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Gorbachev fought desperately to hang on. He called the agreement unconstitutional and warned of anarchy, potential civil wars and fascist takeovers if the union fell apart. Founders of the commonwealth agreed that those were real dangers, but described their association as a "last chance" to avert them. Gorbachev tried to convene the Congress of People's Deputies, the national legislature, to work out some kind of compromise between the new commonwealth and his Union of Sovereign States, but was blocked when legislators from the commonwealth republics refused to attend. The Soviet President huddled with army commanders to appeal for military support a day before Yeltsin made a comparable pitch to a similar group of officers. Some generals interviewed on British television found Yeltsin more impressive, and subordinate officers voiced Russian variations of the Western proverb that he who pays the piper calls the tune. That can only mean Yeltsin: the Gorbachev government is flat broke and has only those funds that Yeltsin's Russian Federation doles out to it.
Another leader who was peeved by what he regarded as cavalier treatment by the commonwealth founders was Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan. When the agreement was signed he was in the air, en route to Moscow for a scheduled meeting with Gorbachev and the three Slavic presidents that never came off; Yeltsin phoned him at Vnukovo airport shortly after his plane landed to tell him about the agreement. Nazarbayev darkly suspected that the Slavic leaders were aiming at a "medieval" division of the union along religious- ethnic-cultural lines and talked for awhile of siding with Gorbachev to keep a central government alive. His defection from the commonwealth would have been a serious blow, since among other things it would have prevented any unified or even joint command over nuclear weapons; many of the biggest multiwarhead intercontinental Soviet missiles are based in Kazakhstan.
By week's end, however, Nazarbayev decided to cut himself in and brought the other Central Asian republics with him. Western Sovietologists speculated that he had little choice: if Kazakhstan did not join the commonwealth, it might have split in two. Kazakhs are actually a minority among its 16 million citizens; about 40% are ethnic Russians, who might have seceded rather than risk being submerged in an independent Muslim state. The other Central Asian republics simply could not survive economically on their own. They could, however, have formed a federation that would look toward alliances with such states as Turkey and Iran, and perhaps even have induced some Tatars, Bashkirs and other Islamic ethnic groups in southern Russia to secede and join them in a sort of Greater Turkestan. By inducing the Central Asians to join the commonwealth instead, the Slavic leaders passed a hard test of whether they could lead toward cohesion and stability rather than divisiveness and chaos.