Brent Scowcroft, viewing the Supreme Soviet scene with President Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, said it was “all over” for Gorbachev. “Yeltsin’s telling him what to do. I don’t think Gorbachev understands what happened.” Bush concurred: “I’m afraid he may have had it.”96 Scowcroft and Bush were correct. After the overmatch on August 23—Gorbachev called it sadistic in his memoirs—it was anticlimactic the next day when Gorbachev dissolved the Central Committee and resigned as general secretary of the party. Yeltsin’s Decree No. 90 on August 25 authorized the RSFSR Council of Ministers to seize all property of the CPSU and its Russian chapter. Yeltsin on August 26 publicly declined Gorbachev’s offer to make him a Hero of the Soviet Union. On August 31 Pravda, which had remained a much more conservative paper than Izvestiya, reprinted an International Herald Tribune cartoon of a smiling Yeltsin reaching down to pump the hand of a miniaturized Gorbachev; the tagline read, “Welcome back to power, Mikhail.”
The coup could not have been more destabilizing, and politics, economics, and culture converged more than ever on the constitutional question. The union treaty initialed in July was a dead letter. Only six union republics had been prepared to sign it, and, riddled with non sequiturs and ambiguities, it would in any event have been impracticable.97 As of August 19, two Soviet republics (Lithuania and Georgia) had announced their independence from the USSR. Between August 20 and September 1, nine (Estonia, Latvia, Armenia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan) followed their example. Tajikistan was to join the crowd in September, Turkmenistan in October, and Kazakhstan in December.
Gorbachev, his administration comatose (with no prime minister, parliament, budget, or bullion reserves), made a last-ditch effort to forge a treaty of union. The negotiating minuet started again at Novo-Ogarëvo, with the republic leaders sitting as the USSR State Council. Yeltsin was uncheerful about it and deputed two leading Russianists, Gennadii Burbulis and Sergei Shakhrai, to prepare working papers. The line had hardened. Earlier, Russia had been prepared to act as cash cow to the USSR and was “ready to cover any breach… even at the cost of its own ruination.” After the coup, this was impossible. “The republics had gone their disjunct ways and did not want to return to the old arrangement. The only possibility in these new conditions was an agreement among them in which Gorbachev would act as middleman.”98
Russia came out for a rump “union of states” or “confederation of states” rather than the “union state” Yeltsin had consented to in July. Gorbachev, who would have taken any form of union with a viable central authority, made the point to the State Council on November 14 that every time he agreed with one of Yeltsin’s suggestions Yeltsin would slow down his speech, as if he were asking himself why Gorbachev was acting so agreeably. Yes, Yeltsin said, he was always wary of Gorbachev. Gorbachev “laughed, but without merriment.”99 The talks went on against a backdrop of Russian appropriation of assets from the shell Soviet government. By the late autumn, Gorbachev and his men were accepting receivership as an improvement on insolvency.100 With Gorbachev caving in to most of Yeltsin’s constitutional demands, agreement appeared within reach, yet slipped away at a last Novo-Ogarëvo meeting on November 25. Yeltsin, fresh from a trip to Germany and to Soviet forces there, said he would be prepared to take a confederative agreement to the Russian parliament, only without an irrevocable endorsement from him as president. Gorbachev accused him of weaseling out of commitments. Feeling trapped, Gorbachev said people were whispering that he was a spent force, and the republic leaders seemed to be of the same opinion. In that case, he went on ominously, “Go ahead and agree among yourselves”—something Yeltsin had warned he might do in their tête-à-tête that summer. He would have no part of the “further chaos that would follow from this diffuse position.”101
Besides the difference over the roles of central and Russian governments, there was another sticking point—the place of Ukraine. It was republic number two of the Soviet Union, with almost 50 million people, and the one for which Russians felt the greatest emotional warmth. On August 24 its parliament had voted for separation from the USSR and set a confirmatory referendum for December 1, to coincide with a presidential election. A real country with its own passports, army, and currency seemed in the offing. “What kind of union would there be without Ukraine?” Yeltsin asked on November 25. “I cannot imagine it.” Relations with Kiev could not be sorted out until December at the earliest. Until they were to its satisfaction, any Ukrainian participation would only give feet of clay to a new confederation, since quite likely it would soon have pulled out or set unacceptable terms.102 Leader Leonid Kravchuk made it clear in comments on November 26 that his reservations were not only about a renewed union but about the Russian entity within it, whose head, Yeltsin, seemed to assume that Ukraine and the others would revolve around it “as if it were the sun.”103 On December 1, 90 percent of the Ukrainian electorate, including a majority of ethnic Russians, who were about one-fifth of the republic’s population, voted for independent statehood. Kravchuk was elected president that same day, with 62 percent of the popular vote, and announced he would not negotiate with Gorbachev. Kravchuk and the Ukrainian elite had been encouraged in thinking that secession was a possibility for them by Yeltsin and his Russian elite, and together they were now prepared to drive the final nail in the coffin.104
As the November 25 State Council session ended, the new head of state of Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, a nuclear physicist whom Yeltsin knew from the Interregional group, invited him to tack onto a planned visit to Minsk some time hunting in Belovezh’e Forest. This was a place where they could talk things over in peace—an old-growth wooded area, the only one surviving in Europe, on the border with Poland, where Warsaw Pact meetings had been held and Khrushchev and Brezhnev had gone shooting. Following the Ukrainian referendum and election, Shushkevich took it upon himself to ask Kravchuk to join them.105 Kravchuk was the only one of the leaders to do any hunting. Over herbal vodka and supper in the government villa at Viskuli on December 7, they and their advisers (Yeltsin had with him Burbulis, Shakhrai, Kozyrev, his aide Viktor Ilyushin, and Yegor Gaidar, his new deputy premier for economic reform) briefly reviewed the impasse. The Russians favored a trilateral agreement that would end it. Shakhrai, a legal scholar by background, hit upon a juridical device, the argument that the trinity of Slavic republics was qualified to act because they had been high parties to the Bolshevik-engineered treaty in 1922 that formed the USSR. Gaidar handwrote a text late that night. Around four A.M., Kozyrev slid it under the door of the one stenographer present, who was asleep; a cleaning woman picked it up overnight and it had to be retrieved from the trash in the morning and typed up.106
When they reconvened after breakfast, Yeltsin unexpectedly made one last stab at salvaging a single state. He had “an assignment from Gorbachev,” he said to Kravchuk, to ask whether he would sign the kind of agreement Gorbachev pushed at Novo-Ogarëvo, “if Mikhail Sergeyevich and the others moved to give Ukraine more rights and freedoms.” Kravchuk said he might have at some earlier date but could not now, and Yeltsin expressed understanding. They then nailed down the accord outlined by Gaidar.107 It was signed around one P.M. on Sunday, December 8, Yeltsin and Burbulis doing the honors for Russia. Its fourteen articles recorded the slipping of the Soviet Union under the waves as a fait accompli (it “is ceasing to exist as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality”) and created a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), headquartered in Minsk, with limited supranational powers on issues of trade, finance, mobility of persons, and security. Russia, not the CIS, was to be legal successor to the USSR and to its obligations and rights, one of them, it was soon to be revealed, the Soviets’ permanent, veto-bearing seat in the United Nations Security Council. Yeltsin phoned George Bush and then USSR Defense Minister Yevgenii Shaposhnikov with the news. “Mr. President,” he said to Bush, using Foreign Minister Kozyrev as interpreter, “the Soviet Union is no more.” Yeltsin was nervous, giving Bush the impression he was reading from a prepared statement. As host, Shushkevich had the thankless duty of calling Gorbachev, and could not get through to him in the Kremlin until Yeltsin and Bush had rung off. Gorbachev demanded that Yeltsin be put on the line and assailed him for a double-cross and for informing a foreign head of state before the president of the USSR. Yeltsin said Gorbachev had to realize they had no alternative but to make the deal.108 Yeltsin was apprehensive of some military or KGB group, perhaps with Gorbachev’s connivance, taking matters into their own hands. Before going to see Gorbachev on December 9, upon his return from Belarus, he asked him on the telephone whether his security would be guaranteed. Gorbachev said it would be.109