462 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
assurances about the Baltic region. Shevardnadze responded that the
Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian leaders were showing insufficient
self-restraint.^58 There was no end to the public controversy in the
USSR. Baltic politicians, including communists, chastised the Kremlin
for refusing to acknowledge historic injustice. There was dispute about
secret protocols in the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939. Yakovlev was
ordered to conduct an enquiry. The search for a full original copy of
the treaty yielded no result. Apparently Molotov, just before losing his
post as Foreign Affairs Minister in 1957, had requisitioned and hidden
or destroyed the file.^59 In July Yakovlev stood by the idea that the
Nazi–Soviet treaty was ‘legitimate’, but not the secret protocols.^60
Gorbachëv’s scheme was to offer the maximum of freedom to the
Baltic Soviet republics but to keep them inside the USSR. He was a
Soviet patriot and a proud Russian. Despite all his mental adaptiveness,
he could barely understand why they refused to accept permanent
association with Russia. The national movements in the republics
started from opposite premises. In their opinion, they were not trying
to secede since they had never consented to that original association.
They had been forcibly and illegally annexed, and now they were re -
asserting their right to independence. Concessions came from Gor-
bachëv, as they saw things, only at a time when Moscow was weak.
They wanted to seize the moment, which might never happen again. If
this meant falling out with Bush, too bad. Bush bore in mind that he
had yet to complete agreements with the USSR on arms reduction;
he also sought to maintain Soviet consent to the revolutionary changes
in Germany and elsewhere. It was not in his interest to see Gorbachëv’s
authority undermined by the Baltic independence movement.
Bush and Gorbachëv wanted to end the Cold War with the mini-
mum of fuss. The Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian nationalists sought
to make as much trouble as appeared necessary to prevent Moscow
and Washington from ending their own hostilities without resolving
Baltic grievances – and they were unwilling to yield to pleas on behalf
of geopolitical convenience.