Chapter 19
THINGS FALL APART
After the fearful days of August 1991, when it seemed, however briefly, that totalitarianism would return to the Soviet Union, the leaders of the constituent republics one by one announced their intention to form independent states. On Saturday, August 24, even Ukraine declared it would seek independence.
Yeltsin was taken aback. Sovereignty within a new union was one thing. But even he found it difficult to contemplate the outright defection from the Soviet Union of the fifty-two million people in Ukraine whose fate had been linked with Russia’s for centuries.
Nevertheless, the Russian president formally recognized the independence of the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which had always been somewhat semidetached members of the Soviet Union. Foreign countries followed suit, no longer wary of offending Gorbachev. But both Yeltsin and Gorbachev faced a dilemma. If the rest of the USSR was disintegrating, what should take its place?
The first initiative to resolve the crisis came in late August. Yeltsin’s secretary of state, Gennady Burbulis, called the Kremlin and suggested to Gorbachev’s adviser Georgy Shakhnazarov that they should meet in the White House and work on new ideas for the future of the Soviet landmass.[183]
A political scientist with bald head and thick black eyebrows, Shakhnazarov doubled as a poet and writer of science fiction under the name Georgy Shakh. But many of his original compositions these days were political memos that he delivered to Gorbachev, always urging him towards ever more daring democratic reforms.
Burbulis was an abrasive former professor of Marxist philosophy from Sverdlovsk. He had the zeal of the converted, having evolved in a short time from communist ideologue to ruthless anticommunist. His evolution was so dramatic that on a television quiz show, contestants who listened to a recording of one of his delirious homages to Leninism thought it was the old Stalin-era apologist Mikhail Suslov. With gaunt face and high-pitched voice, Burbulis was known as Yeltsin’s “grey cardinal,” though he had distinctly worldly tastes. He was the first of the Russian government officials to order himself a Zil after the coup, and Yeltsin observed how thrilled he was when the escort car raced ahead of his new limousine, its light blinking and sirens screeching.
The main difference between Shakhnazarov and Burbulis was that the former wanted to maintain the Soviet Union and the latter wanted to destroy it.
Gorbachev’s adviser consented to go to the White House, “though you would think that as I held higher rank as aide to the president of the Soviet Union he would come to my office.” Giving in on this small detail, he realized, symbolized the shift in power.
When he arrived, accompanied by Gorbachev’s legal adviser, Yury Baturin, they were made to wait half an hour in an anteroom. More small humiliations followed during the daylong negotiations in Burbulis’s cavernous office. Several times Yeltsin’s secretary of state went off to chat with his aides, and twice he went to a separate table to conduct business with other visitors. Shakhnazarov concluded that he wanted them to know they were not top priority.
The sticking point was whether there would be a single union state with some devolved sovereignty, as Gorbachev wanted, or a less centralized union of states, as the Russians insisted. If the latter idea prevailed, then the USSR was indeed finished. Burbulis made it clear that he envisaged Russia going it alone in the world. But when Shakhnazarov asked him if he were prepared to allow an independent Ukraine to keep the Crimea, Yeltsin’s adviser replied, “Absolutely not!” The Russian-populated peninsula in the Black Sea had been ceded from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 by Khrushchev at a time when the Soviet Union was regarded as a permanent entity and it didn’t matter much. Now it did.
Both sides took a break to report to their respective masters. Gorbachev and Yeltsin conferred separately on the telephone. Yeltsin retreated from Burbulis’s hard-line position and said he would agree to an all-union army and foreign ministry. Gorbachev was somewhat heartened. He could perhaps salvage a confederation and a common market similar to, or even stronger than, the European Union.
Yeltsin had to capitulate very quickly on Crimea. The Russian president had raised the issue in a conversation with President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. He told him an independent Russia might have to redraw its borders with other republics, a reference to Crimea and Russian-speaking areas of northern Kazakhstan. “Well then, that’s war,” said Nazarbayev. “That’s civil war.” Yeltsin’s economic adviser, Yegor Gaidar, was also emphatic about the danger. “If you start to discuss the problem of the borders,” he said, “then you have civil war.” Yeltsin quickly closed this Pandora’s box. He could see every day on television the bloodshed that border disputes were causing in the former Yugoslavia.
The Russian and Soviet presidents could at least show a common face to the world again. “After the coup Russia has changed and so has the president,” Yeltsin declared grandly in a television interview. “He found within himself the courage to change his views. I personally believe in Gorbachev today much more than I did three weeks ago before the putsch.” The two rivals openly consulted each other during a session of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. Their only altercation occurred when Yeltsin criticized Gorbachev for creating the climate for the coup, to which the Soviet leader retorted, “Don’t spit on me!”
On September 5 Gorbachev cajoled the congress to approve in principle a new union to be called a Union of Sovereign States, the details of which would be negotiated by the new State Council comprising the leaders of the willing republics. But it would be the last time his famous powers of persuasion would work their magic on a parliamentary assembly.
An anecdote made the rounds. The “Union of Sovereign States” meant the “Union to Save Gorbachev.” (The initials were the same in Russian.)
Gorbachev and Yeltsin performed together on ABC News on the morning of September 6. The much heralded program was postponed twice because of the hectic schedules of the participants. Sitting side by side in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, they told viewers they were getting along fine together.
“There were times when President Gorbachev thought I was a political corpse and I thought he ought not to be president,” said Yeltsin. “Now we are committed to common work—how to deal with a crisis.” Gorbachev agreed: “We do have to cooperate now.”
Then Yeltsin went to ground. Physical exhaustion and melancholy followed the intensity and excitement of battle. He spent almost two weeks on the beach at Yurmala on the Baltic coast; then on September 18, citing a minor heart attack, he retreated to Sochi on the Black Sea. He spent most of the time in a state of semiparalysis or dictating notes for the second volume of his memoirs.
Everyone, it seemed, was rushing to get books out. On October 4 Gorbachev sold a short text called
In Sochi Yeltsin had a visit from Burbulis to discuss strategy. As they sat on deck chairs by the warm sea, his grey cardinal presented him with a “Top Secret” memorandum called “Russia’s Strategy in the Transitional Period.” It was a blueprint for a fully independent Russia. This would be achieved by going along with the new union negotiations until they failed, thereby preserving the appearance of legality. Yeltsin should then make his own arrangements with the other republics and consign the USSR to history.
Yeltsin faced a decision of enormous consequence. He could win full control of Russia, but the price would be high. Russia would lose the steppes of southern Siberia and “Russian” cities like Kharkov and Odessa, as well as the Crimea peninsula and Sevastopol, where the Russian fleet had been based since the reign of Catherine the Great.
In Moscow Gorbachev was also trying to relax after the strain of Foros. He took his wife to see a performance of Thornton Wilder’s play Ides of March, whose theme of betrayal he and Raisa found timely, and “really enjoyed it.” A stream of foreign dignitaries came to seek his assessment of the situation. He assured them that the centrifugal tendencies had been reversed. He warned one visitor, “If we fail to preserve the unitary state, we’re going to have another Yugoslavia on our hands. I bet my life on it.” Unlike the Serbs, however, who fought to preserve their
