‘Desire to Save USSR was Considered Funny,’ Yeltsin Aide Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 8 – Twenty-eight years ago today, the presidents of the three Slavic republics signed the Beloveshchaya accords which declared that the USSR had ceased to exist, thereby formalizing what had become true in the wake of the August coup and finally the vote of Ukraine for independence on December 1, 1991, Sergey Filatov says.

            Filatov, a Russian politician close to Boris Yeltsin who later served as head of the latter’s presidential administration, says that the situation was so fluid and confused and the resources available to anyone to hold things together were so small or doubtful that any expression of a desire “to save the USSR was considered funny” (vz.ru/politics/2019/12/8/1012179.html).

            Yeltsin and the Russian government were obsessed by the need to force Ukraine to return to Russia the nuclear warheads on its territory and because of that ignored the pleas of Russians in Crimea and the Donbass to take them back into Russia. Moscow didn’t have resources to do that without taking steps that would have prompted Ukraine to keep its nuclear arsenal.

            If Yeltsin had been able to form an alliance with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Filatov says, there might have been a chance to save the USSR or at least its Slavic core. But that would have required “normal relations” between the two – and those did not exist. “The fault was on both sides.”

            There was “a strong and deep antipathy” on the part of each. Moreover, they didn’t trust one another. Gorbachev felt Yeltsin had betrayed him, and Yeltsin felt Gorbachev had tried to dismember the Russian Federation by calling on the heads of the autonomous republics within it to sign the union treaty with the same status as the union republics.

            When it became impossible to hold the USSR together, Filatov continues, it was necessary to “preserve at least a Slavic state” including Russia, Belarus and Ukraine “to which Nazarbayev [of Kazakhstan] would join and then all the rest.”  But in the confusion of 1991 that did not happen.

            “Remember,” Filatov says, “we weren’t developing something old. We were building a new Russia and under very strong resistance. When you build something new, it is inevitable that you lose something and that something is destroyed. We could not build something new and not touch at the same time the old.  We had one single territory.”