know where to drop their bombs. He threatens that when he gains power, he will fill outer space with weapons pointed at the United States, make Afghanistan a Russian province, sell off western Ukraine, and blow radioactive waste across the Lithuanian border to kill the population with radiation sickness.
There are other sinister characters discussing, on the day the Soviet Union comes to an end, how to capitalize on the country’s chaotic state. Just outside MOSCOW, in a dacha in the hilly Vedentsovo region, several individuals concerned with the country’s future financial structures are wrapping up a secret three-day meeting. From December 22 to 25, some thirty men of different nationalities, mostly Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, and Chechen, have been conferring on how they should divide the former Soviet Union into zones of influence. They are members of Vorovskoy Mir, or Thieves World. Each person in attendance is a
Organized crime has become a serious problem in the dying Soviet Union. With the unleashing of state assets into private hands, it is about to become a major phenomenon in postrevolutionary Russia.
Already in the last months of the Gorbachev era there are illicit and semilegal fortunes to be made. Unregulated privatization is developing rapidly. Former communist directors are leasing to each other prime industrial properties in preparation for taking them over and enriching themselves when the law permits. Much of the Communist Party asset base that Yeltsin nationalized has already been transferred into the hands of private owners.
Rampant corruption in the oil industry has resulted in the wholesale issuing of export licenses, allowing entrepreneurs to buy oil for rubles and sell it abroad for hard currency. These stamped pieces of paper, Gaidar said later, were “a sort of philosopher’s stone that could almost instantaneously transform increasingly worthless rubles into dollars.” The oilmen and the corrupt members of the
As the Russian president assumes command in the Kremlin, commentator Ilya Milshtein issues a warning to him in an article in
Yeltsin doesn’t have to be told by the media. At the end of December, two former KGB officers write to him alleging that top party officials are siphoning off immense quantities of money and gold and depositing them in foreign bank accounts. Gaidar manages to get $900,000 from state funds to hire the international security and detective agency Kroll Associates to investigate the allegation. It comes up against a wall of noncooperation from inside the new Russian ministry of security. After a month the contract is not renewed.
Chapter 21
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
Yeltsin’s drunken promise that Gorbachev would “stay” in some capacity in the future arrangements for the Soviet Union was soon broken.[204]
On December 6 the Russian president came to Gorbachev’s Kremlin office and told him he was going to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, the next day. There, he promised, he and the republic’s leader, Stanislau Shushkevich, would try to persuade Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk to stay in a new union.
Yeltsin emerged from the meeting to tell reporters, “Every effort must be made to convince the Ukrainians to sign the union treaty.” He added, “If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to consider other options.” He didn’t say what those were.
Knowing the Russian leadership was tired of having any center at all, Gorbachev sensed that treachery was afoot. He told Chernyaev that he suspected Yeltsin and Kravchuk had decided to collapse the Union from both sides.
Chernyaev had already thrown in the towel in his own mind. He was going through the motions of feeding Gorbachev documents to sign, such as agreements between the USSR and other countries on an Islamic conference in Dakar, but it was all “bullshit.” As he wrote in his diary, “It is hard to realize that only Mikhail Sergeyevich needs me, not the country.” Thinking of his wife and mistress, he wondered, “How will my women react to this?”
Pavel Palazchenko predicted that the outcome of the meeting in Belarus would be determined by the fact that, for reasons of their own, all three hated Gorbachev.
Shortly after 3 p.m. on December 7, 1991, a Russian government plane carrying Boris Yeltsin touched down at Minsk, four hundred miles southwest of Moscow. Accompanying him were deputy prime ministers Gennady Burbulis and Yegor Gaidar, foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev, and legal counsel Sergey Shakhrai. They were guarded by twenty burly members of the Russian security service armed with assault rifles, under the command of his chief guardian, Alexander Korzhakov.
The plane took off again in the same direction and after thirty minutes landed at a military airport outside Brest. From there, a small convoy of vehicles took the Russians deep into Belovezhskaya Pushcha, one of the last remaining primeval forests in Europe. As a thick, soft snow fell, they raced through the town of Pruzhany and continued almost as far as the Polish border. The cars pulled up at Viskuli, a mansion with square pillars framing the entrance built in the 1970s for Brezhnev’s hunting pleasure, with adjacent bathhouses, cottages, hunting lodge, and service block.
Everything was done in the utmost secrecy to ensure that the three leaders representing Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine could meet without interruption by journalists or other more dangerous forces. Belarusian KGB head Eduard Shidlovsky had deployed heavily armed patrols in the forest from early morning and sealed off approach roads. He assured Shushkevich that “everything is all right; we are in close connection with the Russian special security service and there will be no problems.” The enemy they feared were reactionary elements of the Soviet forces who might be tempted to prevent what they were about to do.
Shushkevich and Kravchuk and their top officials had already arrived, having flown together from Minsk late that morning. The Ukrainian president and his prime minister, Vladimir Fokin, had immediately gone hunting. The fifty-seven-year-old, white-haired Kravchuk did not want to be seen hanging around waiting for the Russian leader. Nicknamed the Crafty Fox for his political cunning, the former party ideologue turned nationalist once joked that he never carried an umbrella since he could slip between the raindrops. In August he initially cooperated with the coup, then quit the Communist Party, and reinvented himself as a democrat and nationalist.
Kozyrev noticed how tense Kravchuk was. He realized that the Ukrainian boss feared Yeltsin would threaten him and argue for a union, which could cause a breakdown and a resort to a “Yugoslavia-type script.” Yeltsin also remembered Kravchuk as being very tense, even agitated. The overall atmosphere, Gaidar recalled, was one of profound anxiety, with Shushkevich the most agitated and emotional of all. The Belarusian leader was out of his depth in the company of his two wily and powerful fellow Slavs. A prominent nuclear scientist with a square face and bald head, he had little experience of politics. He had been in power only ten weeks, since Belarus rejected the old order and gave power to the reformers in the wake of the coup. His claim to fame outside Belarus was that he once supervised Lee Harvey Oswald when Kennedy’s future assassin was an engineer at a Minsk electronics factory. Shushkevich wondered if his two neighbors actually knew what they were doing, but he was prepared to go along. He believed the USSR was “already ungovernable… a nuclear monster.” Also he disliked Gorbachev, whom he had once looked to as a “god” but latterly found impossible to work with “because he never listened to anybody.”
Kravchuk knew exactly what he wanted. Before leaving Kiev, the Ukrainian president had told American diplomat Thomas Niles that he was going to Belovezh Forest to sign an interstate agreement with Russia and Belarus that would have no center He would claim in his memoirs that there had been months of secret talks beforehand with the Russian and Belarusian leaders that led to the deal they were about to do—which could explain Yeltsin’s mysterious remark in January that the presidents of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan had decided
