ENDINGS 485claimed to have no regrets about his resignation, Adamishin thought
that he was trying to persuade himself.^14
Gorbachëv was exhausted. He could see that things might turn out
badly for him: ‘It always turns out that they crucify prophets. So that’s
why I wonder whether my time has come to be crucified.’^15 Although
he hid his concerns, Raisa knew how ground-down he was. Quietly
she told the man she loved: ‘It’s time, Mikhail Sergeevich, to leave,
withdraw into private life and write your memoirs.’ On another occa-
sion she said: ‘Mikhail Sergeevich, you’ve done your job.’^16 He rejected
the advice. Outside the family and entourage, he behaved as if he
expected to go on and on.
A secret Soviet estimate in April 1991 held out the prospect of
saving 11.5 billion rubles from the state budget over the next six years
by reducing the number of strategic offensive weapons.^17 Akhromeev
admitted to British officials that the USSR could no longer hope to
sustain military parity with the US. This was a comment that no Soviet
commander would have risked making a few years earlier.^18 On 18
May Gorbachëv called together his Security Council to discuss the
emergency. Nobody imagined that the USSR could cope much longer
on its own. Western assistance was essential, and Gorbachëv had
approached President Mitterrand for help in joining the International
Monetary Fund – among the G7 countries, only Japan expressed dis-
sent. His hope was to attain a five-year agreement for an annual loan
of $15 billion. (The Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs was touting the
possibility that the USSR might receive double that amount, but Gor-
bachëv thought this unrealistic.)^19 He warned that the Soviet leadership
would incur criticism by ‘patriots’ about the ‘humiliation’. He urged
the need for sober realism: ‘Unfortunately we’ve fallen far behind the
West and our science is correctly used only in the military sector . . .
Cooperation with the West is in the country’s interests, for its upturn
- that too is patriotism. And what kind of cooperation should this be?
Neither bilateral nor episodic but genuinely broad integration.’^20
Baltic questions continued to complicate the political picture.
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia sent out their leaders to North America
and Western Europe to stir up their diasporas. They wanted to coun-
teract the idea that nothing should be done that might somehow
undermine Gorbachëv. Landsbergis, Chairman of Lithuania’s Supreme
Council, addressed the American Congress’s Commission for Human
Rights, spelling out the continuing abuses of law and order on Lithua-
nian territory. He recounted how the USSR had annexed his country