The Soviet demands were breathtaking. “To extricate this country from its current crisis, we need astronomical amounts of money,” warned former foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Yeltsin’s emissary to Tokyo, Ruslan Khasbulatov, said his republic wants between $8 billion and $15 billion in Japanese aid. Gorbachev asked the European Community for as much as $7.3 billion worth of food, part of it as a gift.
But the most immediate need of the union’s new transitional government is neither food nor money. No one is close to starving yet, though next winter promises to be painful. The government cannot put developmental-aid funds to use until it has drawn up a plan to reform the economy, a process that is only beginning. Instead, Gorbachev and Yeltsin need promises of massive foreign assistance to help preserve political stability. The food that Gorbachev asked for was billed as humanitarian relief, but that claim did not stand up to scrutiny. “Humanitarian supplies are things like flour, corn and oat meal, beans, dried milk-the kind of things you can ship anywhere, store anywhere and that can ward off starvation,” said John Schnittker, a former U.S. under secretary of agriculture. Although Gorbachev asked for grain and flour, he also requested more luxurious goods, including 350,000 metric tons of butter and millions of cigarettes– “political food aid,” said Schnittker.
To drum up such support, Moscow conducted a fire sale of overseas assets. Sharply alter his earlier position, Yeltsin called for an accelerated effort to resolve the status of the Kuril Islands, Japanese territory occupied by the Soviets at the end of World War II and incorporated into the Russian Federation. Once those talks begin, Moscow is likely to eave in quickly, ceding the symbolically and militarily important islands.
Gorbachev granted a longstanding U.S. demand when he said Moscow would talk to Havana about withdrawing Soviet military personnel from Cuba. Castro does not need the 6,000 combat troops, advisers and technicians to stay in power; his own armed forces still see to that quite effectively. But he does need Moscow’s money-the $2 billion in annual subsidies that keep his decrepit economy afloat. Gorbachev implied that future dealings would be based on free trade. If so, Cuba will earn a lot less for its exports to the Soviet Union, such as sugar, and pay a lot more for Soviet oil and other necessities. Castro sulkily accused Gorbachev of “inappropriate behavior.”
Moscow sacrificed another strategic pawn when Pankin and Baker agreed to cut off arms shipments to Afghanistan. The embargo applies both to the Soviet-backed regime of President Najibullah and to the see what these people are doing to my country," says a Georgian journalist. “They look like Christian militiamen in Beirut.” U.S.-supported mujahedin insurgents. But the rebels may continue to receive weapons from other sources, such as Pakistan or Iran, Baker and Pankin also agreed to sponsor elections, which would be supervised by the United Nations in order to prevent manipulation by Najibullah. As a result, the president could be forced to share power with his adversaries-if he is not driven from office altogether.
Gorbachev may have hoped that his campaign for aid would enhance his standing at home and abroad. “He wanted to show us that when it comes to foreign-policy matters, he can still deliver,” said a U.S. official. But it was the republics that forced Gorbachev to cut the cost of coldwar adventurism. They wanted Moscow’s dwindling assets to be spent on them, not on the likes of Fidel Castro. Pankin went through the motions of asking for “reciprocal steps” on Cuba, including cutbacks at the U.S. base in Guantanamo. But Gorbachev made it clear that Moscow was prepared to withdraw unilaterally. Further pursuing their own interests, the republics also were expected to press Gorbachev for deep cuts in military spending.
Will Moscow get the aid it wants in return? Some of it, but probably not all. No one can refuse to supply humanitarian assistance if the winter turns harsh. “But the amounts that will conceivably be involved are a tiny fraction of the Soviet food picture,” says a Department of Agriculture expert. “The aid will be far more visible on Western and Soviet TV than on the shelves of Soviet supermarkets.”
If the new union government finally produces a workable program for economic reform, other countries also will have to cough up some long-term financial aid. Already the United States has softened its terms for such assistance; Baker said the union merely has to “commit” itself to a program of economic reform, not actually implement one. But foreign money will be doled out carefully, in the hope that the Soviets can put it to good use. As things stand now, “we don’t believe it does much good to help the Soviet Union,” says a Japanese official. “We still believe some technical assistance should go first. Then, if the economic environment can be smoothed out, we could go ahead with [financial] assistance.” Despite their efforts to accommodate Washington and Tokyo, Gorbachev and Yeltsin still have a long way to go to persuade potential benefactors that the unsteady new union is a safe and worthwhile investment.
