Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (34 page)

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
nomenklatura
whom they bribe are shifting money abroad as fast as they can.

As the Russian president assumes command in the Kremlin, commentator Ilya Milshtein issues a warning to him in an article in
Novoye Vremya
(New Times). The country Yeltsin is taking over, he writes, is “depraved to the core, a state rotten from top to bottom, a great power of fast thieves and bribe takers.”
⁸

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.
¹

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 to draw up a treaty to replace the old Soviet Union, adding, “I think I may now say where—in Minsk.”

But nothing was certain when the three leaders sat down for a dinner of game and pork that snowy evening in the forest.

With a dramatic gesture, Yeltsin produced the text of Gorbachev’s union agreement and put it on the table. According to Kravchuk he said, “Do you agree with this? Will you sign it? Will you discuss which articles to take out? Your answer will determine the position of Russia. If you sign it I will sign it.” Kravchuk replied “Nyet!” to all three questions.

From that moment on, the Russian leader no longer had to pay lip service to the cause of a union containing Ukraine. He had fulfilled his promise to Gorbachev to ask Kravchuk one more time to sign the union treaty. Kravchuk had refused. The Rubicon had been crossed at last. Here among the pine trees his thoughts went back to the Soviet military actions in Tbilisi and Vilnius, and he renewed his determination that they were not going to wait calmly for a new tragedy “with our paws folded back like timid rabbits.”

They agreed that it was too risky to start negotiations at their level. Instead their support teams should work through the night to find a formula that would meet their aspirations.

The tension eased. According to Kravchuk, “We drained our glasses, chatted, there was conversation and toasts, joking and laughter. Belovezh vodka [Belarus’s herbal vodka] was there. I drank it too.” The Ukrainian president took some pleasure in disclosing that even Ukrainian districts with large Russian populations had voted for independence in the referendum of December 1. “What? Even the Donbass voted yes?” exclaimed Yeltsin.

Between ten and eleven o’clock the trio retired to the main bathhouse, along with Burbulis, Korzhakov, and the Ukrainian and Belarusian prime ministers, and relaxed there until after midnight in clouds of steam. Shushkevich denied later charges that they got drunk, though there was plenty of alcohol available in the
banya.
Yeltsin did not even get dizzy, he claimed, and Shushkevich himself did not touch alcohol, as “I considered that drinking on the eve of signing such a fate-changing document would be a crime.”

Yeltsin’s team of Gaidar, Kozyrev, and Shakhrai meanwhile invited the experts from Ukraine and Belarus to work with them in a chalet where the Russians were billeted. The Belarusians stayed away, however, and the Ukrainian delegates hung around in the dark and snow outside, occasionally sending an emissary into what Kozyrev referred to as “our creative laboratory.”

Shakhrai proved to be the most imaginative in finding the precise formula that was to spell the end of the Soviet Union. A Cossack lawyer with mournful eyes and a moustache that curled round his full lips, he had drafted many decrees for Yeltsin, including the order banning the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He suggested that as the USSR was founded on the basis of a 1922 treaty signed by Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine (and the Transcaucasian Federation, which had ceased to exist), so the three surviving states could legally dismantle it.

In their accounts of the meeting both Kozyrev and Gaidar maintain they were startled at the simplicity of the idea and quickly agreed. After midnight the Belarusians and Ukrainians came in from the cold. They all nodded as they read the words. They had a formula to take to their masters. It stated: “We, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation (RSFSR), and Ukraine, as originators of the USSR on the basis of the Union Treaty of 1922, confirm that the USSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, ceases its existence.”

In Gaidar’s words, this was the knife that would allow them “to cut the Gordian knot of legal ambiguity and begin the business of state-building in countries that were already de facto independent.”

The drafters drew up proposals for a successor association called a Commonwealth of Independent States, to which other Soviet republics would be invited to join. “They were our initiatives, not those of the presidents,” insisted Gaidar in an interview years later. “The final proposals were deliberated at the second level.” Burbulis also insisted, “We came to Minsk without a text and without any carefully weighed idea of a commonwealth. It was born right there.”

There was no copier at the lodge, and the officials had to pass papers through two fax machines to make extra copies. Gaidar wrote out the final texts containing fourteen articles in longhand. At 4 a.m. Kozyrev trudged off through the snowdrifts to bring the sheets of paper to the typist’s room. There was one stenographer at the lodge, Evgeniya Pateychuk, a terrified young woman who worked for the forestry director and who had been fetched by the Belarus KGB at short notice, without even being given enough time, as she recalled, to comb her hair.
²
Unwilling to wake her up, Kozyrev put the documents under the locked door of the business office. There was consternation in the morning when the typist said that she found no papers. It was some time before they realized a cleaning lady had put them in a trash can. When they were eventually extracted by Korzhakov from a bag of rubbish, Pateychuk found she could not decipher much of Gaidar’s handwriting, and he had to dictate a lot of it over again.

While this was going on, Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich gathered for breakfast of fried eggs, black bread, ham, and cheese. The Russian president was in fine fettle. Kravchuk found him stone cold sober. “I don’t exaggerate! He was in good form, vigorous, he had ideas.” The three leaders received their copies of Gaidar’s handiwork in late morning, typed at speed by Ms Pateychuk on the East German-made Optima electric business typewriter she had brought with her. They agreed to the idea of a commonwealth as a fig leaf for a divorce. Everything was inevitable now. They made some minor amendments to the draft paragraphs, toasted each completed article with a sip of cognac, and sent the pages off for retyping. The documents were passed through the two fax machines and the final versions clipped into three red hard-backed folders.

Meanwhile workers carried a long marble-top table into the foyer of the Viskuli hunting lodge. Officials placed the folders in front of miniature flags for Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Five journalists, cold and hungry after having spent the night in a nearby village waiting for they knew not what, were ushered in to report the ceremony.

Kravchuk, Shushkevich and Yeltsin entered and took their places along the table, with their top aides standing behind them. Shushkevich sat in the middle, as the host, with Yeltsin on his left and Kravchuk on his right. They opened the folders, titled “Agreement on the Creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States.” The contents spelled out the new reality. After seven decades the USSR was finished in all but name, and its 293 million people destined to be separated among the constituent republics. The new entity would have its headquarters in Minsk. It would have no flag, no ministry of foreign affairs, no parliament, no citizenship, no tax-raising powers and no president. There was, however, a commitment to set up a single military control over nuclear weapons. Other republics would be invited to join.