Gulf News
It was 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and the mighty Soviet Union began to crumble. A series of ‘velvet’ uprisings were taking place in several of its Eastern Europe satellite countries. The Cold War was clearly nearing its end and a triumphant Western camp, led by the United States, couldn’t wait to share the spoils.
The biggest prize of all at that moment seemed to be communist East Germany. Their compatriots in the western part were bracing for a hard bargain. They were willing to offer the Soviets anything for German unification. However, as new documents show, Western leaders were stunned that Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who presided over the disintegration of the Communist empire, was not much of a negotiator.
A new book, ‘Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union’ by Vladislav Zubok, published in November last year, sheds some light on those fateful three years between the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the official declaration of the birth of the Russian republic and the death of the Soviet Union in December 1991, under the misguided and mostly incompetent watch of Gorbachev, according to the book.
As the West sensed the eminent collapse of the USSR, its leaders realised that all what Gorbachev probably needed to finish the job was a little push, some sort of an assurance that Russia’s interests and dignity will be preserved – something he can sell to his more reluctant and increasingly suspicious comrades in the Politburo.
There comes in the famous words of James Baker, the shrewd US Secretary of State under President George Bush, the father: “Not one inch eastward”. His controversial words referred to the potential expansions of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) closer to the Russian border, always a red line for Moscow.
Ironclad guarantees
The promise, made by Baker during a meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow on February 9 1990, three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, aimed at calming the fears of the Soviet leadership that the proposed unification of Germany would not be a catalyst to expand Nato in Eastern Europe.
In return for agreeing to German unification, Baker offered Gorbachev “ironclad guarantees that there would be no extension of Nato’s jurisdiction for forces of Nato one inch to the east,” according to recently declassified transcript of the meeting. As per the records, Baker reiterated that promise at least three times during the course of that meeting.
Baker was following on the same position of his then West German counterpart, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who insisted in a speech on January 31 1990, less than 10 days before Baker’s Moscow visit, that there “would not be an expansion of Nato territory to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union.”
The Soviet Union was declared dead in November 1991 by the pro-Western Russian President Boris Yeltsin, following a suspicious attack by army generals on the Russian Parliament in August that year. Subsequently, Yeltsin then signed a decree of banning the Communist Party in Russia, effectively making Gorbachev out of work. A few days later, on 8 December 1991, James Baker proclaimed, “the Soviet Union as we’ve known it no longer exists.”
The rest is history. Or as, Francis Fukuyama bragged, ‘the end of history.’
But for Nato, it was just the beginning. And despite Washington’s ‘ironclad’ assurances, the western alliance moved hundreds of miles eastward.
Russian objections
The first to be admitted to Nato was Poland. It is worth here to remember a meeting February 6. 1990, the records of which were made available recently in the UK, between then British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd and Genscher, who is quoted as saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join Nato the next.” But they did in 1999, along with Hungary and the Czech Republic despite Russian objections.
Five years later, on March 29, 2004, the gates of Nato were opened wide to include Bulgaria, one of Moscow’s closest allies during the Cold War era, as well as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Enemies are at the gates of Russia, literally.
Those enemies were never clearly defined or even seen by the incompetent Gorbachev. In his study of the last Soviet leader, titled ‘The enigma of 1989’, Canadian political scientist Jacques Levesque wrote this: “Rarely in history, have we witnessed the policy of a great power continue, throughout so many difficulties and reversals, to be guided by a such an idealistic view of the world, based on universal reconciliation, and in which the image of the enemy was constantly blurring, to the point of making it practically disappear as the enemy.” So Levesque thinks that Gorbachev was a utopian who failed to see the evil in the others (i.e. the West). But others who had close knowledge of the man whose disastrous policies led to the fall of the USSR assert that he was not a utopian but more of a naive, incompetent leader who was easily manipulated by the West. Zubok, the Russian researcher, notes in his book that from 1989 and for the next three years, Gorbachev and his inner circle lost all focus on all major issues that engulfed the country, especially the economic situation (high inflation, shortage of consumer goods, etc), which was exploited by the US and its allies to force concessions.
Creeping expansion of Nato
Fast forward to 2022 and the West is faced with another leader who this time cannot seem to be manipulated. Russian president Vladimir Putin, who complained for years about the creeping expansion of Nato closer to his borders, has finally decided to draw a line in the sand, or more precisely the snow.
Ukraine is pushing hard to join the western alliance, which means that Nato would be at Russia’s borders. Nato has so far denied any plan to admit Ukraine. But Putin, unlike Gorbachev, wouldn’t buy that type of a promise. The memories of those ‘not one inch eastward’ promises made to Gorbachev are very much alive in the memory of Russians. And Putin seems willing to go to war to stop the potential siege of his country. Unlike the former Soviet leader, Putin is not swayed by the flattering words of the western media it lavished on Gorbachev. He is of a different breed. And he learnt the lessons of 1989. And if he has amassed 100,000 troops at the border with Ukraine, then it is a threat that must be taken seriously by the West.
“He will make good on every promise or threat – if Putin says he will do something, then he is prepared to do it; and he will find a way of doing it, using every method at his disposal,” note Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy in their 2015 book, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin”, an exhaustive study of the personality of the Russian president.
Putin is not only a fighter but also a strategic planner, according to the book. He is also a man on a mission: restoring Russia’s pride and prestige as a superpower. President Joe Biden needs to make no mistake; his Russian counterpart is no Gorbachev. Moscow has submitted a draft document listing the security guarantees it requires from Nato. The alliance has already dismissed those demands. Not a very wise move. Biden needs to reconsider; Putin will sure not. The ghosts of 1989 are very much alive and he will make sure that Russia, which has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and the most powerful army in Europe, will not be manipulated, again.
