Yeltsin полностью

With Gorbachev, Yeltsin went for the jugular in public on Friday, August 23, in the Russian Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev had been requested to make a statement and answer questions from the benches, which he did for ninety minutes. With a national television audience watching, Yeltsin sashayed up to Gorbachev and stuck in his face a transcript by Nikolai Vorontsov showing that most Soviet cabinet members backstabbed Gorbachev at a cabinet meeting on August 19. “Gorbachev kept his dignity when he was alone at the podium. But when Yeltsin came over, the effect was almost as if he crumpled.” ⁹⁴ Yeltsin hectored Gorbachev into reading out quotations from the paper to the lawmakers. That done, Yeltsin asked members, “on a lighter note,” to watch him finalize Decree No. 79, suspending the organs of the Russian Communist Party. He scrawled his signature slowly for the delectation of the deputies. They applauded him and heckled the red-faced Gorbachev, who mumbled “Boris Nikolayevich” several times. As an Izvestiya reporter noted, in an eerie inversion of the taunting of October–November 1987, Yeltsin, had now selected Gorbachev for the part of “naughty schoolboy.”⁹⁵

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