32 Holiday essay The Economist December 18th 2021
they had done—to inform Moscow of what had happened.
Mr Gorbachev was furious. The importance of Ukraine was not
an abstract matter to him. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was the child of a
Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. He grew up singing Ukrai
nian songs and reading Gogol, who reimagined his native coun
try’s folk magic as rich poetry after moving to St Petersburg. The
Soviet Union had meant that Mr Gorbachev and others like him,
whatever their parentage, could partake in both identities.
More immediately, though the failed coup had made some
such breakup more or less inevitable, disassembling a multieth
nic empire of 250m people was still a subject of huge trepidation.
As Solzhenitsyn had written in “Rebuilding Russia”, “The clock of
communism has stopped chiming. But its concrete edifice has not
yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its
rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The fact that in that rubble, if
rubble there was to be, there would be the world’s largest nuclear
arsenal, spread between four separate countries (the three Slavic
ones and Kazakhstan), frightened statesmen around the world.
When, as the economy worsened, Mr Gorbachev went to President
George Bush for $10bn15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear
threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession
in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what
you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once
Bush finds out about this, what then?”
The question was being answered on
one of the lodge’s other phone lines. An
drei Kozyrev, Russia’s first foreign minis
ter, had had trouble getting through to
Bush. A State Department receptionist—
Mr Kozyrev did not have the White House
number with him—told the man with a
Russian accent demanding that she con
nect someone called Mr Yeltsin to the pres
ident that she was “not in the mood for
prank calls”. Nor could Mr Kozyrev be
called back in a way that might prove his
bona fides: he had no idea of the lodge’s
phone number. In the end, though, he got
through, and was able to act as interpreter
as Yeltsin explained to Bush that the
world’s largest nuclear arsenal was now in
the hands of something called the cis.
If Mr Gorbachev had been unclear how Bush would react, so
was Bush himself. A voice memo he recorded the next day is a
string of anxious questions: “I find myself on this Monday night,
worrying about military action. Where was the [Soviet] army—
they’ve been silent. What will happen? Can this get out of hand?
Will Gorbachev resign? Will he try to fight back? Will Yeltsin have
thought this out properly? It is tough—a very tough situation.”
Similar doubt assailed the three presidents in the forest. When
Yeltsin and his entourage set off back to Moscow, they joked about
their plane being shot down. The laughter was not entirely free
from anxiety.
Instead the shooting down of planes, along with the violation
of Ukrainian sovereignty, the seizure of Crimea, the reassertion
that the legacy of Kyivian Rus meant the nations must be shackled
together and the reversion of Belarus to dictatorship—that all
came later, a sequence of events which led, 30 Decembers later, to
70,000 or more Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and, in a
ghastly sideshow, thousands of Middle Eastern refugees stuck in
the Belovezh forest itself. The once seemingly settled question of
postSoviet relations between the three nations has once again be
come an overriding geopolitical concern.
Back then, though, as he stood among the snowcapped pine
trees after leaving the meeting, Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of
lightness and freedom. “In signing this agreement,” he later re
called, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path of internal development rather than an imperial one...She was throwing off the
traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict
with Western civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolu
tion of ethnic conflicts. The last hour of the Soviet empire was
chiming.” Maybe the convoluted interdependency of Russia and
Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought; maybe demo
cratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a
failure of imagination.I
n 1994, afterthree years of horrific economic contraction, two
of the three men who had met at Viskuli fell from power. In Bela
rus Alexander Lukashenko, who had previously run a large collec
tive piggery, won election over Mr Shushkevich. Mr Lukashenko
told people he would sort out the economic mess by taking them
back to the security they had had before. Reforms stopped—as
would, at a later stage of Mr Lukashenko’s now 27year reign, com
petitive and fair elections. The flag, which had been changed to
the red and white of the very shortlived Belarusian Republic of
1918, was turned back to one like that of the Soviet era.
There was no such turnaround in Ukraine, where Mr Kravchuk
lost the presidential election to Leonid Kuchma, a skilled Soviet
era industrial manager. Mr Kravchuk held
the more nationalistic, Ukrainianspeak
ing west of the country; Mr Kuchma took
the Russianspeaking and collectivist re
gions to the east. But unlike Mr Lukashen
ko, Mr Kuchma was not a reactionary, and
he was to prove canny in wooing Ukrai
nians who had at first distrusted him.
Yeltsin was not required to stand for
election that year. But a year earlier he and
his reformists had faced down an insur
gency by Communists and an assortment
of antiWestern, antidemocratic factions
led by the speaker of the parliament. One of
their grievances was the loss of Crimea, a
peninsula in the Black Sea reallocated from
the Russian republic to the Ukrainian re
public in 1954 but still seen as part of Rus
sia by most Russians. A holidaying place for both the Soviet elite
and for millions of ordinary people, it had been at the heart of the
imperial project since the days of Catherine the Great.
The insurgency of 1993 was bloody; Yeltsin ordered the parlia
ment building shelled by tanks. The public stood by him. A refer
endum held in the aftermath greatly increased the powers of the
presidency. His foreign supporters stood by him too, and the fol
lowing year a security agreement saw America, Britain and Russia
guarantee respect for Ukraine’s integrity within its existing bor
ders—which is to say, including Crimea—in exchange for its giv
ing up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Un
ion. Ukraine was grateful; the West saw further evidence of a tran
sition towards a liberal, democratic Russian state.
Some, though, thought this dangerously optimistic; one such
was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a PolishAmerican diplomat and former
national security adviser. In March 1994 Brzezinski took his own
shot at Solzhenitsyn’s question—the question he believed, rightly,
to provoke “the greatest passion from the majority of [Russian]
politicians as well as citizens, namely ‘What is Russia?’” Rather
than give a definitive answer, he gave an alternative one: “Russia
can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.”
He was right. Yeltsin’s unburdened moment among the trees
had been that of a man who did not want to, and did not have to,
rule an empire. He consciously rejected not just the Soviet Union’s
ideology and central planning, but also the tools of statecraft that
had held it together—repression and lies. To him, the market