The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

26 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL the international community. They wanted to end it, and move on to something more normal, more stable and more predictable. Predicting the End The next few years were a blur. Starting out with a Gorbachev (andMoscow)-centric approach to U.S.-Soviet relations, we gradu- ally came to recognize the significance of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Republic’s bid for sovereignty. We also belatedly came to understand that several of the non-Russian republics—Ukraine and Georgia chief among them—were moving rapidly to a point of no return on remaining part of the Soviet Union. And then there were the Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Watching their people stand up and insist on their dignity and their return to the democratic family of nations was probably the most inspiring thing I have ever witnessed. The human chains, the mass public sing- alongs and, ultimately, the outright rebellion of these three small countries brought me closer to the spirit of our own revolution. It is a cliché that no one predicted the breakup of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. I can confirm that the cliché is not true. During those consequential years, I had the privilege of working with Paul Goble, an intel- ligence community analyst who joined State in the late 1980s to oversee our outreach to the Baltic states, a region in which he was a true expert. I remember being astonished by a conversation we had in late 1989. Paul was unequivo- cal: “Moscow is weakening, Yeltsin’s Russia is rising. The Balts won’t stay one moment longer than they have to. This is their chance. They will leave, they will reestablish their independence, and the Soviet Union cannot possibly survive their departure. Two years, maximum.” Paul nailed it. It was just about two years, and what a two years they were. We moved fairly quickly from trying to shore up Gorbachev and his proposed union treaty to reaching out to Yeltsin and the other leaders of the republics. Washington was reluctant to accept the inevitability of the Soviet breakup, an ambivalence captured by President Bush’s notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech of Aug. 1, 1991, in which he warned Ukrainians against “suicidal nationalism”—just three weeks before their declaration of independence and four months before the inde- pendence referendum in which 92 percent of Ukrainians voted to withdraw from the USSR. In my job, I worked to establish ties with the leaderships of the non-Russian republics as they moved toward possible independence. Some of them, like Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, later led their coun- tries to independence. Others, such as the nationalist leaders of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan, were later swept away by the resurgence of Soviet-era leaders. It was exciting to establish direct ties with the republic capitals after decades of having to route all communications through Moscow. The Phone Rings On Aug. 21, 1991, the telephone rang in our bedroom in Bethesda, Maryland. It was 2 a.m. Telephone calls at that hour U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz with General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, meeting to finalize the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Oct. 23, 1987. Behind Gorbachev is Paul Nitze, special adviser to the president and secretary of State on arms control from 1984 to 1989. The most important aspect of the Soviet reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall, in my view, was the very clear decision of Gorbachev not to use force to preserve the Soviet empire. COURTESYOFTHEHOOVER INSTITUTION