Ukraine's role in both Soviet and contemporary history
really cannot be overestimated.
{an8}And Putin has this idea that it's really where Russia was born,
{an8}and it's an integral part of Russia.
{an8}Nothing is stronger than the determination of millions,
{an8}who, by their culture, religion, traditions, and language
consider themselves part of Russia,
whose ancestors lived in a single country for centuries.
Putin talks about the fact that Vladimir Lenin,
along with Joseph Stalin, made a huge mistake back in 1922, 1923,
{an8}in creating a standalone Ukrainian Republic.
Ukraine is just the borderlands of Russia.
This is Putin's reading of Russian history.
{an8}From his point of view,
{an8}an independent Ukraine just couldn't exist.
One of the last meetings I had with a very senior official,
one of the closest people to Putin at the time, he said to me,
{an8}"Mike, if things get hot in Ukraine, you need to remember two things."
"One, we care more than you do."
"This is more important to us than it'll ever be
to the United States of America."
"And two, you people, you have really short attention spans."
"We don't."
"Whatever it takes,
we will be here because we care more
and we're gonna be here for the long haul."
{an8}At the end of 1989, the Cold War order is crumbling.
You could feel that the Soviet Union was losing, uh, its position.
{an8}You have the accidental opening of the wall,
{an8}which now all of a sudden puts German unification on the table.
So Gorbachev has more than he can handle.
He can no longer control it.
And there's a million questions.
{an8}What comes next? What happens to the division of Germany?
{an8}What happens to the division of Europe and to NATO and the Warsaw Pact?
What happens to Gorbachev? What happens to the Soviet Union?
Who's got their hand on the nuclear trigger?
Gorbachev, by 1988, '89,
was consciously dismantling the Soviet communist system.
{an8}What he certainly did not wish to dismantle was the Soviet Union.
This multi-ethnic state with 15 union republics.
Up until that point, they'd been using the new freedoms of perestroika
{an8}to argue for a greater autonomy within the Republic
{an8}within the confines of the Soviet Union.
Perestroika was a kind of euphemism for reform.
But after 1989,
expectations were raised.
Not a single shot was fired by a Soviet soldier
when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.
So, people in the most disaffected republics of the Soviet Union,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
when they saw Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians getting away with it,
they thought, "Why not they?"
{an8}A human chain stretched across three Baltic states
{an8}was a clear message for Moscow,
{an8}that the drive for independence had become a popular mass movement.
{an8}Free countries briefly between World Wars One and Two,
{an8}the three Baltic States were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939,
{an8}by a secret Hitler-Stalin treaty.
{an8}The United States never legally recognized
{an8}that these three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,
were in the Soviet Union.
{an8}Despite 50 years of control by Moscow,
{an8}the Baltic States maintain separate non-Russian identities.
{an8}The communist parties, locally, began to break away from Moscow
{an8}and also ask for autonomy.
{an8}So the very communist parties that had been put in place to control them,
{an8}uh, begin to lose control.
{an8}Gorbachev couldn't accept it.
{an8}Many people at the time thought he was going to be removed
{an8}if he didn't suppress the Baltics.
Mr. Gorbachev flew into his rebel republic
and his biggest challenge today,
to be greeted by the Lithuanian communists,
whose split with Moscow threatens his authority
and the unity of the Soviet Union.
{an8}"We don't need more rights, we need full independence."
From whom?
- Who instructed you to do this? - I wrote it myself.
- You personally? - Yes.
What's your vision of your independence?
To die in the same kind of independent Lithuania
as the one in which I was born.
Yes.
I remember Gorbachev told me,
"Why you are so eager, so full independence?"
"It is nonsense."
"Nobody can be independent."
{an8}"But you will be given more."
{an8}"Greater part of your harvest."
If you get full autonomy now
and start trading at market prices,
you'll fall flat on your faces immediately!
Why part of harvest?
All our harvest is ours.
We need perestroika to solve all these issues.
Perestroika has laid them bare.
Could you have raised these questions anytime in the past?
No, never.
What's more, if you did dare ask anything, you knew what would become of you.
Now you want to run away from the Union.
Where would you run to? Why would you run?
That's what you should think about, so do give it some thought.
All the best.
{an8}Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
{an8}By mid-afternoon, a third of a million people
{an8}had gathered to chant for freedom.
{an8}FREEDOM, LITHUANIANS!
Mr. Gorbachev hasn't convinced them.
Our goal in Sąjūdis was,
we are going to full liberation,
including political one, including the statehood of Lithuania.
{an8}We demand freedom and independence.
{an8}We are here, in the heart of Lithuania, and we will not retreat anywhere.
{an8}Lithuania will be free! Lithuania will be free!
{an8}Lithuania was the first one in the Soviet Union.
{an8}On March 11th, 1991,
{an8}they declared the restoration of the independent state of Lithuania.
And from henceforth,
Lithuania is once again an independent state.
I salute the Supreme Council. I salute Lithuania.
As the Lithuanian flag was raised
and they sang the national anthem once banned by the communists,
Lithuania proclaimed that it had returned to the status it enjoyed
up until the Soviet Red Army invaded in 1940.
Soviet laws declared the parliament would no longer apply in Lithuania,
and the words "socialist" and "Soviet" would be dropped from the official title.
Gorbachev had been willing to see the end of communism
in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
He'd even tolerated the end of communism in Germany.
That was a surprise to us.
But he somehow felt he now had to make a stand someplace,
that to allow the collapse of the Baltic States
would mean that it would roll back eventually to Moscow itself.
{an8}We can distinguish between Lithuanians
{an8}and those pushing the nation into a historical cul-de-sac.
These people need to come to their senses.
It was followed by a very difficult period.
Economic blockade.
Soviet Union tried to freeze us.
{an8}The flow of oil has been cut.
{an8}The Republic has two to three weeks' reserves of fuel.
Even the supply of coal to the Republic has now been halted.
Moscow making it clear that it can, by economic means alone,
crush Lithuania's dream of independence.
They did not give us fuel,
some other goods.
Independence leaders called on people to keep their nerve.
They warned that Moscow intends to step up the pressure
with more economic and political sanctions,
and that the struggle for independence will be a hard one.
But we managed to survive.
When they saw that blockade did not work,
uh, then they realized that some kind of violence was needed.
The independence of Lithuania was already ten months long.
People, come here, to the side!
The troops are coming!
As always, I was on duty at the hospital.
I remember that when it was announced on the radio,
{an8}there is big trouble,
the soldiers are moving to take over the government buildings.
At the main newspaper printing plant,
paratroopers storm the building.
They fired into the air and sprayed the plant with bullets.
Several unarmed civilians were seriously wounded.
One sobbing woman feared for her daughter trapped inside the printing house.
"It's Gorbachev," she told us.
{an8}"Now you see the man you gave the Nobel Prize to."
{an8}You're not guilty, but please think about what you're doing!
You have to think on your own.
Popular reaction was quick.
Vilnius Radio called on people to rally around other key installations
which might be taken.
And on that evening of January 12th,
around midnight, I arrived at the TV tower.
We all surrounded the television buildings and tower,
making a live ring.
And, after about an hour,
a tank convoy arrived.
{an8}Lithuania! Lithuania! Lithuania! Lithuania! Lithuania!
The moment Moscow fell back on the old ways
to deal with defiance, is captured in these pictures
snatched by Lithuanian cameramen as their own TV station was overrun.
{an8}That night, I was working in my office.
Occupants were trying to break down my door.
{an8}I've locked myself in my office.
{an8}What should we do? Should we go on the air, do you think?
- We are on the air! - We are on the air.
We're still on the air, dear audience.
There were a few colleagues with me, including women.
We tried to resist, and we did not open the door.
Kauspedas has just informed me
that people are being beaten near the TV tower.
There's a struggle going on inside.
Then they started shooting through the door with rifles.
After it all, the illusions to resist disappeared,
and we were forced to surrender.
Several thousand unarmed Lithuanians
had camped out at the installations
in the belief that Moscow would not take the political risk
of killing or wounding unarmed civilians.
They were wrong.
I could see two young people die in front of my eyes.
I also saw how one person tried to get on the tank.
I'm not armed!
Why are you doing this?
But he jumped aside...
and the other one,
I just saw how his hand loosened up
and he just went down into that iron abyss.
At that moment,
that killer tank
went towards the TV tower
and the next tank arrived.
And just like the picture shows,
I blocked the way.
We stood looking at each other, me and the tank.
It is hard for me to say how long it continued.
At that moment, it felt like eternity.
But... then I realized that we won,
as he turned around and drove away.
Fascists! Fascists! Fascists!
Fourteen people were killed in one night in Lithuania.
{an8}Even today, there are many people in the Baltic republics
{an8}who take a fairly dim view of Gorbachev because they blame him for the crackdown.
The fact that such a confrontation arose there,
it's just a very disturbing reality.
Lithuanians are standing against the tanks.
And tanks
of that reformer,
democrat, Gorbachev,
are going to crush unarmed people.
Knowing Gorbachev, I cannot imagine that he gave that order.
That was a decision that was taken illegally by military commanders.
{an8}How did that happen without his... okay?
{an8}Well, that's-that... that's something that he regretted always,
this kind of, uh, improper behavior by the military
was actually possible.
I don't believe the argument
that Gorbachev didn't know what was happening in Vilnius.
We know that the Chief of the General Staff
{an8}and the Defense Minister had gone, uh, to the Baltic States
{an8}and probably had... had planned the operation there.
{an8}Why would you send tanks?
{an8}Obviously, he was not ready
{an8}to let Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and others free.
{an8}He tried to stop it with brute force.
{an8}And even now, you can see remnants of the barricades.
They marched through the center of the Soviet capital,
{an8}thousands of demonstrators chanting, "Freedom for Lithuania"
{an8}and, "Down with the executioners."
{an8}Mikhail Gorbachev has, with his reforms, let a genie out of a bottle.
He's got protesters both home and abroad calling for many, many more freedoms
than he's willing to give.
Real democracy, real freedom of speech, real freedom of movement.
While Mr. Gorbachev put a brave face on it,
he cannot ignore the fact that so many are so disillusioned.
He's given these people a voice.
And they want that which the party's not prepared to concede, power.
By the winter and spring of 1991, there was another factor.
Boris Yeltsin.
{an8}Boris Yeltsin is another Communist Party figure
who has a very strong rivalry,
which becomes a hatred, with Gorbachev, a mutual hatred.
The two of them are real enemies.
Boris Yeltsin was brought to Moscow by Gorbachev in 1985
to become the city's Communist Party boss.
Yeltsin! Yeltsin!
Yeltsin immediately took on the bureaucracy,
firing hundreds of corrupt trade officials.
His unorthodox style won him a wide following,
but he also played the role of Gorbachev critic,
and that got him into trouble.
He considers me to be too radical.
We have to do everything very carefully and cautiously.
{an8}But people are very impatient.
{an8}They've been waiting for four years, and they can't wait another year.
Something has to be done within a year?
Yes.
If not, then what happens?
A revolution from below will begin.
Yeltsin and Gorbachev represent,
uh, two different aspects of the Russian mindset.
Gorbachev's mindset is, when you want change,
you should think and you should take other people's advice.
Yeltsin represents a part of the Russian mindset
that believes in changing things overnight.
He was a very impatient person,
but it's true that there was something in common between them,
and that is the understanding
that the previous system should be replaced.
Yeltsin, in contrast to Gorbachev,
figures out that nationalism is the wave of the future.
We see communism being basically bad as ideology,
as a system of belief.
{an8}People were looking for alternatives,
{an8}and one of those alternatives was, of course,
{an8}ideas of nation and nationalism.
Yeltsin says, "The Soviet Union is crumbling."
"I need to be in charge of Russia, so I think the smart move,
which Gorbachev isn't doing, is to break with the party
and to try to establish myself as a Russian leader, not a Soviet leader."
{an8}Tonight, on the tenth day of this congress,
{an8}came the blow Mr. Gorbachev had tried so hard to avoid.
{an8}Boris Yeltsin, the ultimate symbol of radical reforms
and arguably the country's most popular politician,
asked for the floor to announce he was leaving the Communist Party.
In the light of promises made in the free election period,
I announce my leaving the party.
In order to have greater opportunity to exert more effective influence
on the activities of the Soviets,
I am willing to cooperate with all parties and sociopolitical organizations
in the Russian Republic.
Mr. Gorbachev interjected.
By then, Yeltsin had turned his back on this congress
and a lifetime in this party, and walked out.
Yeltsin becomes very active in Russian electoral politics,
as opposed to Soviet electoral politics,
and he's resoundingly successful in that.
{an8}Boris Yeltsin has defeated his communist rivals
{an8}in the Russian Republic's first presidential election.
He was the landslide winner for president of the Russian Federation,
the first freely-elected leader in the 1,000-year history
of that vast country.
{an8}Moscow would now be the seat of two governments.
The Russian Republic, headed by Yeltsin,
and the Kremlin regime of Gorbachev.
But only Yeltsin had been elected by popular vote.
So, by the summer of 1991,
{an8}Yeltsin had become powerful as the president of Russia.
Gorbachev is hanging on by a thread.
There are independence movements all over the Soviet Union,
and he's trying to hold it together.
{an8}The idea that Gorbachev developed was to have a new union treaty
{an8}to convert the Soviet Union
from an empire held together by force into a voluntary association.
The 15 republics would all voluntarily agree to work together
in a single country with a single capital,
but with more local autonomy, more autonomy given to the republics.
He believed that a new, voluntary union
could be negotiated between the republics,
giving the republics a lot of latitude
in their economic and social policies.
The economy was totally interconnected.
Not only a single currency,
but industries were completely interconnected.
So to unscramble the whole of the Soviet Union into separate parts
didn't seem to make economic sense.
But it was an attempt to modernize and to give it a future.
Will the Soviet Union remain?
Yes, I'm sure. Absolutely sure.
- What future will it be? - You have to be
a completely ignorant or irresponsible person
to hold any other opinion.
All of us living here in the vast country need the preservation of the Soviet Union.
The leaders of the republics are antsy about this.
And, at the same time,
the leaders of the security apparatus of the military, the KGB,
{an8}the big state industries, they hate Gorbachev by now.
{an8}They hate him.
{an8}They think he's weak
{an8}and everything's going to hell in a handbasket.
{an8}Yanayev and his henchmen have made it clear they distrust the West
and market economic forces,
and their frustration has grown in recent weeks.
{an8}A group of us were tasked,
{an8}"Do some scenario planning if the Soviet Union were to collapse."
We wouldn't even put it on our calendars that we were meeting.
It just said, "Meeting with Dennis Ross."
- It was secret? - It was. Nobody knew.
We would get together, kind of once a week,
and just do scenarios.
And one was that there might be a coup against Gorbachev.
Would we warn him?
Under what circumstances would we warn him?
And there was a little bit of a debate in the administration.
Should we try to hasten it along?
{an8}I remember that Defense Secretary Cheney
{an8}was a little bit more on the, "We should push it along."
{an8}Larry Eagleburger once said,
{an8}"Let's disarm them before we dismember them,"
because this was a nuclear power.
What would it mean for a nuclear power to come undone?
{an8}Gorbachev goes on vacation.
Presumably he'll come back from vacation and they'll sign this new union treaty.
While he's on vacation, the leader of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov,
gets together what would be called the GKChP.
The State Emergency Committee. Essentially a coup.
I turned on the TV, and before I heard any announcement,
I saw classical music.
And when bad things happen in Russia, like a leader dying or things like that,
there is always classical music in the morning.
And so I understood that there was a coup on the way.
There was supposed to be the signing of the union treaty the next day,
and I immediately understood
that the union treaty would not be signed.
Military leaders and the Soviet secret police
have taken control of the government,
and now Vice President Gennady Yanayev is sitting in the president's seat.
{an8}What's especially interesting is to look at the positions
{an8}held by those who were the leading members of the group
{an8}who mounted the coup.
{an8}The chairman of the KGB,
{an8}the minister of interior,
{an8}the minister of defense,
{an8}the prime minister,
{an8}the secretary of the Central Committee,
{an8}who supervised the military-industrial complex.
{an8}These were the leading people in the party and state institutions
who had pretended to go along with Gorbachev's policies for a long time,
but were secretly plotting against him.
Tanks are moving into the capital,
taking up positions near key government buildings.
Outside the Russian Parliament building, crowds began gathering early this morning.
Mikhail Gorbachev has been vacationing in the Black Sea resort area
{an8}and has not been seen since the takeover.
{an8}Gorbachev is arrested at his residence, his dacha, called Foros.
He and his wife are there,
very far away from Moscow on the Black Sea.
He was held incommunicado.
Any number in Moscow was blocked.
{an8}All my telephones were cut off.
{an8}I have no communication with the outside world.
Some members of his security detail
thought that there was a real possibility that his residence would be stormed.
A delegation has flown out to me.
This group of individuals,
on behalf of the so-called Emergency Committee,
proposed that I give up all my functions and transfer them to Yanayev,
that I had been overthrown.
It's unclear what's going to happen to Gorbachev.
And his wife has a stroke while they're being held under house arrest
{an8}because she's so afraid.
{an8}Gorbachev is convinced that he's going to be... going to be killed.
I am not permitted beyond the dacha's premises.
By sea and on land, I am surrounded by troops.
I don't know whether I will succeed in sending this film out,
but I will try to make sure it is set free, so to speak.
In fact, for all of us watching it at the time,
it seemed highly unlikely he was gonna get out of this.
By mid-morning, APCs were ringing the Defense Ministry
and most government buildings.
For many people on the streets,
the reaction was one of sheer surprise and resignation.
The Emergency Committee banned all demonstrations,
threatened a curfew if there are disturbances,
and took control of the mass media.
The clocks were being turned back
by the new masters of the Soviet Union,
but many people were refusing the new rule.
At this moment, people are standing in front of tanks and armored vehicles.
A few shouted insults at the soldiers.
One man lay down in front of a tank to try to halt its progress,
getting out of the way just in time.
One woman shouted angrily, "You are fascists."
The tanks had come not to the Kremlin,
but to the seat of the Russian Parliament a mile away.
There was a reason for this,
for inside the building was the one man who has the popular appeal
that might yet reverse this right-wing coup d'état.
Yeltsin! Yeltsin! Yeltsin!
Workers and shoppers quickly surrounded the security forces,
pleading with them,
appealing for the sake of the Russian motherland for them to go home.
Some even tried grappling with the tank crews,
but it was an act of futility.
There are growing fears
that a massive purge against the reformers may soon begin.
Now the Soviet people have been given a taste of freedom,
they won't give it up easily.
The next thing you know,
you're treated to a press conference of these guys who are the coup,
ostensibly led by the vice president, Gennady Yanayev.
The very first question was, where is Mikhail Gorbachev?
{an8}Well, let me say that Mikhail Gorbachev is now on vacation.
{an8}He's undergoing treatment in the south of our country.
He is, uh, very tired after these many years,
and he will need some time to, uh, get better.
And it is our hope...
Yanayev's answer drew derisive laughter from the press.
You knew this coup was not going to necessarily succeed
when you saw Yanayev's hand shaking during the press conference.
It's apparent several of them are drunk.
They're incompetent, right?
That this is not really going to work.
And meanwhile, Yeltsin is going from strength to strength.
Yeltsin! Yeltsin!
It was all too much for Boris Yeltsin.
As president of the Russian Federation,
he had already mounted a challenge to the coup leaders.
He defied orders to evacuate his offices.
He stood upon a tank surrounded by supporters.
They bring us back to the Cold War period,
and the isolation of the Soviet Union from the international community.
Thus, we declare
that the so-called committee which came to power is illegitimate.
Yeltsin, to his credit,
immediately took the position that the coup was illegal,
and that that committee had to go.
Naturally, we declare that all decisions and decrees
passed by that committee are not legitimate.
In Moscow,
probably tens of thousands of people supported him.
It was the kind of moment that is indelible.
You can say all kinds of things about Yeltsin in years to come,
but when firmness and clarity was called for
on the morning of August 19th in Moscow in 1991,
he performed astonishingly, bravely.
{an8}The curfew in the Soviet capital began one hour ago
{an8}and lasts until 5:00 in the morning.
They started to advance tanks
into the area close to the Russian Supreme Soviet,
where Yeltsin was barricaded with his people.
Four or five armored personnel carriers
were approaching the area of the Russian Federation building.
They certainly were not about to breach the buses and trucks and other barricades
that had been placed across the road there.
They were being pelted by rocks and Molotov cocktails.
The soldiers escaped and then started to open fire.
They acted without any kind of clear purpose,
and then a few people were killed.
When those people died,
it was a shock, even to members of that Emergency Committee.
You bastards! Bastards! Bastards!
These coup leaders just did not have the capacity
or the will to blow everybody away and hold on to power.
One of them committed suicide.
Others asked to be permitted to fly to the Crimea,
where Gorbachev was staying.
But then they were arrested,
and that was the collapse of the coup.
The coup in the Soviet Union appears to be coming apart at the seams.
People are all beginning to turn now.
Tens of thousands of people
outside Yeltsin's headquarters were elated.
In their view, he had saved the day.
During these days and nights,
many thousands of Muscovites proved their fortitude, civic duty, and heroism.
It is you who stopped the attack of the hard-liners
and hit them with a lethal blow.
Russia! Russia! Russia! Russia! Russia!
There was too much going on at once.
The whole system had come apart.
Lack of faith in the economy,
lack of faith in the political institutions.
The whole idea of communism had been dead for some time.
The glue just was no longer there.
Outside the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square,
for years and years and years,
{an8}there's been a ginormous statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky,
{an8}who's the founder, in essence, of the KGB.
Dzerzhinsky was introduced to graffiti.
Next, metal cables were attached to the statue.
Police stood by while protesters argued
whether to take Dzerzhinsky off his pedestal now or later.
And when the coup collapsed, they got a crane.
Somebody got a crane, and they tore the damn thing down.
No symbol could have been more emblematic of totalitarian rule...
...than that statue outside Lubyanka prison,
where so many prisoners had been taken and tortured in their basements.
It was an extraordinarily ecstatic historical moment.
{an8}I was in Budapest, Hungary, at a conference, actually,
{an8}talking about arms control.
{an8}One of my Soviet friends, by the name of Andrei Kokoshin,
{an8}got an emergency message
that he needed to come back to Moscow immediately.
{an8}Andrei Kokoshin calls me three days later and said,
{an8}"Sam, you've got to come to Moscow now."
"You've got to talk to the new leadership,
the people who are going to be running Russia."
I land in Moscow and then, to my surprise, Gorbachev himself,
who had just come back from being taken captive,
said he would like to see me.
I am extremely appreciative and grateful to the Soviet people.
And I ask him a question.
"President Gorbachev, did you have command and control of nuclear weapons
while you were in captivity?"
And he said, "Senator, it's been good visiting with you."
He did not answer the question.
Gorbachev had always been candid and frank with me,
so that was a huge signal.
{an8}When Mikhail Gorbachev visited Boris Yeltsin's Russian Parliament,
{an8}he got a round of applause at first.
But then a lot of heckling, interruption, and embarrassment.
Gorbachev came back, but he was never the same.
He had lost his authority, really, to Yeltsin.
Yeltsin basically starts to more or less order Gorbachev around.
He was suddenly asked to read aloud the minutes of a meeting
of his cabinet last Monday during the height of the coup.
"I haven't seen it yet," Gorbachev cautioned.
"Go on, read it now," Yeltsin insisted.
Yeltsin seized the advantage.
It was never the same after that.
Meanwhile, the other parts of the Soviet Union are saying,
"Hey, we'd like to be nation states too."
Ukraine wants to be a nation state, right?
Belarus.
{an8}Moldova.
So, on December 1st, 1991, Ukraine votes, overwhelmingly, to become independent.
{an8}More than 80% of the Ukrainian electorate
{an8}turned out to vote yesterday.
They voted to end the centuries of rule from Moscow.
The loss of Ukraine is particularly painful and, in fact,
it's one of the main reasons the Soviet Union collapses.
Because then Russia says,
"What are we if we're not in a union with Ukraine?"
"That's the second most populous republic. So who's left?"
Yeltsin realizes, "This is a golden opportunity for me."
Gorbachev is president of the Soviet Union, but if he, Yeltsin,
can destroy the Soviet Union,
{an8}then Gorbachev will be president of nothing,
and he can finally get rid of Gorbachev.
{an8}So Yeltsin goes to a hunting lodge
{an8}with the head of Ukraine and the head of Belarus.
And the three of them basically say, "It's time to get rid of Gorbachev."
"The way we're gonna do this is we're just gonna declare
that we're pulling out of the Soviet Union,
the Soviet Union is no more, and we can be in charge of our states."
"You can be in charge of Ukraine, you of Belarus, and I can be of Russia."
{an8}In other words, Yeltsin was doing what Landsbergis was doing...
{an8}what the Estonians were doing, what the Ukrainians were doing.
{an8}They were all collectively declaring independence from the Soviet Union,
{an8}including the country that was at the center of the Soviet empire,
the Russian Federation.
The flurry of activity at the Kremlin
followed Sunday's declaration by Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia
that they'd formed a commonwealth, and that the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
They come up with this agreement in December 1991.
And then they spring it on the world, and they spring it on Gorbachev.
And it works.
Gorbachev has no effective way of resisting.
The three Slav presidents
have so flagrantly seized the initiative from Mr. Gorbachev,
even claiming control of the armed forces and nuclear weapons,
that whatever role he accepts can only be a diminished one.
{an8}By December 25th, 1991,
{an8}they're able to formally decree the end of the Soviet Union.
{an8}Yeltsin ejects Gorbachev from his office in the Kremlin that day.
{an8}WE DECLARE THE FORMATION OF A COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES
{an8}Yeltsin even then sends men to Gorbachev's private residence,
{an8}where his wife Raisa is.
{an8}And Raisa's just suffered a stroke.
{an8}And they throw them out of the private residence on December 25th, 1991.
That's how much they hated each other.
And so, Yeltsin then moves into the Kremlin,
and, uh, he forces Gorbachev to give a televised resignation speech.
His final days, his final weeks,
were extremely difficult for him emotionally.
I am now concluding my activity as President of the USSR.
Those who wanted to divide the country up have prevailed,
and this is something I cannot agree with.
Yeltsin gets upset, thinks the speech isn't deferential enough.
So while Gorbachev is speaking,
he has the Soviet flag that's flying over the Kremlin be lowered,
and the Russian flag be raised as soon as possible thereafter.
And on paper, the Soviet Union is no more.
{an8}We gather tonight at a dramatic and deeply promising time in our history,
{an8}and in the history of man on Earth.
For in the past 12 months,
the world has known changes of almost biblical proportions.
And even now, months after the failed coup that doomed a failed system,
I'm not sure we've absorbed the full impact,
the full import, of what happened.
But communism died this year.
By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.
Deep down, we believed it was the end of history.
If you look at great power conflict,
we had this moment where we thought, at least among the major powers,
we're not going to have war anymore.
We can sleep at night.
There's not gonna be global thermonuclear war.
And that's not the case.
There was a lot of instability
associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And there was a lot of questions.
How do you transition from being a state economy
to being a market economy?
{an8}How do you adjust the purpose and the mission of NATO
{an8}after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the principal reason NATO was created?
NATO, of course, was set up in 1949,
basically to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union has collapsed.
So, in theory, NATO could say "mission accomplished" and go home.
But that's not what happens.
George H.W. Bush felt very strongly that NATO should persist.
It should retain its ability to enlarge and expand,
and that it should not include the Soviet Union.
And that vision is triumphant.
We weren't terribly creative in those days,
thinking about new arrangements
so that Russia didn't continue to perceive NATO's existence
as a lack of trust in Russia
and as still being a basically anti-Russian organization.
{an8}We devoted a lot of time and a lot of effort
{an8}to figuring out how to change the mission of NATO.
But we never invited Russia to become a member of NATO,
or to be on the path to NATO membership.
The world was, on one hand, rejoicing that Russian reformers
were coming in and the Soviet Union was breaking up.
{an8}But a sense of real fear and foreboding
{an8}that no country in the history of the world
{an8}had ever gone down without a war,
{an8}still possessing its total inventory of weapons of mass destruction
across many time zones.
And it really gave me a tremendous feeling
that the priority had to be to help them protect
their own weapons of mass destruction.
When the Soviet Union disappeared, dissolved,
there were four nations, new nations, that suddenly owned nuclear weapons.
And there were four nations whose scientists and nuclear designers
were suddenly out of a job.
There was also the concern about the knowledge of these Soviet,
{an8}now Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belarusian,
{an8}mostly Russian scientists and nuclear engineers,
that knowledge could be used for good or bad.
It was a period of enormous vulnerability.
Senator Lugar and I understood that,
and we did pass a rather unique program
that became known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction program,
or the Nunn-Lugar program,
to help the former Soviet Union secure their chemical, biological,
and nuclear weapons and materials that they had,
and to also help employ some of their scientists.
The Soviet scientists were offered, in many cases,
{an8}an awful lot of money to take their skills and knowledge,
{an8}and to make these kinds of weapons elsewhere.
{an8}There's a definite set of choke points in a nuclear weapon's development.
{an8}And, of course, the biggest choke point is having the highly-enriched uranium
or the plutonium, what we call the fissile material,
the guts of the bomb.
You don't have it, you don't have a weapon.
President Bush insists that arms control is about to become simpler,
even though America now has to deal with up to 15 states instead of one.
The fundamental difference, he says,
is that Washington is no longer regarded as the enemy.
The breakup of the Soviet Union
turned everything on its head.
{an8}There were a lot of rumors, some intelligence reports,
{an8}about missing nuclear weapons, none of which were ever confirmed.
There were definitely missing nuclear materials.
I would say several hundred kilograms of nuclear materials
have never been accounted for.
In preparation for my assignment to Kazakhstan,
I was given extensive intelligence briefings
about what we thought was there, uh, in the country
related to weapons of mass destruction,
nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons,
as well as the missile delivery systems.
I knew that there was a nuclear facility in northeastern Kazakhstan,
at a place called Ust-Kamenogorsk.
Actually, my automobile mechanic, uh, shortly after I arrived in Kazakhstan,
asked me if I'd like to buy some uranium.
So I said, "Well, I'd be interested to learn more."
{an8}That led to this introduction to the factory director,
{an8}who lived in northeastern Kazakhstan, Vitaly Mette.
As a director of a factory in a factory town,
Mette is responsible for thousands of people, everything.
The schools, the hospital.
Everything was part of this factory town under his control as the director.
And he wasn't able to support them,
so he was desperately looking for funding to help maintain his town.
He looked up to the United States as a reliable partner.
I basically said, "The United States government would not consider
buying this material unless we knew the details."
{an8}One day, my driver, Slava, came by the embassy and said,
{an8}"Andy, somebody wants to see you."
We went to an apartment complex on the outskirts of town,
and there was a former KGB border guard colonel named Colonel Korbater who said,
"Andy, let's go for a walk."
And so we went out into the courtyard. It was snowing.
And he said, "Andy, I have something from Vitaly that he wants me to pass to you."
And he handed me a small folded piece of paper.
And as we're walking, I... I opened it and it said,
"600 KG" or kilograms,
"90% U-235," Uranium-235, which is bomb fuel.
Six hundred kilograms of highly-enriched uranium
is enough for two dozen nuclear weapons.
I mean, it's just unimaginable that this much quantity
would be lying around in a warehouse in Kazakhstan.
{an8}We asked President Nazarbayev to arrange for me,
{an8}with a technical expert, to visit the factory at Ust-Kamenogorsk
to verify the presence of this highly-enriched uranium.
And he said, "Yes."
And he turned to his general and said, "Make it happen."
{an8}About a month or so later, an expert named Elwood Gift,
{an8}from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, came out to Kazakhstan.
And then the next morning, we started the tour of the factory.
There were these wooden sliding doors, sort of like prison bars,
and a padlock that you'd see in an antique shop.
It was like a Civil War-era padlock.
And there was a big platform and stainless-steel buckets,
ostensibly with highly-enriched uranium in them.
It's pretty stable, unless you have too much of it in one place,
but they were spaced out for criticality safety,
so they wouldn't reach a critical mass, which could be very, very, uh, dangerous.
{an8}We did some testing with their equipment
{an8}and were able to verify
that the enrichment level was 90 to 91%.
And that's when Washington went into high gear.
It was a huge logistical challenge.
We had hundreds of these special fissile material transport canisters.
For criticality safety reasons,
you could only transport small amounts of uranium in each barrel.
And then we loaded them up onto these Soviet-era trucks
at the factory.
It was a very, very cold night
with a wet rain and black ice on the roads.
And, of course, that's when the material is most vulnerable to interception.
If you're a bad guy, that's your chance.
That's your opportunity to intercept this material.
Maybe take one truck, kill the driver, and drive off.
So, we were extremely concerned about the secrecy.
We made it to the airfield.
We started the process to load them onto the cargo plane.
And these trucks were sliding.
Yeah. They're not going anywhere.
I was very concerned that we weren't gonna make it.
So the material was flown, without any stops,
with aerial refuelings to Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
where it was brought to the Y-12 plant.
{an8}Yesterday, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy
{an8}completed a high-priority,
{an8}extremely sensitive mission,
{an8}which we call Project Sapphire.
We have just placed, in safe hands,
enough nuclear material from the former Soviet arsenal
to make more than 20 nuclear devices.
During the time, I don't think we realized,
I certainly didn't realize,
how important Project Sapphire was.
This was really the first time the Pentagon had done something like this.
It wasn't going out and fighting a war.
This was preventing a catastrophe from happening.
We applaud President Nazarbayev and the Kazakhstan government
for helping to make the world safer and more secure.
It was a huge package of about $30 million of assistance.
And it was a bargain, because you can imagine,
for this much material, the Iranians would have paid billions.
We made a deal to buy the uranium.
It would be blended down.
We'd burn it as civilian nuclear power in our power plants.
One-tenth of the electricity in America,
um, during that approximately ten-year period,
was coming from weapons, uh, mounted on delivery systems
that could have destroyed America or any other country.
{an8}It was the most important defense money we ever spent
{an8}in terms of avoiding an untold number of possible catastrophes.
When the Soviet Union dissolved,
the Belarusians and Kazakhs agreed to turn over their nuclear weapons
to the Russians, or destroy them.
{an8}Ukrainians, not so quick to decide to turn these weapons over.
{an8}Deep inside its secret forest site at Bila Tserkva,
{an8}40 miles south of Kiev,
a nuclear warhead is carefully removed from its missile and launchpad.
It's not large, but it's equal to the bomb that demolished Hiroshima.
The Ukraine is pledged to destroy 136 of its 176 missiles
under the START disarmament program,
but no one is certain what happens to the remaining 40
or what their price is on the open market.
Everybody wanted to be sure that these weapons were under control.
{an8}Ukraine, at this point, has become a democracy.
{an8}It has over 50 million people,
{an8}and is the world's third-biggest nuclear power.
The Ukrainians were reluctant to give up this deterrent
that could provide them security.
They wanted some kind of guarantee that Ukrainian security,
Ukrainian sovereignty,
Ukrainian territorial integrity, would be defended.
{an8}There were negotiations, Americans, the Brits, the Russians, Ukrainians,
about what to do with these weapons.
In a memorandum eventually signed in Budapest,
{an8}the Ukrainians agreed, under pressure,
{an8}to give up these nuclear weapons, to destroy or send them back to Russia.
{an8}Ukraine formally renounced nuclear arms
{an8}by joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Ukraine will join Belarus and Kazakhstan
in becoming nuclear-free by the end of the century.
The language of the Budapest Memorandum was tricky.
Negotiators settled on the word "assurance," not "guarantee."
The difference between the words "assurance" and "guarantee"
might seem slight, but they are actually very significant in military terms.
A guarantee means you have a high chance that, when you're in trouble,
the 82nd Airborne is coming,
and an assurance does not.
{an8}So that's one of the open questions,
{an8}should they have pressed harder for a better deal?
{an8}Quite a moment, though.
Yeah, and also, by the way, there were Ukrainians at the time who knew this.
There were Ukrainian negotiators involved in the Budapest Memorandum who said,
"We know that this is not really going to protect us from Russia."
"What we really want is a guaranteed world hearing when,
you know, the worst happens."
{an8}"We want a forum. We want a platform."
"We want a microphone."
"We want a reason to tell the world when Russia invades us."
"That's the best we're gonna get here."
They knew that Russia could invade them.
- They knew, yeah. - There was a threat from Russia.
Yes.
At that time,
there was this minor KGB guy,
who was in a minor outpost in East Germany, in Dresden,
during the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He was really minor.
Vladimir Putin is his name. He's probably somebody to remember.
As sad or scary as it might sound,
in my view, a short period of totalitarianism
in our country is possible.
He was never a friend to the West.
He was always suspicious of the West.
We Russians tend to believe,
and I won't hide the fact that I'm inclined to think this way,
that if somebody came along who could resurrect law and order with an iron fist,
then our life would be better, more comfortable, and safer.