Winter is Coming (7 page)

My fame and outspoken nature frequently afforded me the opportunity to discuss politics with people far above my “rating” in the field. I was always surprised by how much they overestimated the stability of Communism in Europe and of the USSR itself. It was as if they had forgotten that a wall built by human hands could be torn down by those same hands.

A few cases stand out in my mind. In October 1989, I attended a party where I discussed the future of Europe with Henry Kissinger and Jonathan Bush, the then-president’s brother. They laughed and only humored me a little when I said there wouldn’t be any Communist regimes left in Europe by the end of the year. They could tell I was just a typical young know-it-all, basing my wild opinions on optimism and the smell of change in the air instead of years of scholarship and analysis. And maybe they were right, but so was I.

Early in 1990, after a promising meeting with the editorial board of the
Wall Street Journal
that led to lasting cooperation, editor Bob Bartley got me an invitation to speak at the RAND Corporation in Los Angeles. There, the head of RAND said I should meet his friend Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security advisor and a veteran hand, having held the same post under President Ford in the seventies. At that White House meeting I also met Condoleezza Rice, a Russia expert who was then the director of the Soviet desk at the National Security Council.

They asked me about Boris Yeltsin, who had become Gorbachev’s main critic and rival in Russia. They called Yeltsin a loose cannon and a drunkard, and I could only reply by asking if they wanted to hear about his character or his political future. It shocked me that these experts seemed completely unfamiliar with the political terrain in Russia, where Yeltsin was clearly rising and Gorbachev was flailing and falling. It was clear they only spoke to their good friend Gorbachev and other people inside the Kremlin—after all, that’s where the power and the nuclear weapons were.

I did a better job holding my tongue in this more formal encounter, but I was amazed at how calm and oblivious they seemed to be about what I was sure was a tidal wave of change coming in Eastern Europe and the USSR. They were far more interested in the mechanics of Gorbachev’s reform proposals than the fact that everybody in the streets from Berlin to Vladivostok now felt willing and able to complain openly about their political leaders. I told Scowcroft that Yeltsin was sure to be elected to lead the Russian Supreme Soviet in May, and that he would use this mandate to continue to challenge Gorbachev. I don’t think he believed me, and I understood he and the White House were more concerned about keeping a good relationship with Gorbachev than anything else.

The focus on the Kremlin and Gorbachev’s concerns meant overlooking the broadly destabilizing impact of Yeltsin’s battle of “Russia versus the USSR,” as Scowcroft admits in the 1998 book he wrote with President Bush. “In retrospect, when Yeltsin started to reject the authority of the Union and the Party and to reassert Russian political and economic control over the republic’s own affairs, he was attacking the very basis of the Soviet state, shaking its political structure to the roots.” Exactly so, and he was successful. Not bad for a loose cannon!

In April 1990, in a car ride across the French countryside, I told an interviewer, Fred Waitzkin, who would go on to become a biographer, “Communism is dead. Next year, in 1991, the Soviet Union will not exist. Definitely. Mark my words. Next year, there will be no more evil empire. We will have private property in my country. Many of the republics will have their independence.” When he recounts this conversation in his book
Mortal Games,
Waitzkin adds that to him my predictions seemed “gratuitous, even frivolous” because they were so out of touch with the conventional wisdom of the day.

I suppose it was around this time that I began to develop an immunity to the rolled eyes and raised eyebrows of interviewers, experts, and politicians, an immunity that continues to serve me well today. My track record certainly isn’t 100 percent, but I would rather speak my mind than censor myself because of what others may think of me, especially about important topics. I had no qualms about shouting about the eminent death of

Communism and the need for the West to press harder for democratic reform in the USSR every chance I got.

I was particularly enraged about how Gorbachev was treated like a champion of freedom in Western Europe and America when, as I said to Waitzkin that night in France, “Gorbachev has succeeded in convincing the West that his is the fight of a decent man for a better future. This is a lie. He is the last leader of the Communist state, trying to save everything he can.”

This was indeed the case, and remains so today, despite a Nobel Peace Prize and over two decades of Gorbachev’s revisionist spin. But I also had personal reasons for my hostility toward the man who became the first and last president of the Soviet Union.

Tensions have always been high between Azerbaijan and Armenia, but the wide scale of interethnic violence was unprecedented in Soviet times. As the regional independence movements gained momentum, protests and violent rhetoric also increased. Soviet hegemony kept conflict between the two territories at a standstill, but when Moscow turned a blind eye the region erupted both politically and in violence. A pogrom against Armenians in Sumgait in February was followed by two years of feuding and Armenian emigration. As would happen in Baku, the official Kremlin response was muted and then, when violence started, very late to arrive with force. As one writer darkly joked at the time, British forces got to the Falklands faster than police and troops arrived in Sumgait.

In 1988, the Armenian population of my home city of Baku was around a quarter million. By January 1990, the only remaining Armenians in Baku were mostly mixed families, including my own. Violence erupted in the city and for seven long days and nights, groups calling for the expulsion of all Armenians from Baku terrorized the city and its surroundings. Over a hundred people were killed and close to a thousand were injured. I was fortunate enough to be able to charter a plane and help family and friends and as many others as possible to escape under the cover of night.

It was an entirely preventable tragedy. Eleven thousand Soviet interior troops were stationed in the city, but they were not ordered to intervene. It wasn’t until nearly a week after the attackers had run out of targets that General Alexander Lebed brought the Soviet troops in and martial law was established. By that point, almost all of Baku’s remaining fifty thousand Armenians had fled. It is impossible to imagine that the attacks could have been so efficiently targeted in a city the size of Baku without comprehensive inside information and coordination.

I believe Gorbachev wanted the outbreaks of violence to consolidate direct control over these hot spots in the Soviet empire. He let the violence run its course, then he sent in the troops to crack down on everyone and to install leaders loyal to Moscow by force. The Baku pogrom led to my only meeting with Gorbachev, in the Kremlin a few days after Lebed’s army entered Baku on January 20. I wanted to talk about the 120 people who had been murdered and the tens of thousands who had been displaced. What was he going to do about the unfolding military confrontation between Azeris and Armenians? But Gorbachev ignored this line of discussion and kept asking me who should become the new first secretary of the Communist Party in Azerbaijan.

I continued to do what I could to help draw attention to what was happening in the USSR. I announced I would sell the winner’s trophy of my 1990 world championship match with Karpov if I won and would use the money to create a fund for Armenian refugees from Baku, which I did. It came out to around ten million rubles, $300,000 at the time. My mother and I basically ran this fund out of our home in Moscow, putting me in personal contact with countless refugees. Their painful stories hardened my antipathy for Gorbachev.

An earlier incident around that 1990 match, my fifth match in a row against Karpov and split between Lyon and New York, revolved around which flag was going to appear next to my name during the games, the Soviet hammer and sickle or the revived prerevolutionary Russian tricolor. This may sound incredibly trivial, I admit. But to me, and to a Soviet culture obsessed with symbols, politics, and chess, it was a big deal. The Soviet Union would still exist for well over a year and the match organizers in New York were very worried about politicizing the event or upsetting the Soviet authorities. After all, this wasn’t a
Rocky
movie with an American underdog; it was two Russians. (As Americans in particular tended to call all Soviets, however inaccurate it often was. American world champion Bobby Fischer once boasted he was going to “beat all the Russians” at a tournament, when in fact his opponents were Estonian, Latvian, and Armenian!)

Of course politicizing the match was what I wanted and I stuck to my demand and got my wish, for a while. After four games, both flags were removed from the table due to protests from the Soviet delegation. I switched to wearing a prominent Russian-flag pin for the rest of the match. As much as I loved chess and as much as chess had done for me, I had always known that there were more important things in life. I was lucky that my “disloyalty” to the chess goddess Caissa rarely cost me as dearly at the chessboard as it might have. Despite the trauma of Baku and the distractions of Russian politics taking up so much of the time I should have been preparing for Karpov, I managed to edge out another world championship victory. And I did it representing to the white, blue, and red flag of democracy and rebellion.

Even the Western critics who admit Gorbachev never desired the end of Communism or the USSR give him credit for “not sending in the tanks” as the Iron Curtain unraveled and the Soviet republics spun off from Moscow like water off a top. I will deny Gorbachev even this small point of honor, however. First off, he did use military force in several places, especially the Baltics. Yes, he could have ordered Soviet troops to shut down elections, arrest opposition leaders, and fire on protestors. But would they have listened? Even had some of them obeyed Moscow’s orders and massacred thousands, it would have sealed Gorbachev’s own violent end—and he was nothing if not a survivor.

It also would have been foolish for Gorbachev to take risky military action in Hungary or Czechoslovakia when he had to worry about stability in the USSR. When your own house is on fire you don’t send the firefighters to your neighbor’s house. Food shortages and political independence movements were flaring up all over. Gorbachev didn’t send in the tanks to try to keep the USSR together by force because he knew it was too late and he knew it would mean his own neck. And by mid-1991, when things were completely unravelling, he had seen the backlash after Soviet forces killed dozens and injured hundreds at a Vilnius TV and radio station in January 1991, after the Lithuanians refused to back down from their declaration of independence (issued in March 1990, the first of the Soviet republics). Yeltsin, by then the president of the Russian Federation, immediately denounced the violence and called for the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from the Baltics. Foreign leaders also condemned the crackdown and Gorbachev knew he could lose Western sympathy and the billions in aid he needed to have any hope of keeping hold of power.

The Soviet Union was already without members when it formally dissolved on December 25, 1991. (A date that has no particular resonance in Russia, where Christmas is celebrated on the Orthodox date of January 7, if at all.) Russian president Boris Yeltsin had succeeded in steadily ripping power away from Gorbachev and transferring command and control to the Russian Republic. The three Baltic nations, Armenia, and Georgia had long since declared independence and had been admitted to the United Nations. The failed coup of August 19-21 opened the floodgates for the rest.

Gorbachev’s hope to form a new union was falling apart when news came that hardliners in his government had declared a state emergency to prevent the August 20 signing of the New Union Treaty that would have officially transformed the USSR into a federation of independent republics. During the coup, Gorbachev was supposedly held incommunicado at his dacha in Crimea, but it is my belief that the coup was of his own devising, or at least that he was a willing participant. Instead of seeing his authority continue to dwindle, Gorbachev might have hoped he would be able to return to a strengthened position after “negotiating” with the hardliners after they had done the dirty work of cracking down on political opponents like Yeltsin. As I recounted at the start, there was no popular or military support for the coup and it fell apart in seventy-two hours. After that debacle, even the Central Asian republics that had been eager to join the new union quickly followed Ukraine and Belarus out the door and declared their independence. Mother Russia herself declared on December 12.

The good news for Gorbachev was that the West spent a long time in denial over what should have been considered fantastic news. After my disappointing experiences discussing my homeland with American experts, it came as no surprise that President Bush often sounded more alarmed than overjoyed by the prospect of the Soviet Union falling to pieces. The empire was evil, yes, but it was the evil he and everyone in his administration knew very well. Bush also felt he could rely on Gorbachev, although he was a man backed by the KGB and who had never been elected to anything, over the unknown quantity of the populist and popularly elected Boris Yeltsin.