“drunken threesome” for a state crime committed to please the United States. Gorbachev told him, “Don’t get so het up; it’s not that terrible.” The volatile Rutskoy was now bitterly opposed to the breakup of the country in whose name he had risked his life in Afghanistan. He prepared a press statement attacking his president, but friends talked him out of issuing it. Seeing he had little support, he backed down and a few days later renewed his vows of allegiance to Yeltsin in unctuous terms.[216]
According to Grachev, the idea of having Yeltsin apprehended never came to Gorbachev’s mind, though he had the power to arrest him for high treason. “That was the reason they were hiding in the woods.” Some in Gorbachev’s entourage, like economist Nikolay Shmelev, believed it was only his aversion to bloodshed that stopped him sending a division of paratroopers to the forest to arrest “those three provincial men of great ambition.” Gorbachev’s former speechwriter Alexander Tsipko would later berate the generals and colonels who “did not stir a finger to stop the outrage.” Gorbachev’s former adviser Arkady Volsky, who had become a Yeltsin supporter, believed that the military would have supported Gorbachev if he had declared martial law.[217]
Whether he was tempted or not, Gorbachev did not try. He was not prepared to spark a civil war. Ordering arrests would have meant taking a road that could have become bloody. “We can’t start a fight. We can’t. It would be just criminal, taking into account the conditions under which our people are living.”
There was no doubt, however, about how bitter the Kremlin loyalists felt. At an American embassy reception on Sunday evening, Palazchenko denounced the Belovezh Agreement to diplomats as a second coup, a blatantly illegal act, dividing the country up like some inherited estate to get rid of its president.
Yeltsin overcame his reservations and arrived at twelve o’clock on Monday at the Kremlin, with Korzhakov nursing a weapon in the front seat of the Niva. They were accompanied by armed bodyguards in several cars that deployed around the red-brick fortress. Yeltsin’s personal security men insisted on accompanying him to the door of Gorbachev’s third-floor office in the Senate Building, where they stood face to face with Gorbachev’s bodyguards as Yeltsin went inside.
Nazarbayev was there already. He thought Yeltsin looked terribly hungover. He complained immediately that the Belovezh Agreement was an offense to the dignity of the Asiatic republics.
Gorbachev squared up to his nemesis and accused him of “some kind of a political coup… meeting in the woods and shutting down the Soviet Union.” He wanted to know if the independent states would have their own forces. “Yes, except for strategic forces,” replied Yeltsin. “So that means Ukraine will have its own army of 470,000, which is 100,000 more than united Germany!” exclaimed Gorbachev. “You were the first to recognize the Baltic states and signed agreements on human rights and what is the result? Now there are laws on citizenship that discriminate against Russians. That’s what democrats do! They say ‘Russians get out.’”
Yeltsin became indignant and snapped, “Why are you interrogating me? A way had to be found out of the dead end, and we found it!”
The wrangling got nowhere. Yeltsin left after ninety minutes. Gorbachev dictated a statement claiming the end of Soviet law was “illegal and dangerous.”[218] It was at variance with the will of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians in the March referendum on preserving the Union. It would strand millions of Russians living outside Russia’s borders. He called for an emergency session of the Congress of People’s Deputies to adjudicate on what he dismissed as the “initiative” of the three leaders.
In Andrey Grachev’s opinion, people were too concerned with their daily problems to take action on behalf of the Union. They had lost faith in Gorbachev and his project and just kept silent. That evening the presidential spokesman went to a piano recital in the Pushkin Museum given by Svyatoslav Richter—a Ukrainian—and had a late-night dinner with the Italian and Dutch ambassadors. The Belarus accord was not mentioned by the company, on the principle, he guessed, that “one doesn’t speak of rope in the house of a hanged man.”[219]
Gorbachev’s military options evaporated two days later. Hoping to make a case for the Soviet armed forces remaining a cohesive force throughout USSR territory, come what may, he asked Shaposhnikov to arrange for him to address an assembly of top commanders from all over the Soviet Union on December 10. Their reaction to his plea was a stony silence. The majority of generals distrusted him and knew that he no longer controlled the purse strings. The next day Yeltsin conducted his own, two-hour meeting with the same officers, who reacted more positively to his direct style and to his promise of a 90 percent pay increase.
To James Baker these moves were the stuff of geopolitical nightmare: “Two Kremlin heavyweights jockeying for power, calling on the army to follow them, and raising the specter of civil war—with nuclear weapons thrown in.”[220]
Shaposhnikov later told Baker how serious it was. Some hotheads among the generals wanted to give an ultimatum to the president, demanding that he defy Yeltsin, he said. It would be the August coup all over again. Rumors of military adventures continued to circulate in Moscow. Shevardnadze was alarmed to receive a warning from General Konstantin Kobets, who had organized the defense of the White House in August, that conservative elements in the military were still strong and secretly organizing. On December 11, Vitaly Tretyakov, the editor of
By December 12 the parliaments of the three Slavic states had endorsed the Belovezh Agreement. In the Russian parliament the vote—188 for, 6 against, and 69 abstentions—was greeted with applause. In Shakhrai’s opinion the deputies realized the agreement had saved the nation from a civil war. And even some hard-liners shared Yeltsin’s goal to see off the unpopular occupant of the Kremlin. Communist deputy Sevastyanov urged his comrades to vote in favor, “so that we can get rid of Gorbachev.”
“Such petty people,” stormed Gorbachev when he heard of the remark. “The era of Gorbachev is only beginning!”[221] At a press conference he waved the secret memo Burbulis had given to Yeltsin in Sochi and said its thrust was that the “cunning Gorbachev” must be stopped before trapping Yeltsin into a new union. Burbulis denied that the Russian leaders killed off the Soviet Union to get rid of its president. It was already dead, he said. The declaration in the Belarusian forest was a “medical diagnosis.”[222]
The tone of Yeltsin’s accomplices grew insulting. Information chief Poltoranin said condescendingly that the Soviet president need not worry, that he would not suffer the same fate as Erich Honecker. His foreign minister, Kozyrev, told the German newspaper
The clock was nevertheless ticking loudly for Gorbachev. Nazarbayev had no choice but to accept the fait accompli of the deal in the forest. Kazakhstan, the three Slav republics, and the seven other republics still nominally in the Soviet Union agreed they would meet to discuss dumping the union and joining the Commonwealth of Independent States. They set the date and place: December 21 in Alma-Ata.
Gorbachev still found it hard to accept the reality that the USSR was finished, though he took the precaution of having crates of Politburo archives removed from the Kremlin in army trucks to General Staff military headquarters in Znamenka Street in the Arbat district. He continued to give almost daily interviews and briefings to journalists, ambassadors, and foreign politicians, pouring out a torrent of words as if he could somehow conjure up a compromise by talking about constitutional propriety and restraining the opportunists. When British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite and visiting UK government official Len Appleyard called on Gorbachev in the Walnut Room, Gorbachev stretched out his hand with a grin, saying, “So what—are you here to find out what country you are in and who I am now?” The president was in bouncing form, with his usual tan, bubbling with verbose and hectic charm, observed Braithwaite. Gorbachev spent half an hour extolling the merits of a union state, while making withering remarks about the “highwaymen,” “hairy faces,” and “inexperienced populists” who ruled the roost. As Gorbachev built his “castles in the air,” the ambassador noticed Alexander Yakovlev looking on more and more gloomily and Chernyaev taking notes, “with deadpan determination.”[223]
On December 13 Gorbachev told George Bush in a telephone call that the agreement between the three presidents was but a draft, a sketch, an improvisation, and the statement that the Soviet Union was dead was facile and bullying.
Bush said after putting down the receiver, “Yeah, Gorbachev is kind of a pathetic figure at this point.”[224]
