Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

When they met in the Kremlin several days later, Yeltsin told Gorbachev that he could not imagine a new union without fifty-three million Ukrainians. “If things don’t work out, we will have to think of other variants,” he added enigmatically. 25Gorbachev interpreted this to mean that Yeltsin would put pressure on Kravchuk to reach a compromise. The Siberian, however, had a different solution in mind.

Yeltsin and his advisers had been thinking about doing away with the Soviet Union for some months. The defeat of the August coup had completely altered the balance of power between Russia and the center. Gorbachev could do nothing without Yeltsin’s consent. Even so, Yeltsin knew that he would not be complete master of his own house as long as the Soviet president was around. He was contemptuous of Gorbachev’s endless political maneuverings which, he believed, had brought the country to the brink of civil war. And he could never forget the political humiliation that he had suffered in 1987, when Gorbachev had hauled him out of a hospital bed to face his vengeful Communist Party accusers. He had suffered debilitating bouts of depression, insomnia, and a nervous breakdown because of Gorbachev. The time had come to even the score.

It took twenty-four hours to draw up the Soviet Union’s death sentence and prepare the birth certificate for the new Commonwealth of Independent States. Aides to the three leaders stayed up all night, working on the text of a joint statement. The extreme secrecy and haste surrounding the meeting greatly complicated this task. There were no photocopy machines in the hunting lodge. When officials wanted to make copies of the documents, dissolving the Soviet Union, they had to feed them through a pair of linked fax machines. Only two typists were on hand to prepare the documents in three languages. 26

By the afternoon of December 8 everything was ready. One by one, Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich signed a joint communiqué declaring that “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is ceasing its existence as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality.” They also laid claim to the nuclear warheads stationed on their territories.

All that remained now was to inform the rest of the world. The sequence of telephone calls made by the Byelovezhsky conspirators was indicative of their priorities. At the top of their list was Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, the only non-Slavic republic to possess nuclear weapons. At that moment Nazarbayev was in the air, en route to Moscow. Yeltsin attempted to contact the plane, hoping to persuade Nazarbayev to fly to Belarus directly. But Soviet air traffic control refused to put the call through, and Nazarbayev remained out of contact until his plane landed at the Moscow airport. Angry that his Slavic colleagues had failed to consult with him earlier, he refused for several days to sign the communiqué dissolving the Soviet Union.

Next on the list was President Bush. If the Byelovezhsky agreements went into effect, twelve new countries would emerge from the rubble of the Soviet Union. (The three Baltic states had succeeded in establishing their independence immediately after the coup.) Swift international recognition was essential to the success of this operation. Otherwise, bickering and territorial disputes might break out among the former Soviet republics, raising the prospect of a replay of the Yugoslav tragedy on a much larger stage.

The simplest way of reaching the American president would have been via the Soviet government communications network, the vertushka , which was still under Gorbachev’s control. Suspicious of his rival, Yeltsin decided to place the call through a regular telephone operator. A few minutes later, the operator called back in a panic: She could not make herself understood by the White House switchboard. The Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, a fluent English speaker, got on the phone. He had to explain patiently to the White House operator exactly who Boris Yeltsin was and why it was so important that he be permitted to speak to the president. 27

Calls were also put through to the Soviet and Russian defense ministers, to tell them what had happened. It was only after all these calls that the conspirators got around to informing Gorbachev about the disappearance of his country and, by logical extension, his job. This time the call was made by the president of Belarus, the junior member of the troika. The other two leaders listened in to the conversation on extensions. They knew only too well what Gorbachev’s reaction was likely to be.

By the time Shushkevich finally reached him, the Soviet president was fuming. He had spent the last few hours frantically calling his aides and trying to find out what was going on in the Byelovezhsky Forest. Nobody seemed to know anything. He felt almost as impotent as he had back in August, when his communications were taken away from him altogether. He told reporters later that he was “stunned” that Yeltsin did not have the decency to call him personally.

“Why is it you who called me?” Gorbachev demanded after Shushkevich filled him in on the agreement. “You mean you have already decided everything?”

When the soft-spoken Shushkevich confessed that not only had the agreement been signed but that Bush had already been informed, Gorbachev exploded. “This is a disgrace. You’ve been speaking with the president of the United States, and you failed to speak with the president of your own country? This is shameful.” 28

WHEN YELTSIN RETURNED to Moscow, he hesitated about going to the Kremlin to inform the Soviet president officially that he had lost both his job and his country. There were rumors that the Alpha Group had been placed on alert and was preparing to arrest “the Byelovezhsky troika” for the attempted overthrow of the state. Speaking by phone to Gorbachev, Yeltsin suggested that he might be taken prisoner if he ventured into the massive red-brick fortress.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Gorbachev incredulously, still employing the familiar ty form of address used for subordinates. “Have you gone out of your mind?” 29

Yeltsin need not have worried. Gorbachev was furious at the leaders of the three Slavic republics, but he had no intention of using force to remain in power. The failure to conclude a new Union Treaty represented the collapse of everything he had been trying to achieve for the last nine months. He regarded the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a political and economic disaster that could only lead to more pain and turmoil. In the end, however, it was up to ordinary Soviet citizens to accept or reject the Byelovezhsky agreements.

“I will respect the choice made by the representative organs of the people,” he told an interviewer. “Let the people themselves decide.” 30

Gorbachev had begun perestroika by attempting to involve ordinary people in decisions previously made by a closed circle of Kremlin leaders. After unleashing the unpredictable force of public opinion, he had gradually lost control over his own revolution. It had taken him places he had never intended to go, and now it threatened to devour him completely. But the successor to Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev remained true to the political choice that he had made when he launched perestroika. Unlike his predecessors, he would not resort to force to impose his will.

Over the next two weeks Gorbachev did everything he could to mobilize public opinion against the dissolution of the once-mighty Soviet superpower. He issued appeals, made statements, gave interviews. He tried to persuade the parliaments of individual Soviet republics to reject the decisions that had been taken in their name. He met with military leaders, newspaper editors, Nobel laureates. None of this activity had the slightest effect. Exhausted by the endless political debates and their own rapidly deteriorating living standards, the narod had lost interest in what the tsar had to say.