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.”
8
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.”
9
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!”
10
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.”
11
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.
12
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
Our First President.
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. When the Russian congress convened on March 28 to debate Yeltsin’s future, demonstrations were banned, and armored vehicles, tanks, and several hundred troop carriers filled with conscripts were deployed nose-to-tail in streets around the Kremlin. Kryuchkov and Pugo had fed Gorbachev ridiculous warnings that radical democrats were preparing to storm the ancient fortress using ropes and grappling irons. These deployments only ensured that a pro-Yeltsin rally in the streets outside became an anti-Gorbachev demonstration. Inside, the deputies refused to debate in a state of siege and voted to adjourn. Tens of thousands of demonstrators milled around military barricades in the streets near the Kremlin as a heavy, fluffy snow coated everyone in white. The confrontation brought the country to the brink of civil conflict. Gorbachev was stunned when Alexander Yakovlev asked him to think of how Moscow would turn out for a funeral if a demonstrator should be killed. The tension was defused when Yeltsin’s collaborator, Ruslan Khasbulatov, persuaded Gorbachev at a tense meeting in the Kremlin that the idea of people scaling the Kremlin walls was outlandish. (Aides were joking among themselves that it would not be possible as there was a shortage of rope in the shops.) The president ordered Yazov to take the troops out of the city.
Khasbulatov later would identify the day the state powers blinked as the day the defeat of the reactionary forces began. Alexander Yakovlev told a visiting American senator, David Boren, that mobilizing the armed forces against the people was Gorbachev’s single biggest mistake.
For three days the Russian congress was deadlocked over whether to censure Yeltsin. In the end the “swamp” of undeclared deputies rejected impeachment rather than side with the unpopular Gorbachev. They were also alarmed by a spreading coal miners’ strike in support of Yeltsin, which began when miners coming off a shift at one mine shaft found there was no soap. Even Ivan Polozkov, leader of the communist faction, stated from the rostrum that the time was not right to destroy Yeltsin because of the ferocious backlash this could provoke.
Fearful of the gathering momentum towards the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev organized a referendum throughout the USSR to restore popular support for stability and a new union treaty. It asked for a yes or no to the question “Do you consider necessary the preservation of the USSR as a
renewed federation
of equal sovereign republics in which the
rights and freedom of an individual of any nationality
will be fully guaranteed?” (emphasis in the original). The referendum was held on March 16. Six of the fifteen Soviet republics had become so independent-minded they boycotted the poll, but in the remaining nine, 76 percent of voters responded yes. Gorbachev took this majority as a mandate to negotiate a new union treaty that would give republics a measure of sovereignty but preserve the Union of which he was president.
Yeltsin cleverly turned the plebiscite to his advantage. On the referendum paper distributed in Russia he added an extra question: Do you support the idea of a directly elected president for Russia? The voters gave their approval. The Russian congress agreed to hold the first free presidential election in Russia, on June 12, 1991.
Though his popularity swelled at home, Yeltsin found to his dismay that his high profile in Moscow did not impress world leaders. Dignitaries who arrived in Russia on fact-finding missions came with perceptions of an unstable and vodkaloving bully. On the other hand, they liked Gorbachev personally and felt protective towards him. When Yeltsin asked U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to call on him during such a visit to the Soviet president in mid-March, Baker saw it as an effort to “drive Gorbachev up the wall.” The American declined after consulting Gorbachev, who “naturally went through the roof” and raved about how unstable Yeltsin was and how he would use populist rhetoric to become a dictator. Gorbachev displayed similar childishness, forbidding his associates to attend a dinner Baker hosted at the embassy in protest at the presence of some of Yeltsin’s team.
The effete British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd took a dislike to the ponderous, blunt-talking nonconformist when they met in Moscow. He suggested to Ambassador Braithwaite as they left the meeting that the Russian was a dangerous man barely under control. Still, Braithwaite concluded that Yeltsin’s analysis was correct and that Gorbachev was by now “living almost entirely in cloud-cuckoo land.”
13
Richard Nixon, visiting Moscow as an unofficial envoy of the White House, cursed the media for giving him the impression of Yeltsin as an “incompetent, disloyal boob.” Yeltsin might not have the “grace and ivory-tower polish of Gorbachev,” he reported to Bush on his return to the United States, “but he inspires the people nevertheless.”
Yeltsin went to France, where he believed he would at least be respected by the democratic parliamentarians of Europe. He got an unpleasant surprise.
Le Monde
lectured him that in Europe “only one Russian is recognized—Gorbachev.” He was greeted with an “icy shower” at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where Jean-Pierre Cot, chairman of the group of socialists, reproached him publicly as a demagogue and an irresponsible politician for opposing Gorbachev, “with whom we feel more assured.” These remarks caused outrage among ordinary Russians—even
Pravda
called them an insult—and only served to increase Yeltsin’s popularity.