The Foreign Service Journal, December 2011

D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 29 ence brought the USSR close to crisis. Foreign Minister Shevardnadze met with me privately on the eve of that decision to enlist my help to persuade the Lithuanians to delay their decision until Gorbachev was secure in the newly created office of president. Shevardnadze did not seek an abandonment of the declaration, but only a delay of 10 days or so. When I informed him the following day that the Lithuanians were determined to proceed imme- diately, he remarked, as he saw me out of his office, “If I see a dictatorship coming, I will resign. I will not be part of a government with blood on its hands.” The Lithuan- ian declaration proceeded, as did Gorbachev’s appoint- ment to the post of president. Important as the independence movements in the three Baltic republics were, it was not their activities, or the growing assertiveness by nationalists in other non- Russian republics, that persuaded us to advise Washing- ton that the Soviet Union could collapse. In 1989 the world had witnessed the slaughter of protesters in Tianan- men Square by Chinese Communist leaders. And the So- viet government still had the same capability to crush any opposition if there were a decision at the top to do so. Although by 1990 we in the embassy were convinced that Gorbachev would make every effort to avoid violence — any widespread application would reverse his entire policy of perestroika (restructuring) — we could not be sure that he would not be suddenly removed from power, as one of his predecessors, Nikita Khrushchev, had been in 1964. The Beginning of the End What persuaded us to alert Washington to the possi- bility that the hitherto unthinkable might happen was the development of separatist opinion in the Russian Social- ist Federated Soviet Republic, the largest and most pop- ulous of the 15 union republics. By the summer of 1990, we found more and more Russian leaders referring to the non-Russian republics as a burden and speaking of a fu- ture in which the USSR would resemble the European Union, not a unitary state. In effect, many key Russian F OCUS