Afterwards Nazarbayev claimed he ‘wished I hadn’t been there’, but now he became dictator of a vast new state, Kazakhstan, so absolute that he ruled for thirty years, acclaimed himself Leader of the Nation and named the capital Nursultan.
At 5 p.m., on Christmas Day, Gorbachev rang Bush. ‘Hello, Mikhail,’ said Bush, at Camp David with his family.
‘George, my dear friend,’ said Gorbachev. ‘I finally decided to do it today, at the end of the day.’ He meant his resignation. ‘The debate in our union on what kind of state to create took a different track from what I thought right.’ This was one of history’s great understatements.
At 7 p.m., as Gorbachev addressed the nation, a general arrived to collect the nuclear briefcase and delivered it to Yeltsin. Afterwards Gorbachev told his aides he was going to ring his old mother who ‘has been saying to me for ages “Throw it all over. Come home”’. Gorbachev took his mother’s advice. Down the Kremlin corridors, Yeltsin searched Gorbachev’s office – the Little Corner, once occupied by Lenin, Stalin and Andropov – then demanded, ‘Bring us glasses.’ He and Korzhakov downed their whiskies. ‘Now,’ growled Yeltsin, president of the new Russian Federation, ‘that’s better.’
THE
Yeltsin, advised by a cohort of young reformers, banned Communism, opened many archives, pell-mell converted the command economy to free-market capitalism and launched a privatization programme. But almost immediately the economy crashed, Mafia criminals ran amok and the privatizations were fatally rushed and corrupted as a well-connected plutocracy of ex-Communists and self-made robber barons, together known as the oligarchs, bought oil companies for a fraction of their true value. Yeltsin, who combined the liberal instincts of a democrat with the habits of a drunken tsar, revealed the crimes of Stalin and encouraged exposés of history, yet he never dispensed with the security services. Instead of dissolving the KGB, he divided it into two new agencies. Meanwhile he played two entourages off against each other: on one hand, he championed his young westernized reformers; on other hand, he spent time with his swaggering, hard-drinking security chieftain, Korzhakov, now a general.
As Yeltsin took power in Moscow, Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, was metamorphosing into a Georgian leader. In May 1991, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who had been persecuted by Shevardnadze when he was Soviet proconsul there in the 1970s, was elected president by 86.5 per cent in a free election, promising to end all Russian interference. But within weeks Gamsakhurdia, manic, hollow-eyed and neurotic, managed to offend liberals with his despotism, Moscow with his Russophobia and ethnic minorities with his chauvinistic ‘Georgia for Georgians’. By September the president was a lonely Shakespearean figure besieged in his palace. ‘I’m the victim of the infernal, diabolic machinations of the Kremlin,’ he told this author in his office. ‘If Shevardnadze ever returns, we’ll shoot him like a poodle.’ Yet the rebels now surrounded the palace. ‘Yes, I’m like a king in a Shakespearean play.’ Henry V became first King Lear, then Richard II.
His chief enemy was an even more extraordinary personality, a former gangster boss, GULAG prisoner and playwright, Jaba Ioseliani, who during Stalin’s reign had raided a bank. He now formed a private army,
Spasms of killing inspired by medieval dreams of lost empires demonstrated what could happen when neither empires nor superpowers balanced the world. Yugoslavia was shattered by its feuding nationalities, incited to confrontation by vindictive nationalists, leading first to a war between Serbia and Croatia, then to a Serbian campaign to exterminate Bosnian Muslims, complete with concentration camps, mass rapes and massacres. After three and half years of war, in November 1995, Bill Clinton orchestrated a peace deal at Dayton, Ohio, that formed a tortuously complex multi-ethnic Bosnian state, but the Serbs switched to crushing Kosovan Albanians until March 1999, when Clinton unleashed NATO airstrikes that forced Serbian withdrawal and further infuriated Russia.
