Gorbachev's Yeltsin rally ban - 29 March 1991

Because of the coming on of Good Friday and Passover at one time, New York City probably had fewer people at office work over this weekend than any other city. And very many of them at prayer and fasting. Remember there are five and three quarter million Jews in the United States, one and a quarter of them in New York City. So it was arranged that this talk should be taped on Thursday and, as usual flown to London overnight so that, also as usual, it could be examined in a leisurely fashion for contraband, slander, coded messages and other inflammatory material, and then played first on Friday evening.

But, on Wednesday, we heard of Mr Gobachev's ban on public rallies which threatened all sorts of dire possibilities for the promised Yeltsin rally on Thursday. Even the ultimate fear, the outbreak of a new civil war. So we waited till Friday.

Now that it appears to be over, it's easy, as always, to say people's fears were groundless and that the worried Kremlinologists here were needlessly solemn. But, on Wednesday night in Washington, a city packed with Soviet experts and hundreds of Soviet refugee intellectuals, I did not hear or hear of one who would dare to assure us that on the morrow all was going to be calm and bright. I heard six or seven guesses at what might happen, what we now numbingly call "scenarios" which sounded persuasive at the time. All of them.

So, as the saying goes, the lights burned late in the White House, in the State Department and the Pentagon. Talk about contingency plans. Once Mr Gorbachev put out his alarming order to ban all public demonstrations, I'll bet the engines of government here were puffing with more improvised, rustled-up, contingency plans than at any time since the night of 2 August 1990.

As it was, the first scary word that came in from Moscow was about the fire that had broken out in the American embassy there. And, by the time it was out, had consumed the top part of the building which was, as it happened, devoted to top security files. It seems that Thursday morning's fire started in one of those lift shafts that are installed on the outside of buildings to help the movement of men engaged in renovation work. There's been no official suggestion from Washington or Moscow that the fire was other than accidental. Although, as you can well imagine, the crowd that gathered in the light of the flames had its nudging wise guys, one of whom told his wife or lady friend, "It's Gorbachev's way of deflecting attention away from the rally".

The first pictures of the rally didn't do much to allay our fears that worse was to come. They showed this huge concentration of tanks and other military, water cannon troops in battle gear, policemen in riot gear with plastic shields, the whole in battle array worthy of a force mobilised to defend Moscow against the invading Nazis. I switched off and waited for the sun to set. If the crowd was to mount to anything like its predicted mass, night-time would be the critical time.

Well, the sun went down and the lights came on and the 90-100,000 whose nucleus had early on traded frowns and insults with the army and the police, now it appeared the huge crowd was delirious and the defensive forces were harmless. Even, as the night wore on, they began to break down into winks and jokes with the masses of citizens they were there to keep in line. One reporter remarking on the huge crowd's remarkable serenity wrote, "They first took the show of Kremlin police power as an insult and finally mocked it as a burlesque of the terror that once made the Kremlin fearful".

That, in itself, is an astounding change and, in a way, suggests more than a failed coup would have done the powerlessness of Mr Gorbachev. Before the night came on, two things happened to weaken the force that Mr Gorbachev's ban was intended to have. The Russian Federation Congress, the parliament, called an emergency session and at once ruled that Mr Gorbachev's ban on public rallies was, itself, illegal and unconstitutional. The vote was almost 2-1.

Now, Mr Yeltsin has nothing like that proportion of supporters. About, what, 20-30,000 against 17 million members of the Communist Party? It showed anyway that large numbers of delegates, more or less neutral in the Gorbachev versus Yeltsin duel, also felt strongly about Mr Gorbachev's illegal assertion of power. Even the government's newspaper, Izvestiya, which for 70 years provided the Kremlin's scriptural lesson of the day, carried an editorial headlined, "Stop this insanity".

Then, the most pathetic news of the day for a man claiming power over a continental nation, Mr Gorbachev put out through the Kremlin the assurance that, in his view, the 100,000 people who had marched in what everybody else took to be defiance of his order, they hadn't really violated it at all. They'd been so quiet, so peaceable, so obedient. Due, according to the Kremlin, due to a compromise worked out earlier in the day with the leaders of the rally. I wonder how they identified them, snatched them out of the 100,000 and got them to the Kremlin in time to negotiate?

Well, it was now Thursday evening with us and we were greatly relieved to be able to turn to our own business. Mainly to two items. One that throws heat, but no light, on the end of the Gulf war and the other on an inflammatory domestic issue that's been crackling away for 10 years at least. The first subject is the so-called rift between President Bush and General Schwarzkopf. I hasten to say it was a rift very much manufactured by the media. The facts are not obscure. They're well established. And they reflect, creditably it seems to me, on both the president and the general.

As you probably know, last Wednesday evening, our public television network, that's the one, nationwide, 390 stations that carry no commercial ads. Well, the public television service transmitted an interview that Mr David Frost had, recently, in the bowels of the Desert Command Headquarters, with the Commander-in-Chief General Schwarzkopf. Mr Frost at one point asked him, "How did the ceasefire happen?" A question of childlike guilelessness which, however, could lead the commander into a bog. Well, when the General believed the enemy to be trapped and, quote, "It was about to become the Battle of Cannae", a battle of annihilation, he reported the situation to General Powell, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was, of course, at the president's elbow in Washington. They discussed the situation, the two generals. "Had they accomplished their military objectives?"

"And," said General Schwarzkopf, "the answer was yes. The enemy was kicked out of Kuwait and we had destroyed the Republican Guard as a militarily effective force."

Only when Mr Frost pressed the question, "Had you totally destroyed it?" did the General refine his meaning. Quote, "Not destroyed to the last tank, but they had been routed." And then, very much at ease with Mr Frost, who was also at ease having done his homework and finding the general a very direct and affable man. "Well, yeah," says the General, "frankly, my recommendation had been, you know, continue the march. We could've made it in fact a battle of annihilation but the president made the decision that we should stop, at a given time, at a given place that did allow some escape routes open."

Now that part of the talk was published next morning. But not what the General had inserted twice, or had said twice. That he thought the president's decision was "a very courageous" decision. "Courageous" and "humane". By deleting this forceful compliment, the papers next morning were able to put the general in a fighting posture of regretting, at least, the president's decision. Which he never did. And Mr Cheney, the Secretary of Defense, came through next day, after the rift had been prized open by the press, to say the General Schwarzkopf never for a moment challenged the president's decision or questioned it.

Mr Bush then came in and said the general was wrong in saying the war ended "while the general wanted to carry it on". This was awkwardly put. The president was saying only what Mrp Cheney had said. Anyway, next day, Thursday, the president phoned the general to say "much ado about nothing".

The domestic item was a big surprise. Thursday was the 10th anniversary, a grim word, of the assassination attempt on President Reagan which did however paralyse and permanently wound his press secretary, Mr James Brady. Since then, Mrs Brady has given all her time to lobbying for a bill to require all applicants for handguns to wait seven days before purchasing them. During which time, their background record can be checked. Several states have this law, but this would be a federal law, taking effect over the whole country.

Mr Bush is, has always been, against gun control and so, through his terms as governor of California, and as president, so has Mr Reagan. On Thursday, with President Bush at his side and Mr Brady in his wheelchair, Mr Reagan came out, clearly and unmistakably, he said, for the Brady bill. And he urged the Congress to do likewise.

I think it's a measure, not of political savvy or even at this late date of political influence. It's a measure of the man's simple magnetism, charm, Irish blarney, whatever you care to call it, that this turnabout of Mr Reagan's has just about forced President Bush to do likewise. And will almost certainly persuade the Congress to come running after him.

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