In Russia, the fall of Communism was also the work of a visionary – but it wasn’t Gorbachev. In March 1990, Gorbachev’s election to a post, the presidency of the USSR, sparked a cascade of new aspirations in the most surprising places: in Alma Ata, a former steelworker, now first secretary, Nursultan Nazarbayev,* had himself elected president of the Kazakh republic. ‘I thought we’d agreed there’s only to be one president,’ said Gorbachev.
‘People in Kazakhstan,’ explained Nazarbayev, one of the key movers in what happened next, ‘say can’t we have a president too?’
Nazarbayev switched patrons, following the flux of power to a different source. On 29 May 1990, Yeltsin was elected chairman of Russia’s Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev could not understand it: ‘Here and abroad he drinks like a fish. Every Monday his face doubles in size. He’s inarticulate … but again and again the people keep repeating “He’s our man” and forgive him everything.’ On 12 July, Yeltsin stormed out of a Communist Congress, resigned from the Party and then claimed sovereignty in Russia. Hated by Communist diehards and despised by frustrated liberals, undermined by a collapsing economy and raging nationalism, Gorbachev saw his power wither as he ranted about the ‘scoundrel’ Yeltsin: personalities matter and their rivalry helped destroy the state. In August, Gorbachev negotiated the price of German reunification in return for billions of dollars in loans to the USSR which, grumbled Gorbachev, were instantly stolen: ‘It’s just gone.’ President Bush was delighted that ‘The day of the dictator is over, the totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree,’* but he was alarmed by Soviet turbulence. Now the adventure of a real suicidal nationalist – Moscow’s closest Arab ally – would further undermine Gorbachev.
On 2 August 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait. He counted himself the victor of the war against Iran, in which the ageing Khomeini had finally agreed to a ceasefire. ‘Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light,’ said the ayatollah. ‘Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice.’ He brought with him to Teheran Ebrahim Raisi, a young mullah who had studied under his deputy Khamenei, and heading the ‘death committee’ personally tortured and oversaw the executions of thousands of opposition activists. When the imam died at eighty-six, his funeral ranked with Nasser’s as the largest ever: millions of frenzied mourners overran the cortège, knocking the flimsily wrapped body to the ground, tearing the shroud to shreds and leaping into the grave, until guards fired overhead and rescued the body by helicopter to be buried later in the day. Yet his creation proved stronger: his henchman, President Ali Khamenei, was chosen as Supreme Leader,* and ruled for thirty years during which Iran achieved power greater than that of the shah.
Saddam, with a bloated army, mountainous debts, a rapacious family and a splintered country, also sought extreme solutions. At home, he liquidated 180,000 Kurds and Assyrians in Anfal who had assisted the Iranians, slaughtering civilians, using chemical weapons, while he procured nuclear weapons with French help. In 1981, Israel bombed his facility; when he hired a Canadian gunmaker to build a supergun, Big Babylon, Mossad assassinated him.
Saddam struggled to control his sons and cousins. His pimp and food taster, Hana Gegeo, son of his chef and his daughters’ governess, introduced him to a blonde doctor Samira, who became his mistress and then his wife, which naturally made enemies of his first wife Sajida and her sons. His trusted half-brothers wanted their sons to marry Saddam’s daughters but in the mid-1980s his rising young cousins Hussein and Saddam Kamel won the girls, Raghad and Rana. A boy who flirted with his favourite daughter Hala was killed.
Even Saddam was unable to manage his eldest son, Uday, whom he had appointed to run the Olympic Committee and the Football Association, clearly heir apparent. Yet this Caligularian psychopath with a speech impediment regularly beat up men and raped women. In 1988, he burst into a party given for the wife of the Egyptian president Mubarak and beat Gegeo to death with an iron bar. Afterwards he tried to kill himself, then, summoned by Saddam, told his father, ‘Stay with your real wife.’ Infuriated, Saddam almost killed him: he ‘was lucky I was unarmed’. An attempt to flee to America was foiled by his brothers-in-law, the Kamel brothers, igniting a feud that would end in bloodshed. Saddam exiled Uday to Switzerland and switched his favour to the less demented Qusay, who ran the SSO secret police.
Now Saddam was broke. Kuwait had lent him $30 billion and wanted it back. Tiny Kuwait had the same 20 per cent share of world oil as Iraq. Saddam claimed it as part of the old Ottoman vilayet of Basra. He probed America: ‘We’ve no opinion on Arab–Arab conflicts,’ the US ambassador told him, mistakenly greenlighting his plan, ‘like your border disagreement with Kuwait.’ Saddam’s 120,000 Iraqi troops and 850 tanks rolled into Kuwait. The amir fled; his brother was shot, then gleefully pulped by one of Saddam’s tanks. Unleashing Uday, back from exile, and the ravening Tikriti clan in a looting frenzy, Saddam annexed Kuwait.
Gorbachev was infuriated and sent his spymaster Primakov to restrain Saddam, but the Iraqi leader threatened the foundation of the west – oil – not to speak of international law. Bush vacillated; ‘This is no time to go wobbly,’ Thatcher told him. Bush won a UN resolution and recruited an unprecedented coalition, from Thatcher* to Assad, which mustered in Saudi Arabia. Saddam had achieved the impossible: uniting most of the fissiparous Arab world against himself. Only Arafat – and a reluctant King Hussein – backed him.
On 17 January 1991, Bush launched the first bombardments of Desert Storm, encouraging Iraqis to rebel against Saddam. Saddam fired Scud missiles at Israel before invading Arabia, temporarily taking the town of Khafji. In the first video war, watched live on the new twenty-four-hour news channel CNN, Bush’s grand army of 956,600 troops used overwhelming air and land power to rout the Iraqis, incinerating entire divisions of tanks and trucks while Kurds, Shiites and Marsh Arabs all rebelled. But once Kuwait had been liberated, Bush, wary of entanglement, halted the invasion, leaving Saddam in power in central Iraq with all destructive weapons banned. Saddam had grossly miscalculated but, after two decades of terror, his camarilla remained loyal, even more concentrated on his family. His negotiators won American permission for Iraqi forces to fly helicopters, which they then used to slaughter the rebels. Just 292 coalition troops had been killed compared to 85,000 Iraqis. American apogee coincided with Soviet perigee.
At 4.30 p.m. on 18 August 1991, Gorbachev, on holiday at his Foros dacha in Crimea, was interrupted by his bodyguard: a mysterious delegation had arrived. Gorbachev found his phone lines had been cut. ‘Something bad has happened,’ he told Raisa. ‘Perhaps terrible.’ It was a coup: the State Committee on Emergency Rule, led by the KGB boss and defence minister, had seized power to stop the rolling disintegration of the USSR. In December 1990, Shevardnadze had resigned, warning of a coup. Lithuania had been the first to declare independence, followed by Estonia and Latvia, but Gorbachev himself had lost control since 13 January when his Spetsnaz commandos had shot civilians at a TV station in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, a crime that only consolidated its defiance. In March, Gorbachev had won a referendum to create his new Union of Sovereign States. Nazarbayev agreed to be its first premier. But the same month, Georgia embraced freedom. On 10 July, Yeltsin was democratically elected president of Russia, a legitimacy that the unelected Gorbachev could not equal. Then Ukraine delayed agreeing to the new Union. On 1 August, President Bush tried to save the USSR, visiting Kyiv to warn Ukraine against ‘suicidal nationalism’.* Gorbachev, himself half Ukrainian, desperately tried to keep Ukraine within his new Union, warning that Ukraine would be too unstable to survive as a state and telling Bush it existed as a republic only because Ukrainian Bolsheviks had crafted it to increase their own power and ‘added Kharkiv and Donbas’. Stalin had organized the actual borders. Crimea was added by Khrushchev. Those Russian regions, Gorbachev explained, would undermine any independent Ukraine.*