Even before the break-up of the Soviet bloc in late 1989, events in China were producing a major story, As many as 100,000 students had made their way to Beijing and had taken over control of Tiananmen square, the center of the capital. The student excitement was fanned by the arrival of Gorbachev in May, seeking to patch up Soviet-Chinese relations which had been strained to the breaking point for some thirty years, ever since Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin policies. The students used Gorbachev’s visit to put posters up in Russian saying “glasnost”—openness. A month later, Chinese troops would be opening fire on these same students in the square, shocking the world with their brutality.
The Times was fortunate to have Nick Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn as our correspondents in Beijing during these tumultuous days.
As Bill Keller, then our Moscow bureau chief, wrote in September 1989, in a very perceptive news analysis we had encouraged: “One of the great contradictions of Mikhail S. Gorbachev is that while the outside world grows more and more captivated by his skill and charm, much of his own country seems increasingly immune to the magic.” Keller wrote that even as Gorbachev was being hailed as a bold visionary by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “the Baltic republics are defiant. Armenia and Azerbaijan are reported close to civil warfare, consumers look ahead to winter with something near panic, and Mr. Gorbachev is openly blamed for not waving a wand and making the hard times go away.”
On May 2, 1990, as an example of the unusual character of what was going on in the Soviet Union, we ran a front page story from Moscow with a lead from Keller saying: “President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the Kremlin leadership were jeered today by throngs of protestors who were allowed to march through Red Square at the end of the annual May Day parade. The Soviet leaders watched in evident amazement from the top of Lenin’s mausoleum as a shouting, fist-shaking column milled underneath waving banners that condemned the Communist Party and the KGB and supported Lithuania’s declaration of independence.” We ran a picture of someone holding a handmade placard in Russian saying: “Gorbachev, the People Don’t Trust You: Resign.”
I had gone with my family to Bar Harbor, Maine in August 1991 for a two week vacation, and we drove back to New York arriving at our house in Riverdale on a Saturday night, August 18. Almost as soon as I got home, I was called by the foreign desk informing me that there was apparently a “coup” in Russia and Gorbachev was ousted while on vacation in the Crimea by hard-liners from the Kremlin. The announcement was made at 6:00 a.m.Moscow time and given the fact that Moscow was seven hours ahead of New York, we had time to put out a banner headline for Sunday’s papers. It was written very cautiously: “Gorbachev Is Ousted In An Apparent Coup,” etc. The Times was lucky in 1971 in having a great team in Moscow. The bureau chief was Frank Clines, who was not a Russian expert, but was a seasoned correspondent and a good leader. Also there was Bill Keller, who was officially on a leave of absence to write a book about Russia which did not get completed because of the chaos that ensued.
The most experienced Russian hands in the bureau were Serge Schmemann, probably our most seasoned Russian expert, the son of a Russian Archbishop in New York, and Celestine Bohlen, the daughter of a former ambassador to Russia, Charles (Chip) Bohlen, who had served as President Roosevelt’s interpreter at the Yalta summit with Stalin and Churchill in February 1945. I called them affectionately our “zamalchatnie kvartet” (wonderful quartet).
As it turned out, the “coup” was extremely short-lived. Boris Yeltsin, the unpredictable Moscow party leader, had been out of the city when the coup occurred, but rushed back and the next day, standing on top of a tank outside the parliament building, was able to win the loyalty of troops sent to arrest him and to take control of Moscow. Thousands of Muscovites thronged the streets and by Wednesday, it was clear the so-called coup had failed. Gorbachev was released and flew back to Moscow.
But Gorbachev was never able to take power back fully. The turnaround led to Yeltsin’s rise in power and Gorbachev’s decline. Schmemann wrote a special report for our paper of December 15, 1991, that began: “Looking back now, the August coup was both Mikhail S.Gorbachev’s finest moment, and the start of the final act in his tumultuous reign. The collapse of the pathetic coup was his victory. It demonstrated that the freedoms he had loosened had taken root, and it brought out the qualities of courage and determination that brought about the end of the cold war.”
“Now, the man who set out almost seven years earlier to reform the world’s biggest empire finds himself on the verge of being swept aside by the very forces he set loose. And although his Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze was still calling on him today not to resign, it seems more and more certain that he will have to give up the role he has played in exchange for some unknown future.”
Everything reached its climax on Christmas Day in New York (the Russian calendar celebrates it later). Serge wrote the special report, “End of an Empire.” He wrote: “The Soviet state, marked throughout its brief but tumultuous history by great achievement and terrible suffering, died today after a long and painful decline.It was 74 years old.” He wrote: “The end of the Soviet Union came with the resignation of Mikhail S, Gorbachev to make way for a new ‘Commonwealth of Independent States.’ At 7:32 p.m. shortly after the conclusion of his televised address [in which Gorbachev resigned], the red flag iwth hammer and sickle was lowered over the Kremlin and the white-blue-red flag Russian flag rose in its stead.” Frank Clines wrote the news story that day.
It’s hard for me today to remember the optimism I felt as the year ended in 1971. After all, in that year the United States had led a coalition that decisively defeated Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army and forced it out of Kuwait. The Soviet Union was now no longer a powerhouse to be feared. And the former Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe were now independent. And 1972 was to be the year Secretary of State James Baker was going to try to get a Middle East peace conference working. And China and Asia were quiet. But what we did not expect was the terrible bloodshed about to break out in the Balkans, and in particular Bosnia.
