Stunned at his audacity, the parliament went into a brief private session. Behind closed doors, KGB chief Kryuchkov warned deputies that Western intelligence agents, planted inside the Kremlin and helped by Harvard economists, were plotting to destabilize the Soviet Union. Thus alarmed, the deputies continued their debate in open session for four days in an atmosphere of growing crisis. Gorbachev was nowhere to be seen, nor did he designate anyone to oppose this threat to his authority.
At midday on the third day of debate, June 20, Mayor Popov turned up at the U.S. embassy and asked Ambassador Jack Matlock for an urgent meeting. In the embassy library, the former economics professor with distinctive mop of white hair and bristling moustache put his finger to his lips and jotted a message on Matlock’s spiral notebook in Russian: “A coup is being organized to remove Gorbachev. We must get word to Boris Nikolayevich in Washington.” Matlock took the notebook and scrawled in Russian, “Who is behind this?” Popov wrote, “Pavlov, Kryuchkov, Yazov, Lukyanov.” Anatoly Lukyanov was the slippery speaker of the Supreme Soviet and a friend of Gorbachev since university days.
5
Matlock relayed Popov’s message to Washington using a secure telephone system called STU-3. President Bush instructed him to warn Gorbachev personally, without mentioning the source. At eight o’clock in the evening the ambassador went to the Kremlin. He found the Soviet president alone with Chernyaev and in a mellow mood. They sat at the long table in his office. Gorbachev chuckled when Matlock told him of the warning. “I have everything well in hand,” he said. “We’ll see tomorrow.” After Matlock departed, Gorbachev poked fun at American gullibility, but he stopped smiling when Chernyaev casually mentioned that he had heard a rumor about suspicious troop movements outside Moscow.
The Popov warning came as Yeltsin, on his trip to the United States, was getting the Rose Garden treatment at the White House as the elected president of Russia, though the Americans were still holding their nose. In his speech of welcome Bush managed to mention Gorbachev favorably more times than he mentioned his guest. In the Oval Office Bush told Yeltsin of Popov’s warning. He jumped at the Russian’s suggestion that they should call Gorbachev to reinforce the urgency of the warning. CIA director Robert Gates was struck by the strange picture of “the presidents of the United States and Russia calling the president of the Soviet Union from the White House to warn him of a possible coup attempt.”
6
When Bush called Gorbachev, he inadvertently named Popov as the sourceeven worse, he did so over a line known to be monitored by the KGB. Matlock was furious when he heard. He saw this careless intimacy as a measure of how deep Bush’s infatuation with Gorbachev had gone.
7
After leaving the White House, Yeltsin remarked caustically on how keen Bush was to get on the phone with his friend and that he was acting as if he were under Gorbachev’s spell, like an adherent of Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a popular Russian faith healer.
Rather than thank Popov for the warning, or ask him the source and reliability of his information, the Soviet leader, when he next met the Moscow mayor, shook his finger at him and said, “Why are you telling tales to the Americans?”
Gorbachev reimposed his will on the Supreme Soviet the next day with a sustained and wrathful broadside, ending what he called the “great scandal” created by Prime Minister Pavlov’s irresponsible behavior. After he harangued the cowering deputies, Pavlov’s resolution was shelved. The Soviet president told reporters with a grin, “The putsch is over!” Astonishingly Gorbachev did not fire his comic-opera prime minister, just as he failed to dismiss the blood-stained KGB chief and ministers of the interior and defense when they lied to him about Vilnius, though he privately lambasted them as “scoundrels and bastards.”
At a subsequent meeting of the Central Committee, hard-line communists raged at Gorbachev about his inadequacy in dealing with the crisis in party authority. “All right,” he said. “I’m quitting.” He walked out. Seventy-two of the three hundred members, among them Andrey Grachev, signed a statement saying they would leave the ranks of the party also. It was a ploy by Gorbachev, and it worked. The challengers backed down. Gorbachev returned. Chernyaev gleefully noted how the gutless rabbits among Gorbachev’s most trenchant critics who longed for a return to totalitarianism “shit in their pants” and begged him to stay as head of the party. The Stalinists were trapped. If they lost him as general secretary, they lost any hold over the presidency, and Gorbachev as president could claim the loyalty of state structures. Gorbachev, however, in his desire to hold his enemies close, missed an opportunity to divest himself of a thoroughly discredited ideology. This deepened his unpopularity with the reformers.
8
On a visit to the Bolshoi Theater that summer, Gorbachev was criticized from the stage by Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrey Sakharov, for his role in the Baltics crackdown. “They celebrate Sakharov’s legacy but they radiate hate, anger and revenge,” fumed the president to Chernyaev afterwards. “How can one deal with these people? They have already forgotten who released Sakharov.”
9
Meanwhile, negotiations for a new union treaty between Gorbachev and the republics’ leaders continued over several sessions at the Novo-Ogarevo mansion during July 1991. Yeltsin would normally arrive last to underline his importance, and his driver and security agent Korzhakov would make sure his limousine was maneuvered to the front of the line of cars parked by the entrance—once infuriating the gardener by plowing up the lawn to get into position. Typically Gorbachev made some introductory remarks as each session began and invited responses, whereupon the republic presidents averted their eyes like schoolboys and waited to see how Yeltsin would react. Gorbachev became embarrassingly supplicant and Yeltsin more bullying. Once the Russian president told Gorbachev bluntly to allow him to continue speaking. Boldin described Gorbachev “looking at the protestor apologetically with his big, moist brown eyes.” On another occasion Gorbachev said that if the center’s ability to levy taxes was not maintained, “I might as well go home.” Yeltsin responded by saying, “Don’t force us to decide the matter without you.”
10
After a long silence Gorbachev called for a break, and the issue was shelved.
A new structure for the Soviet Union emerged. The center would retain foreign policy, defense, and much financial authority, and the republics would otherwise govern themselves and gain control of their own resources and state security. The country would no longer bear the titles “Soviet” or “Socialist.” Gorbachev insisted, however, on a federal tax. Without it he would have no country.
Agreement was finally reached after a twelve-hour session that went on until 2 a.m. on July 29. A new union treaty, to be signed on August 20, would replace the 1922 treaty establishing the Soviet Union. Under it the republics would have sovereign control over their own political systems and the right to negotiate secession in the future.
But at its heart was a virus that could destroy the USSR. Gorbachev had yielded on the single tax issue. He had agreed that the levels of taxes to finance the institutions of the center would be determined “in consultation with the republics.” This meant that Russia and the other republics would have a veto on federal taxes. Western leaders had warned Gorbachev not to surrender on tax. Jacques Delors, chairman of the European Economic Commission, told him bluntly that he could only win the struggle if he insisted on a federal tax to finance a single armed force.
11
Gorbachev’s concession, in the opinion of economist Yegor Gaidar, signaled the moment the Soviet Union fell apart. “In essence this was the decision to dissolve the empire, raising hopes that it could be transformed into a soft confederation.... It ended the history of the USSR as a single state.”
12
After the other presidents left at 3:30 a.m., Gorbachev and Yeltsin stayed behind with Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of the second biggest Soviet republic, Kazakhstan, who strongly supported a continued union. They began to discuss what they would do after the new treaty came into effect. At one point Yeltsin stopped talking. “What’s up, Boris?” asked Gorbachev. The Russian president made a sign and indicated they should retire to the balcony. He had a feeling that the KGB might be listening.
Sitting on cane chairs, they continued their discussion in the unseasonably chilly night air. Yeltsin said he would nominate Gorbachev for the post of elected president of the new union of sovereign states. However, he must get rid of his “odious entourage” in the cabinet—KGB Chairman Kryuchkov, Defense Minister Yazov, Interior Minister Pugo, and other notorious hard-liners—before the republics would sign up to a new center. Gorbachev replied, “We’ll remove Kryuchkov and Pugo.” He would ditch his unpopular prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, and Nazarbayev could take his place. He would also get rid of the vice presidency, held by the lackluster Yanayev.
Only much later would they discover, from KGB transcripts found in Boldin’s safe, that hidden microphones, placed on the balcony by Gorbachev’s KGB chief of security, General Medvedev, had picked up every word. Kryuchkov—though he would later deny it—had put Gorbachev himself under close surveillance. Copies of the Soviet president’s most intimate conversations were kept in a KGB file marked Subject Number 110. Raisa, too, was monitored. She was Subject Number 111. There was even a microphone at the hairdresser’s salon she frequented.
13
Though they had negotiated in reasonably civil fashion, Gorbachev and Yeltsin still vied to upstage each other in front of the world. When George Bush arrived in Moscow for a summit with Gorbachev on July 30, Yeltsin demanded a separate meeting with him.
14
The U.S. president agreed to give him ten minutes but stipulated that there would be no joint press conference afterwards.
Nevertheless, Yeltsin was on his home ground. The more he forced the Americans to pay attention to him, the greater his prestige in the eyes of Russians. He made Bush and Brent Scowcroft wait seven minutes outside his Kremlin office, kept them talking inside for forty minutes while he pressed Russia’s case for aid, and facilitated a media ambush of the U.S. president by allowing reporters to gather outside. “Yeltsin’s really grandstanding, isn’t he?” Bush complained to Scowcroft as he left. Yeltsin subsequently declined to turn up at a separate meeting between Bush and the presidents of Soviet republics hosted by Gorbachev so as not be seen as a member of his rival’s “entourage.”
Yeltsin then telephoned Gorbachev before a Soviet state dinner for George and Barbara Bush and demanded that both of them escort the Bushes to their seats to demonstrate the new balance of power between the Russian and Soviet presidents. Gorbachev indignantly refused, saying this was his function as host. Yeltsin had other ideas. As Gorbachev and Raisa stood with George and Barbara Bush at the entrance to the dining hall in the Kremlin’s Chamber of Facets to welcome the guests, they were puzzled to see Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, arrive on the arm of Gavriil Popov. At the last minute Yeltsin turned up in majestic solitude and with elaborate courtesy offered to escort Barbara Bush to her table as if he were the host. “Is that really all right?” asked Barbara, with a steely smile. The American First Lady kept Raisa between herself and the lumbering Russian as they walked to the tables. Gorbachev asked Yeltsin sarcastically why he had entrusted his wife with the Moscow mayor, to which Yeltsin replied cheerfully, “Oh, he is no longer a danger!”
George Bush later described Yeltsin as a real pain for hijacking Barbara, and Matlock thought his behavior boorish and childish. “Everyone was dumbfounded except me,” noted Gorbachev. “I knew Boris too well.”
Next day, at a dinner hosted by the Americans in the U.S. embassy, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev found themselves seated some distance from the head table. They simply got up and walked to Bush’s place and engaged him in lengthy conversation. No one dared tell them they were out of line. “Our heroes experienced no embarrassment,” observed a disgusted Gorbachev. “Of course this behavior went beyond all bounds of protocol.”
15
Everyone saw that the dinner seating assignments reflected Bush’s preference for his friend Mikhail and his continued support for his efforts to hold the Soviet Union together. But the grandstanding served Yeltsin’s purpose. It exposed the uncomfortable fact for the Americans that their hero Gorbachev was losing control over the previously subservient republics and, most importantly, Russia.
On July 31 Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev entertained George and Barbara Bush and James Baker at a state dacha on the western outskirts of Moscow. They relaxed on wicker chairs on the sunlit veranda; Gorbachev in grey shirt, sweater, and slacks, Bush in a polo shirt. This was Gorbachev in his element, reshaping the world with his international friends. But they were rudely interrupted.
An American official, John Sununu, intruded to give Baker a note: The Associated Press was reporting that armed men had attacked a Lithuanian border post. Seven customs officials were killed execution style. Bush noted how Gorbachev visibly paled when told what was in the note. Deeply embarrassed at being informed first by the Americans, Gorbachev sent Chernyaev off to call Kryuchkov. The KGB chief dismissed the killings as an act of organized crime, or “an internal Lithuanian thing.” It would later be established that it was a covert operation by the Soviet special police force, OMON, to teach the separatists a lesson—and most likely to compromise Gorbachev during his summit.
In the course of their conversation, Bush told Gorbachev that he did not think the collapse of the Soviet Union was in America’s interests. He dismissed as extremists those in his own Republican Party who wanted the Soviet Union to break up, though the most prominent was his defense secretary, Dick Cheney. He promised to oppose separatist tendencies on his trip to Ukraine the following day.