Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War (2024) s01e07 Episode Script
The End of History
1
[evocative music playing]
[Mary Elise Sarotte] Ukraine's role
in both Soviet and contemporary history
really cannot be overestimated.
And Putin has this idea
that it's really where Russia was born,
and it's an integral part of Russia.
[Putin, in Russian] Nothing is stronger
than the determination of millions,
who, by their culture, religion,
traditions, and language
consider themselves part of Russia,
whose ancestors lived
in a single country for centuries.
[Fiona Hill] Putin talks about the fact
that Vladimir Lenin,
along with Joseph Stalin,
made a huge mistake back in 1922, 1923,
in creating a standalone
Ukrainian Republic.
Ukraine is just the borderlands of Russia.
This is Putin's reading
of Russian history.
[Condoleezza Rice] From his point of view,
an independent Ukraine
just couldn't exist.
[Michael McFaul] 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,
"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."
[loud gunfire]
[dramatic music playing]
[opening theme music playing]
[tense music playing]
[crowd cheering and clapping]
[Sarotte] At the end of 1989,
the Cold War order is crumbling.
You could feel that the Soviet Union
was losing, uh, its position.
[clamoring]
[Sarotte] You have
the accidental opening of the wall,
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.
What comes next?
What happens to the division of Germany?
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?
[ominous music playing]
[Archie Brown] Gorbachev, by 1988, '89,
was consciously dismantling
the Soviet communist system.
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
to argue for a greater autonomy
within the Republic
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?"
[reporter] A human chain
stretched across three Baltic states
was a clear message for Moscow,
that the drive for independence
had become a popular mass movement.
Free countries briefly
between World Wars One and Two,
the three Baltic States were annexed
by the Soviet Union in 1939,
by a secret Hitler-Stalin treaty.
[Jack Matlock] The United States
never legally recognized
that these three Baltic countries,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,
were in the Soviet Union.
[reporter] Despite 50 years
of control by Moscow,
the Baltic States maintain
separate non-Russian identities.
[Matlock] The communist parties, locally,
began to break away from Moscow
and also ask for autonomy.
So the very communist parties that
had been put in place to control them,
uh, begin to lose control.
Gorbachev couldn't accept it.
Many people at the time
thought he was going to be removed
if he didn't suppress the Baltics.
[reporter] 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.
[in Russian] "We don't need more rights,
we need full independence."
From whom?
- Who instructed you to do this?
- [man] I wrote it myself.
- You personally?
- [man] 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.
[Vytautas Landsbergis, in English]
I remember Gorbachev told me,
"Why you are so eager,
so full independence?"
"It is nonsense."
"Nobody can be independent."
"But you will be given more."
"Greater part of your harvest."
[Gorbachev, in Russian]
If you get full autonomy now
and start trading at market prices,
you'll fall flat
on your faces immediately!
[Landsbergis, in English]
Why part of harvest?
All our harvest is ours.
[in Russian] 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.
[indistinct chatter]
[crowd] Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
[reporter, in English] By mid-afternoon,
a third of a million people
had gathered to chant for freedom.
FREEDOM, LITHUANIANS!
Mr. Gorbachev hasn't convinced them.
[Landsbergis] Our goal in Sąjūdis was,
we are going to full liberation,
including political one,
including the statehood of Lithuania.
[in Lithuanian]
We demand freedom and independence.
We are here, in the heart of Lithuania,
and we will not retreat anywhere.
[crowd cheering]
[chanting] Lithuania will be free!
Lithuania will be free!
[Algirdas Kauspedas] Lithuania was
the first one in the Soviet Union.
On March 11th, 1991,
they declared the restoration
of the independent state of Lithuania.
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
[Landsbergis] And from henceforth,
Lithuania is once again
an independent state.
I salute the Supreme Council.
I salute Lithuania.
[applause]
[reporter, in English]
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.
[Rice] 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.
[tense music playing]
[Gorbachev, in Russian]
We can distinguish between Lithuanians
and those pushing the nation
into a historical cul-de-sac.
These people need to come to their senses.
[applause]
[in Lithuanian] It was followed
by a very difficult period.
Economic blockade.
Soviet Union tried to freeze us.
[reporter, in English]
The flow of oil has been cut.
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.
[Kauspedas, in Lithuanian]
They did not give us fuel,
some other goods.
[reporter in English] 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.
[man speaking in Lithuanian]
[crowd singing in Lithuanian]
[Kauspedas] But we managed to survive.
When they saw that blockade did not work,
uh, then they realized that some kind
of violence was needed.
[ominous music playing]
[Ricardas Daunoravicius] The independence
of Lithuania was already ten months long.
[man] People, come here, to the side!
The troops are coming!
[Daunoravicius] As always,
I was on duty at the hospital.
I remember that when
it was announced on the radio,
there is big trouble,
the soldiers are moving
to take over the government buildings.
[reporter, in English] At the main
newspaper printing plant,
paratroopers storm the building.
[people screaming]
[gunfire]
[reporter] They fired into the air
and sprayed the plant with bullets.
[gunfire continues]
Several unarmed civilians
were seriously wounded.
One sobbing woman feared for her daughter
trapped inside the printing house.
"It's Gorbachev," she told us.
"Now you see the man
you gave the Nobel Prize to."
[people chanting]
[woman, in Lithuanian] You're not guilty,
but please think about what you're doing!
You have to think on your own.
[people singing]
[reporter, in English]
Popular reaction was quick.
Vilnius Radio called on people
to rally around other key installations
which might be taken.
[in Lithuanian]
And on that evening of January 12th,
around midnight,
I arrived at the TV tower.
[people singing in Lithuanian]
[Daunoravicius] We all surrounded
the television buildings and tower,
making a live ring.
And, after about an hour,
a tank convoy arrived.
[ominous music playing]
[people chanting] Lithuania! Lithuania!
Lithuania! Lithuania! Lithuania!
[reporter, in English] 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.
[clamoring]
[gunfire]
[in Lithuanian]
That night, I was working in my office.
- [yelling]
- [gunfire]
[Kauspedas] Occupants were trying
to break down my door.
I've locked myself in my office.
[TV host] 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.
[clamoring]
There's a struggle going on inside.
[Kauspedas] Then they started shooting
through the door with rifles.
After it all,
the illusions to resist disappeared,
and we were forced to surrender.
- [clamoring]
- [gunfire]
[reporter, in English]
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.
- [loud explosion]
- [reporter] They were wrong.
- [gunfire]
- [clamoring]
[screaming]
[Daunoravicius, in Lithuanian] I could see
two young people die in front of my eyes.
I also saw how one person
tried to get on the tank.
[man] I'm not armed!
Why are you doing this?
[clamoring]
- [gunshot]
- [screaming]
[Daunoravicius] 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.
[people chanting]
Fascists! Fascists! Fascists!
Fascists! Fascists! Fascists!
Fascists! Fascists! Fascists!
[plaintive music playing]
[Brown, in English] Fourteen people
were killed in one night in Lithuania.
Even today, there are many people
in the Baltic republics
who take a fairly dim view of Gorbachev
because they blame him for the crackdown.
[in Russian] The fact that such
a confrontation arose there,
it's just a very disturbing reality.
[in English] Lithuanians are standing
against the tanks.
And tanks
of that reformer,
democrat, Gorbachev,
are going to crush
unarmed people. [laughs]
[Pavel Palazhchenko] Knowing Gorbachev,
I cannot imagine that he gave that order.
That was a decision that was taken
illegally by military commanders.
[interviewer]
How did that happen without his okay?
Well, that's-that that's something
that he regretted always,
this kind of, uh,
improper behavior by the military
was actually possible.
[Rice] 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
and the Defense Minister
had gone, uh, to the Baltic States
and probably had
had planned the operation there.
[plaintive music continues]
[Gabrielius Landsbergis]
Why would you send tanks?
Obviously, he was not ready
to let Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia, and others free.
[crowd singing indistinctly]
[Landsbergis] He tried to stop it
with brute force.
And even now, you can see
remnants of the barricades.
[crowd singing]
[clamoring]
[reporter] They marched
through the center of the Soviet capital,
thousands of demonstrators chanting,
"Freedom for Lithuania"
and, "Down with the executioners."
Mikhail Gorbachev has, with his reforms,
let a genie out of a bottle.
[clamoring]
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.
[reporter] 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.
[Sarotte] 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.
[reporter] Boris Yeltsin was brought
to Moscow by Gorbachev in 1985
to become the city's Communist Party boss.
[crowd] Yeltsin! Yeltsin!
[reporter] 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.
[Yeltsin]
He considers me to be too radical.
We have to do everything
very carefully and cautiously.
But people are very impatient.
They've been waiting for four years,
and they can't wait another year.
Something has to be done within a year?
Yes.
[Jim Lehrer] If not, then what happens?
[speaking Russian]
[Yeltsin's translator]
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.
[tense music playing]
[Sarotte] Yeltsin,
in contrast to Gorbachev,
figures out that nationalism
is the wave of the future.
[clamoring]
[Serhii Plokhy] We see communism
being basically bad as ideology,
as a system of belief.
People were looking for alternatives,
and one of those alternatives
was, of course,
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."
[reporter] Tonight, on the tenth day
of this congress,
came the blow Mr. Gorbachev
had tried so hard to avoid.
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.
[Yeltsin translator] 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.
[reporter] Mr. Gorbachev interjected.
[Gorbachev speaking in Russian]
[reporter, in English] By then, Yeltsin
had turned his back on this congress
and a lifetime in this party,
and walked out.
[Sarotte] Yeltsin becomes very active
in Russian electoral politics,
as opposed to Soviet electoral politics,
and he's resoundingly successful in that.
[reporter 1] Boris Yeltsin has defeated
his communist rivals
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.
[reporter 2] 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.
[David Remnick] So, by the summer of 1991,
Yeltsin had become powerful
as the president of Russia.
[speaking in Russian]
[Remnick] Gorbachev
is hanging on by a thread.
There are independence movements
all over the Soviet Union,
and he's trying to hold it together.
The idea that Gorbachev developed
was to have a new union treaty
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.
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[Lyne] 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.
[reporter, in Russian]
Will the Soviet Union remain?
[Gorbachev] Yes, I'm sure.
Absolutely sure.
- [reporter] What future will it be?
- [Gorbachev] 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.
[tense music playing]
[Remnick, in English] 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,
the big state industries,
they hate Gorbachev by now.
They hate him.
They think he's weak
and everything's going
to hell in a handbasket.
[reporter] Yanayev and his henchmen
have made it clear they distrust the West
and market economic forces,
and their frustration has grown
in recent weeks.
[Rice] A group of us were tasked,
"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."
- [interviewer] 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?
I remember that Defense Secretary Cheney
was a little bit more
on the, "We should push it along."
Larry Eagleburger once said,
"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?
[suspenseful music playing]
[Remnick] 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.
[Tchaikovsky's "Danse des petits cygnes"
from Swan Lake, playing]
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[reporter] 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.
What's especially interesting
is to look at the positions
held by those who were
the leading members of the group
who mounted the coup.
The chairman of the KGB,
the minister of interior,
the minister of defense,
the prime minister,
the secretary of the Central Committee,
who supervised
the military-industrial complex.
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.
[reporter]
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
and has not been seen since the takeover.
[Remnick] 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.
[Palazhchenko] He was held incommunicado.
Any number in Moscow was blocked.
[in Russian]
All my telephones were cut off.
I have no communication
with the outside world.
[Palazhchenko] Some members
of his security detail
thought that there was a real possibility
that his residence would be stormed.
[Gorbachev]
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.
[Sarotte] It's unclear
what's going to happen to Gorbachev.
And his wife has a stroke while
they're being held under house arrest
because she's so afraid.
Gorbachev is convinced that
he's going to be going to be killed.
[in Russian] 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 English] In fact,
for all of us watching it at the time,
it seemed highly unlikely
he was gonna get out of this.
[tense music playing]
[reporter 1] 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.
[reporter 2] The Emergency Committee
banned all demonstrations,
threatened a curfew
if there are disturbances,
and took control of the mass media.
[reporter 3] 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.
[reporter 4]
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."
[reporter 5]
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.
[crowd] Yeltsin! Yeltsin! Yeltsin!
[reporter 5] 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.
[clamoring]
There are growing fears
that a massive purge
against the reformers may soon begin.
[reporter 6] Now the Soviet people
have been given a taste of freedom,
they won't give it up easily.
[Remnick] 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.
[reporter] The very first question was,
where is Mikhail Gorbachev?
Well, let me say that Mikhail Gorbachev
is now on vacation.
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.
[laughter]
And it is our hope
[laughter]
[reporter] Yanayev's answer
drew derisive laughter from the press.
[Remnick] You knew this coup
was not going to necessarily succeed
when you saw Yanayev's hand shaking
during the press conference.
[Sarotte] 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.
[crowd] Yeltsin! Yeltsin!
[reporter] 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.
[Yeltsin, in Russian] 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.
[applause]
[Palazhchenko, in English]
Yeltsin, to his credit,
immediately took the position
that the coup was illegal,
and that that committee had to go.
[Yeltsin, in Russian] Naturally,
we declare that all decisions and decrees
passed by that committee
are not legitimate.
[applause]
[Palazhchenko, in English] In Moscow,
probably tens of thousands of people
supported him.
[Remnick] 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.
[reporter] The curfew
in the Soviet capital began one hour ago
and lasts until 5:00 in the morning.
[Palazhchenko]
They started to advance tanks
into the area close
to the Russian Supreme Soviet,
where Yeltsin was barricaded
with his people.
[unsettling music playing]
[reporter] 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.
[clamoring]
[reporter] They were being pelted
by rocks and Molotov cocktails.
The soldiers escaped
and then started to open fire.
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[indistinct yelling]
[man, in Russian] You bastards!
Bastards! Bastards!
[continues yelling in Russian]
[clamoring]
[gunfire]
[Remnick, in English] These coup leaders
just did not have the capacity
or the will to blow everybody away
and hold on to power.
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[reporter] The coup in the Soviet Union
appears to be coming apart at the seams.
People are all beginning to turn now.
[clamoring]
[reporter] Tens of thousands of people
outside Yeltsin's headquarters
were elated.
In their view, he had saved the day.
[Yeltsin, in Russian]
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.
[crowd cheering]
[crowd chanting] Russia! Russia!
Russia! Russia! Russia!
[Hill, in English] 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.
[fireworks cracking]
[Remnick] Outside the KGB headquarters
on Lubyanka Square,
for years and years and years,
there's been a ginormous statue
of Felix Dzerzhinsky,
who's the founder, in essence, of the KGB.
[reporter]
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.
[Remnick] 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
[chanting]
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.
[clamoring]
[Sam Nunn] I was in Budapest, Hungary,
at a conference, actually,
talking about arms control.
One of my Soviet friends,
by the name of Andrei Kokoshin,
got an emergency message
that he needed to come back
to Moscow immediately.
Andrei Kokoshin calls me
three days later and said,
"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."
[mysterious music playing]
[Nunn] 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.
[indistinct chatter]
I am extremely appreciative
and grateful to the Soviet people.
[Nunn] 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.
[reporter] When Mikhail Gorbachev visited
Boris Yeltsin's Russian Parliament,
he got a round of applause at first.
[applause]
[reporter] But then a lot of heckling,
interruption, and embarrassment.
[Remnick] 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.
[reporter] 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.
[Remnick] Yeltsin seized the advantage.
It was never the same after that.
[Sarotte] 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.
Moldova.
So, on December 1st, 1991, Ukraine votes,
overwhelmingly, to become independent.
[reporter] More than 80%
of the Ukrainian electorate
turned out to vote yesterday.
They voted to end
the centuries of rule from Moscow.
[Sarotte] 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,
then Gorbachev
will be president of nothing,
and he can finally get rid of Gorbachev.
So Yeltsin goes to a hunting lodge
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."
[Michael McFaul] In other words, Yeltsin
was doing what Landsbergis was doing
what the Estonians were doing,
what the Ukrainians were doing.
They were all collectively declaring
independence from the Soviet Union,
including the country that
was at the center of the Soviet empire,
the Russian Federation.
[reporter] 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.
[Sarotte] 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.
[reporter] 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.
[Sarotte] By December 25th, 1991,
they're able to formally decree
the end of the Soviet Union.
[compelling music playing]
Yeltsin ejects Gorbachev
from his office in the Kremlin that day.
WE DECLARE THE FORMATION
OF A COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES
Yeltsin even then sends men
to Gorbachev's private residence,
where his wife Raisa is.
And Raisa's just suffered a stroke.
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.
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[Sarotte] 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.
[intense music playing]
[Sarotte] And on paper,
the Soviet Union is no more.
[applause]
We gather tonight at a dramatic
and deeply promising time in our history,
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.
[crowd cheering and clapping]
[Sarotte] 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.
[bittersweet music playing]
[Gates] There was a lot of instability
associated with the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
And there was a lot of questions.
[Sarotte] How do you transition
from being a state economy
to being a market economy?
How do you adjust
the purpose and the mission of NATO
after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
and the principal reason NATO was created?
[Sarotte] 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.
[Gates] 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.
We devoted a lot of time
and a lot of effort
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.
[Nunn] The world was, on one hand,
rejoicing that Russian reformers
were coming in
and the Soviet Union was breaking up.
But a sense of real fear and foreboding
that no country
in the history of the world
had ever gone down without a war,
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.
[William Taylor] 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,
now Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belarusian,
mostly Russian scientists
and nuclear engineers,
that knowledge could be used
for good or bad.
[Nunn] 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,
an awful lot of money
to take their skills and knowledge,
and to make these kinds
of weapons elsewhere.
There's a definite set of choke points
in a nuclear weapon's development.
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.
[reporter] 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.
[Andy Weber] The breakup
of the Soviet Union
turned everything on its head.
There were a lot of rumors,
some intelligence reports,
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.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Weber] 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."
That led to this introduction
to the factory director,
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."
One day, my driver, Slava,
came by the embassy and said,
"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.
We asked President Nazarbayev
to arrange for me,
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."
About a month or so later,
an expert named Elwood Gift,
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.
[crackling]
[Weber] We did some testing
with their equipment
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.
[tense music playing]
[Weber] 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.
[tense music continues]
Yeah. They're not going anywhere.
[indistinct chatter]
[Weber] I was very concerned
that we weren't gonna make it.
[tense music continues]
[Weber] So the material was flown,
without any stops,
with aerial refuelings
to Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
where it was brought to the Y-12 plant.
Yesterday, the Department of Defense
and the Department of Energy
completed a high-priority,
extremely sensitive mission,
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.
[Weber] 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.
[Weber] 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.
[Nunn] 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.
It was the most important
defense money we ever spent
in terms of avoiding an untold number
of possible catastrophes.
[William Taylor]
When the Soviet Union dissolved,
the Belarusians and Kazakhs
agreed to turn over their nuclear weapons
to the Russians, or destroy them.
Ukrainians, not so quick
to decide to turn these weapons over.
[reporter] Deep inside its secret
forest site at Bila Tserkva,
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.
[atmospheric music playing]
Everybody wanted to be sure
that these weapons were under control.
[Sarotte] Ukraine, at this point,
has become a democracy.
It has over 50 million people,
and is the world's
third-biggest nuclear power.
[Taylor] 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.
There were negotiations, Americans,
the Brits, the Russians, Ukrainians,
about what to do with these weapons.
In a memorandum
eventually signed in Budapest,
the Ukrainians agreed, under pressure,
to give up these nuclear weapons,
to destroy or send them back to Russia.
[reporter]
Ukraine formally renounced nuclear arms
by joining
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Ukraine will join Belarus and Kazakhstan
in becoming nuclear-free
by the end of the century.
[Taylor] The language
of the Budapest Memorandum was tricky.
Negotiators settled
on the word "assurance," not "guarantee."
[Sarotte] 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.
So that's one of the open questions,
should they have pressed harder
for a better deal?
[interviewer] 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."
"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."
[interviewer] They knew
that Russia could invade them.
- They knew, yeah.
- There was a threat from Russia.
Yes.
[plaintive music playing]
[Remnick] 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.
[Putin, in Russian]
As sad or scary as it might sound,
in my view, a short period
of totalitarianism
in our country is possible.
[Remnick, in English]
He was never a friend to the West.
He was always suspicious of the West.
[Putin, in Russian]
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.
[ominous music crescendoes]
[closing theme music playing]
[evocative music playing]
[Mary Elise Sarotte] Ukraine's role
in both Soviet and contemporary history
really cannot be overestimated.
And Putin has this idea
that it's really where Russia was born,
and it's an integral part of Russia.
[Putin, in Russian] Nothing is stronger
than the determination of millions,
who, by their culture, religion,
traditions, and language
consider themselves part of Russia,
whose ancestors lived
in a single country for centuries.
[Fiona Hill] Putin talks about the fact
that Vladimir Lenin,
along with Joseph Stalin,
made a huge mistake back in 1922, 1923,
in creating a standalone
Ukrainian Republic.
Ukraine is just the borderlands of Russia.
This is Putin's reading
of Russian history.
[Condoleezza Rice] From his point of view,
an independent Ukraine
just couldn't exist.
[Michael McFaul] 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,
"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."
[loud gunfire]
[dramatic music playing]
[opening theme music playing]
[tense music playing]
[crowd cheering and clapping]
[Sarotte] At the end of 1989,
the Cold War order is crumbling.
You could feel that the Soviet Union
was losing, uh, its position.
[clamoring]
[Sarotte] You have
the accidental opening of the wall,
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.
What comes next?
What happens to the division of Germany?
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?
[ominous music playing]
[Archie Brown] Gorbachev, by 1988, '89,
was consciously dismantling
the Soviet communist system.
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
to argue for a greater autonomy
within the Republic
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?"
[reporter] A human chain
stretched across three Baltic states
was a clear message for Moscow,
that the drive for independence
had become a popular mass movement.
Free countries briefly
between World Wars One and Two,
the three Baltic States were annexed
by the Soviet Union in 1939,
by a secret Hitler-Stalin treaty.
[Jack Matlock] The United States
never legally recognized
that these three Baltic countries,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,
were in the Soviet Union.
[reporter] Despite 50 years
of control by Moscow,
the Baltic States maintain
separate non-Russian identities.
[Matlock] The communist parties, locally,
began to break away from Moscow
and also ask for autonomy.
So the very communist parties that
had been put in place to control them,
uh, begin to lose control.
Gorbachev couldn't accept it.
Many people at the time
thought he was going to be removed
if he didn't suppress the Baltics.
[reporter] 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.
[in Russian] "We don't need more rights,
we need full independence."
From whom?
- Who instructed you to do this?
- [man] I wrote it myself.
- You personally?
- [man] 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.
[Vytautas Landsbergis, in English]
I remember Gorbachev told me,
"Why you are so eager,
so full independence?"
"It is nonsense."
"Nobody can be independent."
"But you will be given more."
"Greater part of your harvest."
[Gorbachev, in Russian]
If you get full autonomy now
and start trading at market prices,
you'll fall flat
on your faces immediately!
[Landsbergis, in English]
Why part of harvest?
All our harvest is ours.
[in Russian] 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.
[indistinct chatter]
[crowd] Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
[reporter, in English] By mid-afternoon,
a third of a million people
had gathered to chant for freedom.
FREEDOM, LITHUANIANS!
Mr. Gorbachev hasn't convinced them.
[Landsbergis] Our goal in Sąjūdis was,
we are going to full liberation,
including political one,
including the statehood of Lithuania.
[in Lithuanian]
We demand freedom and independence.
We are here, in the heart of Lithuania,
and we will not retreat anywhere.
[crowd cheering]
[chanting] Lithuania will be free!
Lithuania will be free!
[Algirdas Kauspedas] Lithuania was
the first one in the Soviet Union.
On March 11th, 1991,
they declared the restoration
of the independent state of Lithuania.
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
[Landsbergis] And from henceforth,
Lithuania is once again
an independent state.
I salute the Supreme Council.
I salute Lithuania.
[applause]
[reporter, in English]
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.
[Rice] 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.
[tense music playing]
[Gorbachev, in Russian]
We can distinguish between Lithuanians
and those pushing the nation
into a historical cul-de-sac.
These people need to come to their senses.
[applause]
[in Lithuanian] It was followed
by a very difficult period.
Economic blockade.
Soviet Union tried to freeze us.
[reporter, in English]
The flow of oil has been cut.
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.
[Kauspedas, in Lithuanian]
They did not give us fuel,
some other goods.
[reporter in English] 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.
[man speaking in Lithuanian]
[crowd singing in Lithuanian]
[Kauspedas] But we managed to survive.
When they saw that blockade did not work,
uh, then they realized that some kind
of violence was needed.
[ominous music playing]
[Ricardas Daunoravicius] The independence
of Lithuania was already ten months long.
[man] People, come here, to the side!
The troops are coming!
[Daunoravicius] As always,
I was on duty at the hospital.
I remember that when
it was announced on the radio,
there is big trouble,
the soldiers are moving
to take over the government buildings.
[reporter, in English] At the main
newspaper printing plant,
paratroopers storm the building.
[people screaming]
[gunfire]
[reporter] They fired into the air
and sprayed the plant with bullets.
[gunfire continues]
Several unarmed civilians
were seriously wounded.
One sobbing woman feared for her daughter
trapped inside the printing house.
"It's Gorbachev," she told us.
"Now you see the man
you gave the Nobel Prize to."
[people chanting]
[woman, in Lithuanian] You're not guilty,
but please think about what you're doing!
You have to think on your own.
[people singing]
[reporter, in English]
Popular reaction was quick.
Vilnius Radio called on people
to rally around other key installations
which might be taken.
[in Lithuanian]
And on that evening of January 12th,
around midnight,
I arrived at the TV tower.
[people singing in Lithuanian]
[Daunoravicius] We all surrounded
the television buildings and tower,
making a live ring.
And, after about an hour,
a tank convoy arrived.
[ominous music playing]
[people chanting] Lithuania! Lithuania!
Lithuania! Lithuania! Lithuania!
[reporter, in English] 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.
[clamoring]
[gunfire]
[in Lithuanian]
That night, I was working in my office.
- [yelling]
- [gunfire]
[Kauspedas] Occupants were trying
to break down my door.
I've locked myself in my office.
[TV host] 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.
[clamoring]
There's a struggle going on inside.
[Kauspedas] Then they started shooting
through the door with rifles.
After it all,
the illusions to resist disappeared,
and we were forced to surrender.
- [clamoring]
- [gunfire]
[reporter, in English]
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.
- [loud explosion]
- [reporter] They were wrong.
- [gunfire]
- [clamoring]
[screaming]
[Daunoravicius, in Lithuanian] I could see
two young people die in front of my eyes.
I also saw how one person
tried to get on the tank.
[man] I'm not armed!
Why are you doing this?
[clamoring]
- [gunshot]
- [screaming]
[Daunoravicius] 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.
[people chanting]
Fascists! Fascists! Fascists!
Fascists! Fascists! Fascists!
Fascists! Fascists! Fascists!
[plaintive music playing]
[Brown, in English] Fourteen people
were killed in one night in Lithuania.
Even today, there are many people
in the Baltic republics
who take a fairly dim view of Gorbachev
because they blame him for the crackdown.
[in Russian] The fact that such
a confrontation arose there,
it's just a very disturbing reality.
[in English] Lithuanians are standing
against the tanks.
And tanks
of that reformer,
democrat, Gorbachev,
are going to crush
unarmed people. [laughs]
[Pavel Palazhchenko] Knowing Gorbachev,
I cannot imagine that he gave that order.
That was a decision that was taken
illegally by military commanders.
[interviewer]
How did that happen without his okay?
Well, that's-that that's something
that he regretted always,
this kind of, uh,
improper behavior by the military
was actually possible.
[Rice] 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
and the Defense Minister
had gone, uh, to the Baltic States
and probably had
had planned the operation there.
[plaintive music continues]
[Gabrielius Landsbergis]
Why would you send tanks?
Obviously, he was not ready
to let Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia, and others free.
[crowd singing indistinctly]
[Landsbergis] He tried to stop it
with brute force.
And even now, you can see
remnants of the barricades.
[crowd singing]
[clamoring]
[reporter] They marched
through the center of the Soviet capital,
thousands of demonstrators chanting,
"Freedom for Lithuania"
and, "Down with the executioners."
Mikhail Gorbachev has, with his reforms,
let a genie out of a bottle.
[clamoring]
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.
[reporter] 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.
[Sarotte] 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.
[reporter] Boris Yeltsin was brought
to Moscow by Gorbachev in 1985
to become the city's Communist Party boss.
[crowd] Yeltsin! Yeltsin!
[reporter] 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.
[Yeltsin]
He considers me to be too radical.
We have to do everything
very carefully and cautiously.
But people are very impatient.
They've been waiting for four years,
and they can't wait another year.
Something has to be done within a year?
Yes.
[Jim Lehrer] If not, then what happens?
[speaking Russian]
[Yeltsin's translator]
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.
[tense music playing]
[Sarotte] Yeltsin,
in contrast to Gorbachev,
figures out that nationalism
is the wave of the future.
[clamoring]
[Serhii Plokhy] We see communism
being basically bad as ideology,
as a system of belief.
People were looking for alternatives,
and one of those alternatives
was, of course,
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."
[reporter] Tonight, on the tenth day
of this congress,
came the blow Mr. Gorbachev
had tried so hard to avoid.
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.
[Yeltsin translator] 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.
[reporter] Mr. Gorbachev interjected.
[Gorbachev speaking in Russian]
[reporter, in English] By then, Yeltsin
had turned his back on this congress
and a lifetime in this party,
and walked out.
[Sarotte] Yeltsin becomes very active
in Russian electoral politics,
as opposed to Soviet electoral politics,
and he's resoundingly successful in that.
[reporter 1] Boris Yeltsin has defeated
his communist rivals
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.
[reporter 2] 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.
[David Remnick] So, by the summer of 1991,
Yeltsin had become powerful
as the president of Russia.
[speaking in Russian]
[Remnick] Gorbachev
is hanging on by a thread.
There are independence movements
all over the Soviet Union,
and he's trying to hold it together.
The idea that Gorbachev developed
was to have a new union treaty
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.
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[Lyne] 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.
[reporter, in Russian]
Will the Soviet Union remain?
[Gorbachev] Yes, I'm sure.
Absolutely sure.
- [reporter] What future will it be?
- [Gorbachev] 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.
[tense music playing]
[Remnick, in English] 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,
the big state industries,
they hate Gorbachev by now.
They hate him.
They think he's weak
and everything's going
to hell in a handbasket.
[reporter] Yanayev and his henchmen
have made it clear they distrust the West
and market economic forces,
and their frustration has grown
in recent weeks.
[Rice] A group of us were tasked,
"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."
- [interviewer] 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?
I remember that Defense Secretary Cheney
was a little bit more
on the, "We should push it along."
Larry Eagleburger once said,
"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?
[suspenseful music playing]
[Remnick] 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.
[Tchaikovsky's "Danse des petits cygnes"
from Swan Lake, playing]
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[reporter] 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.
What's especially interesting
is to look at the positions
held by those who were
the leading members of the group
who mounted the coup.
The chairman of the KGB,
the minister of interior,
the minister of defense,
the prime minister,
the secretary of the Central Committee,
who supervised
the military-industrial complex.
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.
[reporter]
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
and has not been seen since the takeover.
[Remnick] 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.
[Palazhchenko] He was held incommunicado.
Any number in Moscow was blocked.
[in Russian]
All my telephones were cut off.
I have no communication
with the outside world.
[Palazhchenko] Some members
of his security detail
thought that there was a real possibility
that his residence would be stormed.
[Gorbachev]
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.
[Sarotte] It's unclear
what's going to happen to Gorbachev.
And his wife has a stroke while
they're being held under house arrest
because she's so afraid.
Gorbachev is convinced that
he's going to be going to be killed.
[in Russian] 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 English] In fact,
for all of us watching it at the time,
it seemed highly unlikely
he was gonna get out of this.
[tense music playing]
[reporter 1] 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.
[reporter 2] The Emergency Committee
banned all demonstrations,
threatened a curfew
if there are disturbances,
and took control of the mass media.
[reporter 3] 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.
[reporter 4]
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."
[reporter 5]
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.
[crowd] Yeltsin! Yeltsin! Yeltsin!
[reporter 5] 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.
[clamoring]
There are growing fears
that a massive purge
against the reformers may soon begin.
[reporter 6] Now the Soviet people
have been given a taste of freedom,
they won't give it up easily.
[Remnick] 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.
[reporter] The very first question was,
where is Mikhail Gorbachev?
Well, let me say that Mikhail Gorbachev
is now on vacation.
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.
[laughter]
And it is our hope
[laughter]
[reporter] Yanayev's answer
drew derisive laughter from the press.
[Remnick] You knew this coup
was not going to necessarily succeed
when you saw Yanayev's hand shaking
during the press conference.
[Sarotte] 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.
[crowd] Yeltsin! Yeltsin!
[reporter] 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.
[Yeltsin, in Russian] 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.
[applause]
[Palazhchenko, in English]
Yeltsin, to his credit,
immediately took the position
that the coup was illegal,
and that that committee had to go.
[Yeltsin, in Russian] Naturally,
we declare that all decisions and decrees
passed by that committee
are not legitimate.
[applause]
[Palazhchenko, in English] In Moscow,
probably tens of thousands of people
supported him.
[Remnick] 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.
[reporter] The curfew
in the Soviet capital began one hour ago
and lasts until 5:00 in the morning.
[Palazhchenko]
They started to advance tanks
into the area close
to the Russian Supreme Soviet,
where Yeltsin was barricaded
with his people.
[unsettling music playing]
[reporter] 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.
[clamoring]
[reporter] They were being pelted
by rocks and Molotov cocktails.
The soldiers escaped
and then started to open fire.
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[indistinct yelling]
[man, in Russian] You bastards!
Bastards! Bastards!
[continues yelling in Russian]
[clamoring]
[gunfire]
[Remnick, in English] These coup leaders
just did not have the capacity
or the will to blow everybody away
and hold on to power.
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[reporter] The coup in the Soviet Union
appears to be coming apart at the seams.
People are all beginning to turn now.
[clamoring]
[reporter] Tens of thousands of people
outside Yeltsin's headquarters
were elated.
In their view, he had saved the day.
[Yeltsin, in Russian]
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.
[crowd cheering]
[crowd chanting] Russia! Russia!
Russia! Russia! Russia!
[Hill, in English] 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.
[fireworks cracking]
[Remnick] Outside the KGB headquarters
on Lubyanka Square,
for years and years and years,
there's been a ginormous statue
of Felix Dzerzhinsky,
who's the founder, in essence, of the KGB.
[reporter]
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.
[Remnick] 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
[chanting]
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.
[clamoring]
[Sam Nunn] I was in Budapest, Hungary,
at a conference, actually,
talking about arms control.
One of my Soviet friends,
by the name of Andrei Kokoshin,
got an emergency message
that he needed to come back
to Moscow immediately.
Andrei Kokoshin calls me
three days later and said,
"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."
[mysterious music playing]
[Nunn] 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.
[indistinct chatter]
I am extremely appreciative
and grateful to the Soviet people.
[Nunn] 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.
[reporter] When Mikhail Gorbachev visited
Boris Yeltsin's Russian Parliament,
he got a round of applause at first.
[applause]
[reporter] But then a lot of heckling,
interruption, and embarrassment.
[Remnick] 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.
[reporter] 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.
[Remnick] Yeltsin seized the advantage.
It was never the same after that.
[Sarotte] 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.
Moldova.
So, on December 1st, 1991, Ukraine votes,
overwhelmingly, to become independent.
[reporter] More than 80%
of the Ukrainian electorate
turned out to vote yesterday.
They voted to end
the centuries of rule from Moscow.
[Sarotte] 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,
then Gorbachev
will be president of nothing,
and he can finally get rid of Gorbachev.
So Yeltsin goes to a hunting lodge
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."
[Michael McFaul] In other words, Yeltsin
was doing what Landsbergis was doing
what the Estonians were doing,
what the Ukrainians were doing.
They were all collectively declaring
independence from the Soviet Union,
including the country that
was at the center of the Soviet empire,
the Russian Federation.
[reporter] 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.
[Sarotte] 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.
[reporter] 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.
[Sarotte] By December 25th, 1991,
they're able to formally decree
the end of the Soviet Union.
[compelling music playing]
Yeltsin ejects Gorbachev
from his office in the Kremlin that day.
WE DECLARE THE FORMATION
OF A COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES
Yeltsin even then sends men
to Gorbachev's private residence,
where his wife Raisa is.
And Raisa's just suffered a stroke.
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.
[Palazhchenko] 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.
[Sarotte] 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.
[intense music playing]
[Sarotte] And on paper,
the Soviet Union is no more.
[applause]
We gather tonight at a dramatic
and deeply promising time in our history,
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.
[crowd cheering and clapping]
[Sarotte] 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.
[bittersweet music playing]
[Gates] There was a lot of instability
associated with the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
And there was a lot of questions.
[Sarotte] How do you transition
from being a state economy
to being a market economy?
How do you adjust
the purpose and the mission of NATO
after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
and the principal reason NATO was created?
[Sarotte] 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.
[Gates] 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.
We devoted a lot of time
and a lot of effort
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.
[Nunn] The world was, on one hand,
rejoicing that Russian reformers
were coming in
and the Soviet Union was breaking up.
But a sense of real fear and foreboding
that no country
in the history of the world
had ever gone down without a war,
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.
[William Taylor] 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,
now Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belarusian,
mostly Russian scientists
and nuclear engineers,
that knowledge could be used
for good or bad.
[Nunn] 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,
an awful lot of money
to take their skills and knowledge,
and to make these kinds
of weapons elsewhere.
There's a definite set of choke points
in a nuclear weapon's development.
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.
[reporter] 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.
[Andy Weber] The breakup
of the Soviet Union
turned everything on its head.
There were a lot of rumors,
some intelligence reports,
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.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Weber] 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."
That led to this introduction
to the factory director,
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."
One day, my driver, Slava,
came by the embassy and said,
"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.
We asked President Nazarbayev
to arrange for me,
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."
About a month or so later,
an expert named Elwood Gift,
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.
[crackling]
[Weber] We did some testing
with their equipment
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.
[tense music playing]
[Weber] 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.
[tense music continues]
Yeah. They're not going anywhere.
[indistinct chatter]
[Weber] I was very concerned
that we weren't gonna make it.
[tense music continues]
[Weber] So the material was flown,
without any stops,
with aerial refuelings
to Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
where it was brought to the Y-12 plant.
Yesterday, the Department of Defense
and the Department of Energy
completed a high-priority,
extremely sensitive mission,
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.
[Weber] 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.
[Weber] 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.
[Nunn] 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.
It was the most important
defense money we ever spent
in terms of avoiding an untold number
of possible catastrophes.
[William Taylor]
When the Soviet Union dissolved,
the Belarusians and Kazakhs
agreed to turn over their nuclear weapons
to the Russians, or destroy them.
Ukrainians, not so quick
to decide to turn these weapons over.
[reporter] Deep inside its secret
forest site at Bila Tserkva,
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.
[atmospheric music playing]
Everybody wanted to be sure
that these weapons were under control.
[Sarotte] Ukraine, at this point,
has become a democracy.
It has over 50 million people,
and is the world's
third-biggest nuclear power.
[Taylor] 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.
There were negotiations, Americans,
the Brits, the Russians, Ukrainians,
about what to do with these weapons.
In a memorandum
eventually signed in Budapest,
the Ukrainians agreed, under pressure,
to give up these nuclear weapons,
to destroy or send them back to Russia.
[reporter]
Ukraine formally renounced nuclear arms
by joining
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Ukraine will join Belarus and Kazakhstan
in becoming nuclear-free
by the end of the century.
[Taylor] The language
of the Budapest Memorandum was tricky.
Negotiators settled
on the word "assurance," not "guarantee."
[Sarotte] 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.
So that's one of the open questions,
should they have pressed harder
for a better deal?
[interviewer] 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."
"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."
[interviewer] They knew
that Russia could invade them.
- They knew, yeah.
- There was a threat from Russia.
Yes.
[plaintive music playing]
[Remnick] 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.
[Putin, in Russian]
As sad or scary as it might sound,
in my view, a short period
of totalitarianism
in our country is possible.
[Remnick, in English]
He was never a friend to the West.
He was always suspicious of the West.
[Putin, in Russian]
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.
[ominous music crescendoes]
[closing theme music playing]