The Last Empire (17 page)

Gorbachev, who had spent a sleepless night in Foros, learned of his ouster thanks to a small Sony radio that the plotters had failed to take away from him. “What a stroke of luck to have brought it along,” wrote Raisa Gorbacheva in her Foros diary. “While shaving in the morning Mikhail Sergeevich uses it to listen to the ‘Maiak' station. He brought it with him to the Crimea. The fixed receiver here in our residence is not working on any of the wavelengths. Only the tiny Sony is working.” The whole Gorbachev family had spent a sleepless night. “Several large warships headed toward our bay,” wrote Raisa. “The patrol ships came unusually close to the shore, stayed for about fifty minutes and subsequently left.” She wondered what that might mean: “A threat? Isolation from the sea?” Neither she nor her husband knew the answer.
²⁴

The appearance of an unusual number of patrol ships near Gorbachev's mansion was one of the few facts that the CIA could provide to President Bush in addition to official Soviet reports about the ongoing coup. Another piece of information was that Gorbachev's plane had not left the Crimea. The Americans knew that Gorbachev was there, but no one could say what had happened to him. They could only hope for the best. But their optimism was limited, to say the least.

On the evening of August 19, President Bush dictated into his tape recorder his virtual letter to the distant Gorbachev: “As I sit here with all the best advice we can muster, I'm not sure that there's any chance that you, Mikhail, can come back. I hope that you never compromise yourself enough that if you come back you'll be under a cloud. I hope that Yeltsin, who's calling for your return, stays firm, that he's not removed by the power of this ugly right-wing coup.” The words sounded like a prayer. It was anyone's guess whether it would be answered.
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5

THE RUSSIAN REBEL

B
ORIS YELTSIN WAS AWAKENED
by his daughter Tatiana soon after 6:00 a.m. at his resort house in the government compound of Arkhangelskoe-2 near Moscow. He had slept barely five hours after returning from a visit with Nursultan Nazarbayev in Almaty. At first he could not understand what was going on, but when Tatiana told him about the coup, Yeltsin's first reaction was, “That's illegal.” The news came as a complete shock. It was August 19, the first full day of the coup. The previous night his thoughts had been focused on the signing of the new union treaty. He was worried about what to expect from Mikhail Gorbachev once the treaty was signed: Would he try to set the Central Asian republics, which were loyal to him, against Russia? Now Yeltsin was facing an unprecedented situation. He sat glued to the television set, watching the announcers read the official statements of the Emergency Committee. It was clear that Gorbachev was not among the committee members. The treaty was off. What should he do now?

Yeltsin's wife, Naina, was the first to compose herself. “Boria,” she said, addressing her husband by his nickname, “whom should we call?” Most of the Russian leaders were housed in the buildings nearby. Unlike Gorbachev's phones, Yeltsin's were still working, and he soon summoned his associates to his house. The visitors found Yeltsin deep in thought. Everyone agreed that it was a coup. Given the membership of the committee, the plotters had all the instruments
of power in their hands. The Russian government, meanwhile, was a paper tiger. It had ministers and departments but no control over the army, the KGB, or the interior forces. The democratically elected mayors of Moscow and Leningrad (since September 1991 St. Petersburg) theoretically had the local police under their control, but nothing more. The first impulse was to enter into negotiations with the Emergency Committee, but that idea was soon rejected. The Russian leadership would instead appeal to the people.

Yeltsin and the members of his government began to draft the text of their appeal by calling a spade a spade: “On the night of August 18–19, 1991, the legally elected president of the country was removed from power.” It declared the Emergency Committee unlawful and called on the “citizens of Russia to give a fitting rebuff to the putschists and demand a return to normal constitutional development.” Yeltsin, Russian prime minister Ivan Silaev, and chairman of the parliament Ruslan Khasbulatov, the three Russian leaders who signed the appeal, called for a general strike until their demands were met: that Gorbachev be allowed to address the country and that the Soviet parliament be called into emergency session. The appeal was written by hand and then typed by Yeltsin's daughter Tatiana. It was now ready for distribution. Its main points were dictated over the phone to the Russian vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, who was then in Moscow. The deputy mayor of Moscow, Yurii Luzhkov, jumped into his car and sped off to the capital with a copy of the appeal. He had orders from Yeltsin to mobilize the citizens of Moscow against the coup.

It was now close to 9:00 a.m., and Yeltsin had to decide what to do next. Should he stay in Arkhangelskoe or go to Moscow? “We were afraid that we would be caught there,” his prime minister, Silaev, later remembered, referring to Arkhangelskoe. That would have been easy to do in the remote compound, but there was the no less real danger that the Russian leaders would be arrested on their way to Moscow. Their bodyguards were reporting the appearance of KGB troops near the compound and the movement of tanks toward the capital and offered to smuggle Yeltsin out in a fisherman's boat on the Moskva River and then take him to Moscow by car. He refused. He would go openly in his presidential limousine to the White House, as Muscovites called the huge downtown building of the Russian parliament, from which he would lead the resistance. Yeltsin saw tears
in his wife's eyes. As he put on a bulletproof vest and got ready to leave, she tried to stop him: “What are you protecting here with that bulletproof vest? Your head is still unprotected. And your head is the main thing.” She added, “Listen: there are tanks out there. What's the point of your going? The tanks won't let you through.”

Naina Yeltsina later recalled her husband's words: “No, they won't stop me.” It was then that she became truly frightened. Yeltsin had a somewhat different recollection of his answer. “I had to say something,” he wrote in his memoirs, “so I gave her my best shot: ‘We have a little Russian flag on our car. They won't stop us when they see that.'” It is not clear from Yeltsin's memoir which Russian flag he had on his car—the official Soviet one, red with a narrow blue stripe, beneath which he had taken the presidential oath a few weeks earlier, or the old tsarist tricolor with white, blue, and red stripes, the official flag of the Russian Empire and later of the first democratic Russian revolution of February 1917, which toppled tsarism. Certainly it was the latter that became the symbol of Russian hope and identity in the days of the coup.

A few hours later, having made his way to the White House, Yeltsin climbed atop one of the tanks surrounding the parliament building to read his appeal to the people of Russia. Behind him, his aides unfurled a middle-sized Russian tricolor. “This improvised rally at the tank was not a propaganda gimmick,” remembered Yeltsin later. “After coming out to the people, I felt a surge of energy and an enormous sense of relief inside.” Yeltsin was now leading the opposition to a coup that allegedly wanted to save the Soviet Union. He was doing so in the name of Russia, under the traditional imperial colors—an unlikely leader of an even more unlikely revolt. Russia was rebelling against its own empire.
¹

FOR KGB HEAD VLADIMIR KRIUCHKOV
, as for most of the plotters, the sleepless night of August 18 was followed by a day that was hectic but also full of excitement. Immediately after 5:00 a.m., he ordered the distribution of printed forms to military commanders for the detention of opposition leaders. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov demanded the internment of a thousand activists, but Kriuchkov was not so relentless. There were about seventy individuals on his list, including Gorbachev's former liberal aides Eduard Shevardnadze and Aleksandr Yakovlev. There was also a short list of eighteen people,
including the activists of Shield, an organization of former military officers whom the plotters considered most likely to organize mass protests. The “short list” did not include the name of Boris Yeltsin.

The Russian president was no friend of Gorbachev's, and the plotters hoped to win him over. Kriuchkov sent commandos from the KGB Alpha group to Yeltsin's cottage in Arkhangelskoe with the order to create conditions for Yeltsin's negotiations with the Soviet leadership. In plain language, that meant his arrest. But Kriuchkov soon changed his mind and called off the operation in Arkhangelskoe. Hopeful that the Soviet parliament would provide a veil of legitimacy for the coup, Kriuchkov was careful to avoid any rash action. The unprovoked arrest of such a high-profile figure as Yeltsin would doubtless raise questions in parliament. It was therefore decided to wait: if Yeltsin cooperated, he could be left free; if he did not, he could be arrested for violating the newly proclaimed laws once he made it fully apparent that he was opposed to the state of emergency and thus, it was hoped, had discredited himself in the eyes of the public. The plotters firmly believed that most people were tired of the anarchy of Gorbachev's rule and would side with them. Yeltsin was therefore allowed to proceed to Moscow on the morning of August 19: the Alpha operatives were under orders not to stop him.
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At 10:00 a.m., when the plotters gathered in Acting President Yanaev's office for the first regular meeting of the Emergency Committee, Kriuchkov told his colleagues that he had been in touch with the Russian president. The result was dismal: “Yeltsin refuses to cooperate. I spoke with him by telephone. I tried to make him see reason. It was useless.” This was a clear setback but not a major reason for concern. The coup was proceeding as planned. By 6:00 a.m., tanks of the Taman division had surrounded the Ostankino television center and tower; an hour later the rest of the troops from the Taman and Kantemirovskaia divisions, familiar to Muscovites from their participation in the annual military parades on Red Square, began to move in. Altogether some 4,000 troops, more than 350 tanks, about 300 armored personnel carriers, and 420 trucks were rushed into the city. They converged on the capital just as Muscovites who had spent the weekend at their country houses were making their way back. The troops blocked major intersections and created havoc on the roads.
Yeltsin's limousine had managed to reach the center of town before army vehicles made the streets there almost impassable.

Muscovites cursed the traffic jams and the army but were generally friendly to individual soldiers. They talked with the young recruits, whose average age was nineteen. They also brought food and candy and bombarded the troops and officers with endless questions: Why did you come? Are you going to shoot? The soldiers did not know the answer to the first question but knew that they would not fire on civilians. As the plotters saw it, things were going their way. There were no demonstrations in Moscow, enterprises were working as usual, and Yeltsin's call for a general strike went unanswered. His speech from the top of a tank made an impressive picture, but there were relatively few people around the White House to listen to him. The situation outside Moscow seemed calm as well. Kriuchkov received regular reports from around the country. He later remembered, “It was calm everywhere. The first reaction aroused hope; there was even a kind of euphoria.”
³

With the troops safely in Moscow and the situation under control, the time had come to face the public and tell the Soviet people and the international community what the plotters wanted. Scores of foreign correspondents and a select group of Soviet reporters whose editors had the trust of the hard-liners were invited to a press conference at 6:00 p.m. in the press center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There, a few weeks earlier, Bush and Gorbachev had held their press conference after the signing of the START treaty. Weary and under stress, Gennadii Yanaev, who had known nothing about the coup a day earlier and could hardly have imagined himself as its leader, was charged with selling it to the public. Kriuchkov, Yazov, and Prime Minister Pavlov refused to face the public—they would run the coup behind the scenes—but the rest of the plotters, including Interior Minister Boris Pugo, joined Yanaev behind a long table facing hundreds of foreign and domestic reporters.
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“Ladies and gentlemen, friends and comrades,” said Yanaev as he opened the press conference, “as you already know from media reports, because Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev is unable, owing to the state of his health, to discharge the duties of President of the USSR, the USSR Vice President has temporarily taken over the performance of the duties of the President.” He went on to stress the gravity of the
political and economic situation in which the country found itself as a result of Gorbachev's reforms, and he promised to organize the broadest possible discussion of the new union treaty. After Yanaev was done, the floor was opened for questions, both to him and to other members of the committee. That afternoon the committee had ordered the closing of all liberal-leaning newspapers in Moscow. In the evening they would use their total control of state television to project the desired image of the coup and its objectives. The television cameras were in the hall. The plotters' calculation was simple: their own man would conduct the press conference, and even if foreigners asked uncomfortable questions, these would be offset by the “right” questions from loyal reporters.

The proceedings began well. The loyal correspondents asked questions designed to help Yanaev make his case in favor of extraordinary measures and against the actions undertaken by Boris Yeltsin. A
Pravda
correspondent said that Yeltsin's call for a general strike could “lead to the most tragic consequences.” But the next question, which came from a foreign correspondent, opened a devastating salvo of inquiries. Ignoring the tone set by the Soviet reporters, their foreign counterparts bombarded Yanaev with questions about Gorbachev's health and pointed out the illegality of the coup. But the hardest blow on that score was delivered by a local journalist. Tatiana Malkina, a young reporter for
Nezavisimaia gazeta
(
Independent Newspaper
), one of the papers shut down by the plotters, had sneaked into the conference hall without an invitation. When the unsuspecting press secretary called on her, she shook the audience with the sheer audacity of her demeanor: “Could you please say whether or not you understand that last night you carried out a coup d'état? Which comparison seems more apt to you—the comparison with 1917 or with 1964?” The references were to the Bolshevik coup and the dismissal of Nikita Khrushchev.