prestige stiffened the nationalists’ resolve to resist, infuriating Gorbachev. A friendly KGB source advised Yeltsin not to take a flight back to Moscow, as it might be sabotaged. He was driven instead the 217 miles from Tallinn to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and from there flew back to the Russian capital.
An energized Yeltsin reported to deputies packing a committee room in the White House that the military crackdown in the Baltics was “the start of a powerful offensive against democracy in the Soviet Union, and Russia’s turn will come.” He was applauded by adoring Russian journalists. Commanding, self assured, and red-eyed with exhaustion, he urged Russian soldiers not to fire on unarmed civilians, saying it would be unlawful under the new Russian constitution. “You are a pawn in a dirty game,” he told them. An army paratroop unit in the Belarusian city of Vitebsk subsequently refused to deploy to Latvia. Yeltsin also announced that the presidents of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan had decided to draw up a treaty to replace the old Soviet Union. “I think I may now say where—in Minsk,” said Yeltsin, slyly, “but I can’t tell you when.”
“That son of a bitch! What’s to be done about him?” cried Gorbachev to his advisers when he got a report of Yeltsin’s remarks. They listened in silence, aghast at the turn of events. Chernyaev later composed an anguished, 2,000-word letter of resignation, saying he was tortured by burning shame over events in Lithuania. “You’ve told me and others many times that the Russian people would never permit the destruction of the empire. But now Yeltsin is impudently doing just that—in the name of Russia! And very few Russians are protesting,” he wrote. “As a result, you chained yourself to policies that you can only continue by force.”[115] He did not deliver the letter, however, and stayed on with Gorbachev, as he saw no proof of his boss’s complicity in planning the bloodshed. He confided to diplomats that General Valentin Varennikov, commander of land forces in the USSR and an admirer of Stalin, had ordered in the troops on his own initiative. Chernyaev also concluded that Gorbachev genuinely believed misleading reports from Kryuchkov and Pugo that people in the Baltics were being intimidated by a minority of separatists. In private, however, the loyal aide berated Gorbachev for allowing the military to send in the tanks, saying, “This is the demise of your great undertaking!” Gorbachev protested that “I couldn’t simply dissociate myself from the army and express my disapproval after all the insults there to soldiers, officers, their families [calling them] occupiers and pigs.”
Outside the Kremlin, the Russian capital was in uproar. Muscovites took to the streets to show that they had had enough of totalitarian methods. Some carried placards insulting the president as Gorbaty, the Hunchback. The nonstate media gave graphic accounts of the killings.
Yegor Yakovlev, the editor who had toed the Gorbachev line in Moscow News and taken his side in the power struggle with Yeltsin, was deeply disillusioned. The journal’s thirty directors, a who’s who of the liberal Russian intelligentsia, expressed their bitter loss of faith in the president and announced they were quitting the party. All signed their names to a devastating editorial accusing “a regime in its death throes” of committing a criminal act. “After Bloody Sunday in Vilnius, what is left of our president’s favorite topics of ‘humane socialism,’ ‘new thinking’ and ‘our European home’—virtually nothing!”
This charge from intellectuals whom he had encouraged and protected would rankle with Gorbachev for years. Infuriated, he demanded the Supreme Soviet suspend a recently adopted law on press freedom—which he had promoted—and assign a censor to each media organization. Even conservative deputies found this too much in the face of public outrage.
On Sunday, January 20, Yeltsin addressed a Moscow protest rally of 100,000 people. He warned that the danger of dictatorship had become a reality. International leaders harbored similar fears. Several days later, after Soviet black berets in Latvia’s capital of Riga shot dead two militiamen, a television cameraman, and two civilians, President Bush put off a summit meeting with Gorbachev scheduled for mid-February. The United States, Canada, and the European Parliament delayed implementing aid programs.
Under such internal and international pressure, and with his own innate revulsion for bloodshed, Gorbachev pulled back. He adopted a more conciliatory tone to the Baltics. He went on television on January 22 to say that he was deeply moved by the bloodshed, declared the use of armed force inadmissible, and denied that the military activity was a prelude to direct rule. Belatedly Gorbachev would claim that the hard-liners’ plan was “to establish a blood bond with me, to subordinate me to a kind of gangster’s mutual protection society.”[116]
But the damage had been done. Making things worse, no one was ever punished for the slaughter in Vilnius. In July 1991 Gorbachev’s chief law officer, Soviet prosecutor Nikolay Trubin, exonerated Soviet forces, finding, grotesquely, that all the casualties were shot by Lithuanian nationalists.
In the Kremlin Gorbachev continued to rage about the “illogical” behavior of Yeltsin, who was “infatuated with sovereignty.” He telephoned his minion in state television, Leonid Kravchenko, and instructed him to close down Radio Rossiya, the voice of Yeltsin’s parliament, which had been granted a frequency in December. It had carried factual reports from Lithuania that infuriated Mikhail Gorbachev personally, according to Yeltsin’s radio controller, Oleg Poptsov. Kravchenko protested that shutting it down would cause a scandal. Gorbachev insisted that it be restricted then to a much weaker frequency, in “the back of beyond.”
Kravchenko denied repeated requests from Yeltsin for air time on state television in the weeks after Vilnius. Every appearance of Yeltsin made Gorbachev crazy, he recalled. “It looked childish, like little boys battling for domination, but it was based of course on the instinctive fear that Yeltsin was acquiring an authority with the people which threatened Gorbachev’s own survival.”
He finally bowed to enormous public pressure and agreed to broadcast a live interview with Yeltsin on February 19. Gorbachev insisted that one of the two interviewers should be Sergey Lomakin, a good-looking young favorite of Raisa. Gorbachev sent Lomakin a list of hostile questions, and Lomakin asked even tougher ones. But Yeltsin managed to create a sensation for the millions of viewers who tuned in across the USSR. He called for the immediate resignation of Gorbachev, who was “lying to the people and was smeared with the blood of ethnic conflicts,” and demanded the transfer of all power to the leaders of the fifteen Soviet republics.
Gorbachev recalled Yeltsin’s behavior with disgust. “His speech teemed with rude and offensive remarks about me,” he complained. “His hands were trembling. He was visibly not in control of himself and laboriously read out a prepared text.” In Washington, Bush watched the Russian leader’s performance on a news report and remarked to his aides in the Oval Office, “This guy Yeltsin is really a wild man, isn’t he!”[117]
Despite everything, President Bush and other Western leaders wanted the Soviet Union to stay intact under its current leader. They preferred dealing with the sophisticated and amenable Gorbachev than the unpredictable Yeltsin. Robert Gates, deputy national security adviser and future head of the CIA, who in the early days wrote off Gorbachev as an aberration, now saw him doing “what we wanted done on one major issue after another.”[118] With some justification Yeltsin complained that Americans didn’t get it. They saw only one figure in Moscow, and that figure was surrounded by so much foreign euphoria they couldn’t see the truth.
On a second trip to the United States that spring, Yeltsin, with his increased stature as leader of the Russian republic, asked for an official invitation to the White House. Bush hesitated, commenting to Brent Scowcroft that such a step would “drive Gorbachev nuts.” That might be just why Yeltsin wanted it, suggested his national security adviser. “Well that’s also why I don’t want to do it,” replied Bush. They agreed they would see him but would get Congress rather than the White House to issue the official invitation to Washington.[119]
Yeltsin’s call for the resignation of the Soviet president overshadowed Gorbachev’s sixtieth birthday on March 2. He celebrated in the Kremlin with Yazov, who presented him with a saber with inlaid sheath; Pugo, who gave him an inscribed Makarov pistol; and Kryuchkov and others, who sent expensive presents straight to his dacha. Kravchenko arranged for Soviet television to broadcast a sycophantic documentary called
The best birthday present he got came from six pro-Gorbachev communist deputies in Yeltsin’s parliament. They secured enough votes to call a special session of the Russian congress for March 28 to have Yeltsin impeached for his television behavior. Gorbachev clutched at this straw. He told Chernyaev, “Boris Nikolayevich is done for; he’s starting to toss and turn; he’s afraid of being held responsible for what he has and hasn’t done for Russia.”
Yeltsin raised the stakes at a vast outdoor assembly in Moscow on March 9 by declaring war on the leadership in the Kremlin, an intemperate remark he withdrew a week later.
The hard-liners around Gorbachev decided on a display of military might to intimidate the restless populace.
