The Last Empire (59 page)

Upon assuming presidential office in 1990, Nazarbayev was caught between a rock and a hard place: on one hand, rising Kazakh self-awareness and nationalism; on the other, growing separatist
tendencies among the Slavs, who were settled largely in northern Kazakhstan. While pushing for his republic's legislative sovereignty and economic autonomy, he lent no open support to either Kazakh or Slavic nationalism. Balancing between the two groups, he managed to consolidate power in Almaty and become an influential power broker in Moscow. Nazarbayev gained the respect of Yeltsin and Gorbachev, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich, and his word counted for a good deal among the leaders of the Central Asian republics. The collapse of negotiations on the new union treaty and the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States tested Nazarbayev's ability to maneuver without appearing to waver.

Nazarbayev could not unilaterally declare the independence of Kazakhstan against the wishes of its Slavic majority, but neither could he embrace the Commonwealth as constituted in Belavezha: that would mean 6.5 million Kazakhs sharing the new political entity with more than 200 million Slavs. One could easily predict the consequences of that arrangement for the Kazakh elite's influence in the Commonwealth, to say nothing of the Kazakh national and cultural identity. Even less attractive was the vision of Kazakhstan's future offered by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the spiritual father of the Slavic Union, which many believed to have come into existence in Belavezha. Solzhenitsyn was a proponent of the “reunification” of northern Kazakhstan with Russia. As Nazarbayev affirmed later, even if he had come to Belavezha on December 8, he would not have signed the agreement in its existing form.
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Nazarbayev was not prepared to sign the Commonwealth treaty with the Slavic presidents alone, but he was happy to do so if joined by other Central Asian leaders. On December 12, he flew to Ashgabat, the capital of the neighboring Muslim republic of Turkmenistan, to take part in a meeting of the five presidents of the Central Asian republics. On the agenda of the meeting, hosted by President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, was the question of the Central Asian response to the creation of the Slavic Commonwealth. Niyazov proposed the formation of a Central Asian confederation as a counterbalance to the Slavic Union created in Belavezha. Nazarbayev was among those who argued against it. He wanted the Central Asian republics to join the Commonwealth created by the three Slavic leaders.

“We gathered at Niyazov's quarters in Ashgabat,” recalled Nazarbayev, “and discussed the situation until 3:00 a.m.: whether we should refuse to accept the dissolution of the Union and recognize Gorbachev as president—but what kind of Union could there be without Russia? Or should we create a Central Asian confederation—that was what Niyazov proposed, but then, we have one economy, one army, one and the same ruble [[with Russia]], 1,150 nuclear warheads in Kazakhstan. . . . How could we engage in a confrontation with Russia?” The idea of a Central Asian confederation probably would have been advantageous to Niyazov's own republic, which was rich in natural gas and had a population of only 3.5 million, the absolute majority of whom were Turkmen. But the prospect of complete separation from Russia and other Slavic republics could deepen the emerging division between Slavs and Kazakhs in Kazakhstan and might very well mean the end of Kazakhstan in its current borders, with the subsequent realization of some form of Solzhenitsyn's scenario.
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Crucial to the outcome of the late-night debate in Ashgabat was the position taken by the fifty-three-year-old leader of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. Uzbekistan was Central Asia's most populous republic. With close to 20 million inhabitants, it was third in the Soviet Union, after Russia and Ukraine. The Uzbeks, numbering more than 14 million, had a comfortable majority over non-Uzbeks: their largest ethnic minority, the Russians, came a distant second, with somewhat more than 1.6 million. While not threatened by Russians or Slavs at home, the Uzbek elite had had difficult relations with Moscow in the last years of Soviet rule. Moscow had never tried to send an ethnic Russian to rule non-Slavic Uzbekistan, as was attempted in Kazakhstan, but it did much to alienate the Uzbek elite with its relentless drive against corruption—a drive that, for a number of reasons, focused on Uzbekistan.
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The investigation of the “Cotton Case,” which soon became known as the “Uzbek Case,” began under Yurii Andropov and resumed with new vigor under Gorbachev. The facts uncovered by the Moscow investigators in Uzbekistan were staggering. The first secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party was accused of taking bribes from fourteen individuals in the total amount of 1.2 million rubles. Some of the bribes, claimed the prosecutors, had been handed over in St. George's Hall of the Kremlin Grand Palace during sessions of the USSR
Supreme Soviet. The system that generated millions of dollars in bribes in Uzbekistan was created by Shoraf Rashidov, the first secretary of the republic's Central Committee and a nonvoting member of the Moscow Politburo, who ran the republic from 1961 to 1983.

In the mid-1970s, responding to increasing demands from Moscow for production quotas of cotton—Uzbekistan's main export product—and encouraged by that year's bumper crop, Rashidov made a public pledge to his patron, Leonid Brezhnev, that from then on his republic would produce 6 million tons of cotton per annum. At best, it could in fact produce only two-thirds of that amount, and in a bad year, no more than 3 million tons. Rashidov's future and the careers of those around him were under threat. Rashidov ordered every available plot of land to be used for growing cotton and forced the entire population of the republic, including children and teenagers, to work in the fields, irrespective of their main occupation. The results were disappointing at best—the harvest never reached 6 million tons.
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Like European imperial powers in their overseas colonies, the Soviets in Uzbekistan wanted “white gold,” as cotton was then known in Soviet parlance. While cotton was grown and produced in Uzbekistan, the main textile facilities were in Russia. Thus Uzbekistan exported cotton and imported textiles, at a great loss to its economy. The leaders of Uzbekistan then found a colonial solution to the imperial problem. It was called bribery. If the missing 2 or 3 million tons per annum could not be produced in the republic, decided Uzbek officials, they could be “added” to the official reports.

The scheme involved tens of thousands of individuals at all levels, from collective farms to high offices in the government and the Central Committee. Money received from the center for allegedly produced cotton was redistributed in Uzbekistan in the form of bribes. Millions of rubles also went to directors of textile factories and state and party officials in Russia, who confirmed the receipt of cotton never produced or pretended not to know what was going on. Uzbekistan became the homeland of the first hundred Soviet-era millionaires and a breeding ground of organized crime. Andropov and then Gorbachev gave their consent to the arrests of those involved in the scheme. With thousands of people under investigation, many began to regard the criminal prosecution as an assault on the entire republic, whose leaders were considered by their defenders to be
guilty of nothing more than trying to fulfill the wishes of their colonial masters.

Islam Karimov, who became the leader of Uzbekistan in 1990, shared the feelings of his countrymen. Like many in Uzbekistan, he regarded the “Cotton Case” as a form of political persecution. In September 1991, he convened a congress of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, now renamed the Popular Democratic Party, which adopted a resolution exonerating the communist leaders of Uzbekistan of any wrongdoing. “They have labored honestly and with a clear conscience for the good of the Motherland and can look their people in the eye directly and openly,” read the resolution. In late December 1991, a few days before being elected to the newly created presidency of his country, Karimov pardoned every individual prosecuted as a result of the investigation. By that time it had become known as the “Uzbek Case” and served as a symbol of Uzbek suffering under the communist regime.
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Karimov showed much more independence than Nazarbayev during the Gorbachev-initiated talks on the new union treaty. He often sided with Yeltsin and Kravchuk in derailing Gorbachev's efforts (generally supported by Nazarbayev) to tie the republics more closely to the center. After the August coup he moved swiftly to remove the veneer of communist ideology from Uzbek society, demolishing monuments to communist leaders and rechristening squares and streets originally named after them. He declared, however, that Uzbekistan was not ready for democracy, crushed nascent opposition, and proclaimed that his inspiration was the political and economic model of neighboring China. Despite this move away from Moscow, Karimov was unhappy with what had happened at Belavezha. He later would express his displeasure directly to Yeltsin concerning the separate agreement between the Slavic presidents. But during the lengthy discussion in Ashgabat on the night of December 12–13, 1991, Karimov supported Nazarbayev and others who were arguing against the creation of what Moscow journalists were already calling the “Muslim Charter.”

Karimov's motives for joining the Commonwealth were different from Nazarbayev's. Like the president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, Karimov needed Russia and the Commonwealth as allies against Islamic fundamentalism and rising China. But even more, he needed
Russian textile factories to process Uzbek cotton. Without them, the Uzbek economy would collapse in a matter of weeks. Talking to reporters after the end of the Ashgabat meeting, Karimov rejected suggestions of a second-class citizenship status awaiting the Muslim republics in the Slavic Commonwealth. He told reporters that “the only way to escape a secondary role [[for those republics]] is to turn Central Asia into a highly developed region with its own processing industry.”
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Even though they were unhappy about the exclusively Slavic character of the Belavezha meeting, Nazarbayev, Karimov, and their colleagues saw no alternative but to support—in each case for a different combination of political, economic, social, ethnic, and security reasons—the course adopted at Belavezha by Russia and its Slavic neighbors. At Ashgabat, the Central Asian leaders not only agreed to join the Commonwealth but also came up with a face-saving way to do so. “Having discussed the matter, we adopted a declaration of the leaders of the five republics,” Nazarbayev told journalists after the end of the meeting, “which states the following: ‘We treat with understanding the effort of the leaders of the republics of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine to establish a Commonwealth of Independent States in place of the previously disenfranchised republics. Our main condition is the entry of all republics of the CIS as founders, that is, on the basis of absolutely equal rights.”
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THE ALMATY SUMMIT
, which, as many expected, would decide the fate of both the crumbling Union and the not yet fully established Commonwealth, was scheduled for Saturday, December 21. It was to be held at the Palace of Friendship in Kazakhstan's capital, where in early November the leaders of twelve Soviet republics had met for their first summit without Gorbachev to sign an economic agreement.

This new meeting would also take place without Gorbachev. But how many leaders would come to Almaty was not clear until the very end, and the journalists who descended on the capital of Kazakhstan—almost five hundred in all—to cover the last Soviet and first post-Soviet summit of the republican presidents were kept guessing. “The talk now is that not just eight but nine or ten states will take part,” wrote a reporter for the Moscow newspaper
Izvestiia
. “It is expected that the Minsk ‘trio' and the Ashgabat ‘quintet' will be joined by Armenia and
perhaps Moldova.” On the eve of the meeting, news reached Almaty that Ayaz Mutalibov of Azerbaijan, a country locked in bloody battle with Armenia over Nagornyo-Karabakh, was also on his way.
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What the presidents of republics with different interests—sometimes even at war with one another, such as Armenia and Azerbaijan—were bringing to the table and what to expect from the meeting were anyone's guesses. The only political leader to go public with his agenda for the Almaty summit was the one who was not invited to attend—Mikhail Gorbachev. He was left with no vehicle but that of a public statement to present his views and concerns and try to influence the outcome. After the ratification of the Belavezha Agreement by the Russian parliament and the Ashgabat declaration of the leaders of the Central Asian republics, Gorbachev had no choice but to reconcile himself to the idea of the Commonwealth. On December 17, the day on which Baker left Moscow and Gorbachev held his all-important meeting with Yeltsin about the transfer of power, the Soviet president declared to the media that his position coincided 80 percent with that of Yeltsin.

The content of the remaining 20 percent was revealed on the following day, when Gorbachev published an open letter to the participants in the Almaty summit. Gorbachev wanted the Commonwealth to become a subject of international law, take part in international relations, and have a common citizenship. He also argued for the creation of a unified military command and a common foreign policy agency that would take care of Soviet legal obligations abroad and USSR representation in the United Nations Security Council. He proposed the creation of Commonwealth institutions to coordinate economic and financial policy, as well as academic and cultural activities. Finally, he suggested dropping the reference to independent states from the title of the new organization and calling it the “Commonwealth of European and Asian States.”
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