If Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t already know he was mortally wounded, the Sunday phone call from Minsk should have told him. On the line was Stanislav Shushkevich, chairman of the Belorussian Parliament. The message was straightforward: the union is dead, long live the Commonwealth of Independent States. Acting alone, the republics of Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine had voided the union treaty embodying Gorbachev’s hopes of clinging to power. They had formed a new alliance. And Russian President Boris Yeltsin, now preeminent over what was once the Soviet Union, could not be bothered to speak personally to the man who made possible the past six astonishing years.
Gorbachev seemed to accept that an era was ending. He denounced Yeltsin’s new union as unconstitutional and said, “There is no place for me in the Commonwealth of Independent States.” He threatened to resign, then took it back, then signaled he would stay in office for a transition period. But as a leader of real influence, he was as good as gone. The “main ideas of perestroika “had taken hold, he said. “My life’s work has been accomplished.”
The commonwealth agreement did produce something like a constitutional crisis. It created two governments in a single space. It heightened fears of a Slavic entente at the expense of other peoples of the former empire. Even after Kazakhstan and four Central Asian republics said they would join the core Slav states, the lines of authority were unclear (page 27). Who was responsible for military command and control? Who was in charge of foreign policy? Exactly what did “commonwealth” mean? Different republics seemed to have different schemes in mind. Still, said Yeltsin in a speech to the Russian Parliament, no alternative existed. Under the circumstances, he said, any “effort to raise doubts about the legality of the agreement [is] immoral.”
There could be no doubt about the human crisis. Ever since the failed coup attempt in August, the country has been in history’s first slow-motion free fall. As winter closed in, the deterioration accelerated. Food was scarce. Services suffered: about half the airports in the former union closed last week for lack of aviation fuel, and public buildings shut down after electricity cuts. An unnerved Bush administration called for a new aid program for the “disoriented and confused” Soviet people (page 29).
Most ordinary Soviets agreed on one thing, though. Whenever Gorbachev officially goes, they won’t miss him. While grateful for his historic role in transforming a totalitarian system, they blame him for the dislocations of perestroika. His perorations bore them. They are weary of politics. It’s unlikely that many will fret about constitutional niceties. The question is whether the new arrangement can foster prosperity before confidence in it, too, collapses. What happens on the Sunday the phone rings for Boris Yeltsin?
