Moscow, December 25, 1991

Nevertheless, Yeltsin was on his home ground. The more he forced the Americans to pay attention to him, the greater his prestige in the eyes of Russians. He made Bush and Brent Scowcroft wait seven minutes outside his Kremlin office, kept them talking inside for forty minutes while he pressed Russia’s case for aid, and facilitated a media ambush of the U.S. president by allowing reporters to gather outside. “Yeltsin’s really grandstanding, isn’t he?” Bush complained to Scowcroft as he left. Yeltsin subsequently declined to turn up at a separate meeting between Bush and the presidents of Soviet republics hosted by Gorbachev so as not be seen as a member of his rival’s “entourage.”

Yeltsin then telephoned Gorbachev before a Soviet state dinner for George and Barbara Bush and demanded that both of them escort the Bushes to their seats to demonstrate the new balance of power between the Russian and Soviet presidents. Gorbachev indignantly refused, saying this was his function as host. Yeltsin had other ideas. As Gorbachev and Raisa stood with George and Barbara Bush at the entrance to the dining hall in the Kremlin’s Chamber of Facets to welcome the guests, they were puzzled to see Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, arrive on the arm of Gavriil Popov. At the last minute Yeltsin turned up in majestic solitude and with elaborate courtesy offered to escort Barbara Bush to her table as if he were the host. “Is that really all right?” asked Barbara, with a steely smile. The American First Lady kept Raisa between herself and the lumbering Russian as they walked to the tables. Gorbachev asked Yeltsin sarcastically why he had entrusted his wife with the Moscow mayor, to which Yeltsin replied cheerfully, “Oh, he is no longer a danger!”

George Bush later described Yeltsin as a real pain for hijacking Barbara, and Matlock thought his behavior boorish and childish. “Everyone was dumbfounded except me,” noted Gorbachev. “I knew Boris too well.”

Next day, at a dinner hosted by the Americans in the U.S. embassy, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev found themselves seated some distance from the head table. They simply got up and walked to Bush’s place and engaged him in lengthy conversation. No one dared tell them they were out of line. “Our heroes experienced no embarrassment,” observed a disgusted Gorbachev. “Of course this behavior went beyond all bounds of protocol.”¹⁵

Everyone saw that the dinner seating assignments reflected Bush’s preference for his friend Mikhail and his continued support for his efforts to hold the Soviet Union together. But the grandstanding served Yeltsin’s purpose. It exposed the uncomfortable fact for the Americans that their hero Gorbachev was losing control over the previously subservient republics and, most importantly, Russia.

On July 31 Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev entertained George and Barbara Bush and James Baker at a state dacha on the western outskirts of Moscow. They relaxed on wicker chairs on the sunlit veranda; Gorbachev in grey shirt, sweater, and slacks, Bush in a polo shirt. This was Gorbachev in his element, reshaping the world with his international friends. But they were rudely interrupted.

An American official, John Sununu, intruded to give Baker a note: The Associated Press was reporting that armed men had attacked a Lithuanian border post. Seven customs officials were killed execution style. Bush noted how Gorbachev visibly paled when told what was in the note. Deeply embarrassed at being informed first by the Americans, Gorbachev sent Chernyaev off to call Kryuchkov. The KGB chief dismissed the killings as an act of organized crime, or “an internal Lithuanian thing.” It would later be established that it was a covert operation by the Soviet special police force, OMON, to teach the separatists a lesson—and most likely to compromise Gorbachev during his summit.

In the course of their conversation, Bush told Gorbachev that he did not think the collapse of the Soviet Union was in America’s interests. He dismissed as extremists those in his own Republican Party who wanted the Soviet Union to break up, though the most prominent was his defense secretary, Dick Cheney. He promised to oppose separatist tendencies on his trip to Ukraine the following day.

On August 1 in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, Bush warned in a public speech that Americans would not aid those “who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” speech, as it was dubbed by American columnist William Safire, delighted Gorbachev and infuriated Ukrainians who were moving fast towards a break with Moscow. It was widely seen as evidence that Bush was as seriously out of touch about what was happening in the Soviet Union as Margaret Thatcher, who a year before said she could no more open an embassy in Kiev than she could in San Francisco.