, the United States had a unique responsibility to support reform efforts.”
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Less than hour later, Baker landed in Almaty. This was his second visit to Kazakhstan in little more than three months—he had last been there in mid-September, during his postcoup fact-finding mission to the USSR. His return underscored the importance of the republic and the political acumen of its leader. The president of Kazakhstan, fifty-year-old Nursultan Nazarbayev, was running the only non-Slavic republic with nuclear arms on its territory, had considerable influence in Soviet politics, and was eager to establish direct political and economic relations with the West. The future of the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth, as well as control of nuclear arms, which was paramount for the American leadership, all depended in large degree on the attitude of the Kazakh president.

Lagging behind many of his fellow republican leaders in declaring his country's independence, Nazarbayev had caught up with them after the Belavezha summit. After attending a stormy meeting between Gorbachev and Yeltsin on December 9, Nazarbayev decided to shift his support from Gorbachev to Yeltsin and his political weight
from the all but defunct Soviet Union to the increasingly viable Commonwealth.
Rossiiskaia gazeta
described Nazarbayev's new position as follows: “He advised against speculating on the subject of opposition between Slavic and Asian republics. First, because it is dangerous; second, because he himself is acutely opposed to agreements based on the national, ethnic principle and considers them a throwback to the Middle Ages. Third, because he sees no anti-Kazakh or similar motives in the desire of three Slavic states to find optimal forms of cooperation.”

After leaving the Kremlin, Nazarbayev rushed home to speed up the process of making Kazakhstan an independent state. The Union was living out its last days, and if Kazakhstan wanted to play any role in the Commonwealth or any other regional organization, it had to have all the formal attributes of national independence. On December 10, the Kazakh parliament renamed the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic the Republic of Kazakhstan. Later that day, Nazarbayev swore an oath of allegiance as the first elected president of the republic—the elections had taken place on December 1, the same day that Ukrainians voted for independence and elected Leonid Kravchuk as their president. On December 16, the Kazakh parliament proclaimed independence without submitting the matter to a referendum. As some newspapers suggested, in effect the Ukrainians had voted on December 1 not only for their own independence but also for that of Kazakhstan.
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James Baker wanted to see Nazarbayev in order to discuss nuclear arms and the future of the Commonwealth. He was prepared to offer the same carrots that the US administration was ready to give the other leaders of the Soviet republics: humanitarian aid and technical assistance. He conducted his negotiations with Nazarbayev on the basis of standard points prepared by his staff for meetings with all post-Soviet presidents. They included a list of American expectations concerning nuclear arms and conventional forces, resolution of border disputes, and economic cooperation. They also listed the amount of American aid for the Soviet Union: pledges of humanitarian assistance of up to $3.5 billion since December 1990. In December 1991 the crumbling Soviet state was supposed to receive supplies valued at $600 million as part of the pledged amount. Nazarbayev apparently showed little interest in the aid package. He wanted recognition of his
country's independence and foreign investments. “Send me advisers and investors, not money,” he told Baker.
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Nazarbayev was also forthright in showing his displeasure with what he interpreted as American support for the dissolution of the USSR. “Yeltsin told the whole world that he had called President Bush and that President Bush had immediately supported what he had done,” confided Nazarbayev to Baker. “If it's true, I would say only that since President Bush is respected by the whole world, one has to consider the weight of his words very carefully. What did the president think of the legality of that move by them? What did he think of the constitutionality of this? In August, the reaction of the United States was very clear. And the US view is important to everybody. Now what we have is Yeltsin trying to legitimize his actions by getting President Bush to do so for him.”
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Baker assured Nazarbayev that Bush had remained neutral, giving no support to Yeltsin and his counterparts. The secretary of state recalled later that while Nazarbayev was clearly hurt by his initial exclusion from the Belavezha summit, he was prepared to make his peace with that. “They have all apologized, and it's over,” he told his American visitor, referring to Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich. He was now all for the Commonwealth and was working hard to convince his fellow Central Asian presidents to join it. “Once again, I am going to have to get into being a firefighter,” he told Baker, referring to the political storm touched off by the Belavezha Agreement. “I am going to have to get them all together.”

There was one major condition on which the Central Asian leaders were ready to join the Commonwealth: they were to be treated as its founding members, and the whole treaty was to be signed anew with their participation. Nazarbayev also wanted a separate treaty between the four nuclear republics on the control of nuclear arms. Those words must have been music to Baker's ears. “When I got to my room that night at 3:00 a.m., I felt that my three hours with Nazarbayev were among the best I had had thus far,” he recalled. Baker wanted Nazarbayev to succeed. As he explained the next day to StanislaÅ­ Shushkevich in Minsk, “By an association of the Central Asian republics with the Slavic republics, the Central Asians could serve as a bridge between West and East and a secure buffer against the spread of radical Islamic fundamentalism.”
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WHILE THE AMERICANS
were interested in extending the Slavic Commonwealth into Central Asia for reasons related to nuclear arms and militant Islam, the motivations of the Central Asian leaders for joining the Belavezha Agreement were much more diverse and complex. Nuclear arms were an issue only for Nazarbayev, and radical Islam was only one of the factors that influenced the Central Asian leaders, most of whom were former party bosses. At the center of their thinking was Russia. Traditionally, their relations with Moscow were ones of subordination and dependence, and while they were eager to end the former, they were not in a position to terminate the latter entirely.

On December 17, the day Baker arrived in Almaty, Nazarbayev presided over a mass downtown rally to mark two occasions: the declaration of the country's independence by the republican parliament one day earlier and the fifth anniversary of the anti-government protests in Almaty on December 16 and 17, 1986. The protests had involved Kazakh youth and proceeded under national slogans—the very first indication of rising ethnic tensions in the Soviet Union. The young people, largely students of Almaty institutions of higher learning, went into the streets to protest Moscow's appointment of an ethnic Russian as leader of the republic's party and state apparatus, a post earlier occupied by a Kazakh. The appointment of Gennadii Kolbin was part of Gorbachev's plan to remove from power party cadres closely associated with Leonid Brezhnev and his corrupt rule.

To establish his control over the republics and regional elites, Gorbachev relied on party cadres from Russia. A year earlier, Boris Yeltsin had been transferred from Sverdlovsk to Moscow to take over the capital from the Brezhnev loyalist Viktor Grishin. Now Kolbin, who had been Yeltsin's boss in Sverdlovsk in the 1970s, was moved from the post of first party secretary in the city of Ulianovsk on the Volga to Kazakhstan. With Gorbachev's blessing and assistance, the “Sverdlovsk mafia” was taking over with the goal of rooting out corruption and increasing the power of the new general secretary over a country badly in need of political and economic reform.
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But whereas Yeltsin's appointment to the helm of the Moscow city administration was welcomed by the Moscow public, Kolbin's “election” as first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan
at Moscow's insistence met with hostility on the part of the Kazakh populace and elite alike. The main reason was quite simple: in trying to clamp down on old party cadres and corruption, Gorbachev had violated the unwritten contract between the center and the republics that had existed since Stalin's death—the leader of any republic was to be drawn from its titular nationality. Gorbachev was changing gears and proposing to run the Soviet Union directly from the Kremlin, bypassing local elites. But Almaty was not Moscow. Republics had more rights than cities, and republican party and cultural elites were not about to yield their hard-won local prerogatives to a starry-eyed upstart in the Kremlin.
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There were rumors that senior officials in the republican party apparatus and government, who had much to lose with the arrival of a Moscow appointee in their capital, encouraged ethnic Kazakh students to rebel. Nazarbayev, an ethnic Kazakh, was then head of the republic's government and one of the obvious candidates for the post of first secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party. Some have argued that he was behind the student protests. If so, he managed to remain unnoticed in Moscow. At the height of the protests he spoke to the students, asking them to disperse. When diplomacy failed, he backed those who argued for harsh measures. The protest, which took place a few months before the start of Gorbachev's glasnost, was crushed. There were casualties, and thousands of students were arrested, interrogated, and expelled from the universities.

Nazarbayev, a former metallurgical engineer who had begun his education in Leonid Brezhnev's hometown, Dniprodzerzhynsk, in Ukraine—a fact that he mentioned with pride to underscore his internationalist bona fides—managed to maintain his position in the republican leadership. His time to claim the highest office would come in the summer of 1989, when he was elected first secretary of the Kazakh party with Gorbachev's blessing. The contract between the center and the republican elite in Kazakhstan, violated by Gorbachev a few years earlier, was now restored. This occurred at a time when the republican elite was preparing not only to regain the status it had held under Brezhnev but also to claim new ground in competition with Gorbachev, now weakened by his own political reforms. In the spring of 1990, less than a year after becoming first secretary, Nazarbayev
took over as president of Kazakhstan, receiving his mandate, like Gorbachev, not from the masses but from parliament.

President Nazarbayev had to be very careful in deciding how much sovereignty and independence to take under the circumstances. When it came to the political and ethnic balance in Kazakhstan, he was in a much harder spot than any of his republican counterparts. The republic, whose titular nationality and leaders were Kazakh, was largely non-Kazakh in ethnic composition. Of Kazakhstan's 16.5 million inhabitants, Kazakhs constituted only 6.5 million. Russians were the next-largest ethnic group, with more than 6 million; Ukrainians, linguistically and ethnically close to them and often culturally Russified, constituted the third-largest ethnic group, numbering slightly less than 1 million. In the 1980s the Kazakhs were the fastest-growing ethnic group in the republic, but the Slavs remained a majority. The Slavs were generally better educated, formed a majority in urban centers, and flaunted their superiority as masters of the republic. “If you traveled around my country,” confided Nazarbayev to Baker during his visit to Almaty in September 1991, “you would see Russian kids beating up Kazakh kids. That's how it was for me. It's not easy to live with them.”
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The precarious ethnic composition of Kazakhstan was the result of Soviet ethnic engineering and economic policies. In the early 1930s, the ethnic composition of the republic was affected by Soviet agricultural policies and, in particular, by a brutal campaign of forced collectivization. More than 1 million Kazakhs, or a quarter of their entire population, perished in the famine of 1930–1933. The 1950s brought an influx of hundreds of thousands of Slavs, who arrived as part of another agricultural campaign—the colonization of the “Virgin Lands” launched by Nikita Khrushchev and implemented with the help of a then rising star in Soviet politics, Leonid Brezhnev. They wanted to make the steppes of northern Kazakhstan arable in order to solve the problem of chronic food shortages in the USSR. While the food problem remained unsolved, the ethnic composition of Kazakhstan was further changed in favor of the Slavs.
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