Down with Big Brother (65 page)

“What’s the matter with you? We’re not doctors,” said one of the group. “We were just told, ‘He’s sick.’ ”
⁸³

Realizing that the others wanted him to declare himself acting president, Yanayev began to squirm. He protested that Lukyanov, who had known Gorbachev since the university, would be a better choice. The Supreme Soviet speaker was adamantly opposed to this idea. He had come to the meeting armed with a copy of the constitution, which he had helped draft. The constitution was clear, he told Yanayev. If the president is incapacitated, for whatever reasons, the vice president must take over.

“According to the constitution, you become acting president, not me. My job is to convene the Supreme Soviet.”
⁸⁴

At this point, Kryuchkov shoved a piece of paper across the table to Yanayev. It contained a single typewritten sentence:

In connection with the inability of Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich, to fulfill his duties as President of the USSR, due to his state of health, I assume the responsibilities of President of the USSR from August 19, 1991, on the basis of article 127
⁷
of the Constitution of the USSR.

USSR Vice President

G. I. Yanayev

“Don’t you understand?” said Kryuchkov, one of the few people in the room still sober. “Unless we save the harvest, there will be hunger. In a few months the people will come out onto the street. There will be civil war.”
⁸⁵

“Perhaps we shouldn’t say that he is ill,” mused Yanayev, smoking one cigarette after another. “They might not understand us properly. There will be all sorts of speculation, talk. People will immediately want to know when he is going to get better.”

“If we don’t link this with Gorbachev’s illness, what other basis do we have for assuming his responsibilities? Now is not the time to investigate whether or not he is ill. We have to save the country.”
⁸⁶

There was silence around the table as everyone waited for the vice president to make up his mind.

“I won’t sign this decree,” he said finally. “I do not consider myself morally or professionally ready to assume these responsibilities.”
⁸⁷

Everybody around the table attempted to calm Yanayev down. They told him that the GKChP would take care of everything. His duties would be limited to signing a few decrees. When Gorbachev’s state of health improved, he would naturally resume his old duties.

“Sign, Gennady Ivanovich,” said Kryuchkov softly.

Yanayev took out his pen and signed the document in a shaky hand.

MOSCOW
August 19, 1991

S
HORTLY AFTER SIX THE NEXT MORNING
, Yeltsin’s youngest daughter, Tanya, flew into his bedroom, yelling, “Papa, get up! There’s been a coup!”

“That’s illegal,” said Yeltsin, still half asleep. Just six weeks previously he had been sworn in as the first popularly elected president of Russia in a millennium, and his own children were already making jokes about a coup.

Tanya told her father what she had just heard on television. Gorbachev had been replaced for “reasons of health.” A committee with a strange-sounding acronym had been appointed to run the country, in order to impose a state of emergency. Its members included Kryuchkov, Yazov, Yanayev. By now Yeltsin was wide-awake. His first reaction to the coup was the same as that of millions of other Soviet citizens when they heard the news that Monday morning either by switching on the television or from telephone calls from their friends.

“Are you kidding me?”
⁸⁸

Still in his nightclothes, Yeltsin dragged himself to the television set. A stern middle-aged matron was reading from a pile of decrees.

“The holding of meetings, street processions, demonstrations, and also strikes is forbidden. In the case of necessity, a curfew and military patrols will be introduced. Important government and economic installations will
be placed under guard. Decisive measures will be taken to stop the spreading of subversive rumors, actions that threaten the disruption of law and order and the creation of interethnic tension, and disobedience to the authorities responsible for implementing the state of emergency. Control will be established over the mass media.…”

Like most senior officials, Yeltsin had spent the weekend at his dacha in the bucolic Moscow countryside. After long negotiations with the central authorities, the Russian government had finally been allocated a complex of a dozen state dachas in the village of Arkhangelskoye, on the Moskva River, a twenty-five-minute drive from the center of the city. All of Yeltsin’s key aides, including Russian Parliament Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov and Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silayev, had weekend homes in the same compound. They began assembling at Yeltsin’s dacha as soon as they heard the news.

The immediate priority was to establish how much support the coup leaders enjoyed across the country. None of the republican leaders seemed very eager to take the Russian president’s call. He had just returned from an official visit to Kazakhstan and thought he had a good relationship with the Kazakh leader, Nazarbayev. The day before, they had toasted their success in persuading Gorbachev to accept a new Union Treaty. This morning, however, Nazarbayev was extremely cautious in committing himself, one way or the other.

“It is obvious that this is a coup. Gorbachev has been stripped of power by force. How do you intend to react?” Yeltsin said down the phone line to Alma-Ata.
⁸⁹

Nazarbayev replied that he did not yet have enough information to make any kind of public statement. A similar wait-and-see position was adopted by the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus when Yeltsin finally managed to get through to them.

At least the
vertushka
was still functioning. Yeltsin used it to call Yanayev but was told that the “acting president” was “resting” after working all night. He then placed a call to Gorbachev in Foros. A few minutes later the government telephone operator called back to say the call could not be put through.

The most significant call that Yeltsin made from Arkhangelskoye that morning was to the paratroop commander, General Pavel Grachev. The two men had first met just a few weeks before, during the Russian presidential election campaign. Displaying the sixth sense that was his political hallmark, Yeltsin understood that he might one day need the support of the military.
After a campaign stop in the provincial town of Tula, he had made a point of attending a paratroop training exercise nearby. Grachev had been his host. After watching paratroopers float down from the sky, the two men repaired to a hut by a lake, where they downed numerous bottles of vodka. Yeltsin went for a nude swim in the lake. As the banquet ended, officers and politicians repeatedly assured each other of their “eternal love and friendship.”
⁹⁰

In his alcoholic haze, the future president of Russia had posed a crucial question to the Afghan war hero. “If our lawfully elected government in Russia were ever threatened—a terrorist act, a coup, efforts to arrest the leaders—could the military be replied upon? Could you be relied upon?”

“Yes, we could,” Grachev had replied.
⁹¹

Unbeknownst to Yeltsin, Grachev had played a key role in drafting the plans for a state of emergency. On Kryuchkov’s invitation, he had joined a working group of senior KGB and Defense Ministry officials that began preparing for a crackdown as soon as Gorbachev left for Foros. The documents drawn up by Grachev and his colleagues formed the basis of the decrees issued by the GKChP that had been read over television that morning. When Yeltsin reached him on the phone, the general was supervising the deployment of tens of thousands of troops into the capital, including the Tula Division. Defense Minister Yazov had put him in charge of the military side of the coup.

The Russian president asked Grachev if he remembered the conversation they had had in Tula a few weeks previously. After a long pause Grachev replied nervously that he was duty-bound to obey the orders of his superiors. But then he added, “Wait a minute, Boris Nikolayevich, I’ll send you a security detachment.”
⁹²

Yeltsin thanked Grachev, and they said good-bye. There was something about the general’s tone of voice that was encouraging. For a military officer, who knew that someone might be listening in to the telephone conversation, he had seemed sympathetic.

“Grachev’s on our side,” Yeltsin told his wife, Naina, as he put down the phone.

While Yeltsin was on the phone, the other Russian leaders had begun drafting an appeal to the citizens of Russia. They understood there was little point negotiating with the members of the GKChP. Their best hope was to take a firm stand on the issue of constitutional legality. There could be no compromise with the people who had overthrown the democratically elected president of the Soviet Union.

Since there was no typewriter available, Khasbulatov began writing out
the appeal by hand. “We are confronted with a right-wing, reactionary, anticonstitutional coup,” the speaker wrote as the others leaned over his shoulder, making suggestions. “We urge the citizens of Russia to give a worthy answer to the putschists and demand that they return the country to normal constitutional development.” When they signed their appeal, Yeltsin, Silayev, and Khasbulatov had no way of knowing if it would ever reach the outside world.

In fact distributing the appeal turned out to be an amazingly simple operation. Unlike Jaruzelski, in December 1981, Kryuchkov and his colleagues had failed to lay the proper groundwork for their coup. There was no mass roundup of the political opposition. Soviet borders with the outside world remained open. Independent radio stations were still on the air. The telephones were working. The party apparatchiks who had set up the GKChP seemed to assume that once they got rid of Gorbachev, the rest of Soviet society would fall meekly into line. They were operating according to the rules of the last Kremlin coup—against Nikita Khrushchev, in October 1964—when Moscow’s control over information had been total.

The information revolution had caught up with Russia by 1991, and there were dozens of ways to get the news out. The president’s daughters began by faxing it to a group of Yeltsin supporters in the nearby town of Zelenograd. Son-in-law Lyosha then sent a copy to the aerospace design office where he worked. Someone else called the White House, the headquarters of the Russian government. Within an hour Yeltsin’s call for popular resistance had been photocopied, faxed, broadcast, and E-mailed all over the world. It was an impressive achievement in a land where all copy machines had been kept under lock and key up until 1989.

Yeltsin had been so preoccupied with organizing resistance to the coup that he did not have time to change out of his slippers and tennis shorts. When he decided to drive to the White House, his family helped him get dressed in his working clothes. It was then that he uttered what later became one of the catchphrases of the coup: “Can one of you women find some socks for the president of Russia?”
⁹³

Before leaving Arkhangelskoye, Yeltsin put on a bulletproof vest offered to him by one of his security guards. The sight of the vest, peeking out of his smart brown suit, made his family understand the risks he was running. His wife and daughters suddenly felt afraid. By now several dozen Russian security men, with assault rifles, had taken up positions around the dacha.

“What are you protecting with that bulletproof vest?” Naina wanted to know. “Your head is still unprotected. And your head is the main thing.”

As the president climbed into his Zil limousine, his wife began to worry
about the tanks already reported to be heading in the direction of Moscow. Yeltsin did his best to sound confident.

“We have a little Russian flag on our car. They won’t stop us.”
⁹⁴

The presidential Zil hurtled along the winding country road that led from Arkhangelskoye to Moscow, followed by a cortege of Russian government vehicles. They were heading due east, and the morning sun was shining directly in their faces, making it difficult to see the road ahead. As they turned onto the Minsk highway, they overtook hundreds of tanks, armored cars, and troop trucks, crawling toward the center of town. The line of military vehicles seemed endless. The troops had been woken up at 4:30 that morning and ordered to head toward Moscow in full combat gear. Similar columns were advancing from the north and the south.

Dozens of journalists, both Soviet and Western, were already assembled at the White House. If there was going to be significant resistance to the men who had seized power from Gorbachev, this vast edifice on the left bank of the Moskva River would almost certainly be the rallying point. Designed by a committee of Soviet architects, in the worst traditions of post-Stalinist modernism, the nineteen-story building was an unlikely symbol for Russia’s fledgling democracy. It was possible to get utterly lost wandering around its corridors. It was the kind of building where if you wanted to reach the cafeteria on the top floor, you first had to take an elevator to the eighth floor, go down a corridor, descend two flights of stairs, and then take another elevator. As it turned out, the maze of corridors and underground tunnels provided the defenders of the White House with the basis of an effective security system.