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.2
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.4
“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.
Yanaev dodged the question, saying that neither precedent applied to this particular case. But the question that followed immediately from a foreign reporter was no less crushing: whether the plotters had consulted with the leader of the 1973 Chilean coup, General Pinochet. The audience burst into laughter and applause. The press secretary called for order. In answering further questions and countering accusations that the committee was acting unconstitutionally, Yanaev promised to have the Soviet parliament in session by August 26. He also went out of his way to assure the audience of his loyalty to his “friend, President Gorbachev,” whose return after recovery he was eagerly awaiting. Before the conference Yanaev had received a message from Gorbachev, who demanded that his communications at Foros be restored and that a plane be made available to take him back to Moscow. The demand was rejected. Instead, the guards reconnected the television cable, making it possible for Gorbachev and his family to watch the press conference.5
The press conference was a failure for the plotters. Television cameras showed the whole country a tired apparatchik with a gray and less than healthy-looking face, an odd haircut designed to cover his baldness, a trembling voice, a runny nose, and restless hands that he did not know where to place. Yanaev, who was not well known in the country and was considered a nonentity by those who did know him, confirmed people’s worst expectations. The press conference had shown people all over the country that the authorities could be not only argued with but even ridiculed. Later that evening it became apparent that the plotters did not have full control over Soviet television. The official news program Vremia (Time) included not only a reading of the Emergency Committee’s statements and a report on the press conference but also a broadcast from the approaches to the White House, where Yeltsin’s supporters were constructing barricades. Now everyone in Moscow knew that resistance was possible and where to go in order to join it.
The press conference highlighted a major problem facing the committee: it had no unquestioned leader. The mastermind of the coup was Kriuchkov, but formal authority belonged to Yanaev, who, as a seasoned apparatchik, was trying to save his place atop the Soviet pyramid in the only way he knew: by avoiding responsibility. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, having joined the committee and demanded harsh measures against his political opponents and strike participants, drank himself into an attack of hypertension and found safe haven in a hospital. Marshal Yazov and Interior Minister Pugo had been at each other’s throats ever since their subordinates began to be deployed to crush pro-independence movements in the non-Russian republics, so neither of them was about to take responsibility for failures there. When Marshal Yazov’s wife, Emma, came to see her husband at the Ministry of Defense at the time of the press conference and begged him to quit the committee and call Gorbachev, he told her, “Emma, understand that I am alone.” He shook his head in desperation as he watched the broadcast of the press conference. “Dima,” said Emma, calling her husband by his nickname, “whom have you fallen in with? You always used to laugh at them!”6
As the plotters assembled in Yanaev’s office after the press conference, the euphoria they had experienced a few hours earlier was gone. They now grasped that Yeltsin was a real danger to them and had to be dealt with. They decided to do something about that in the morning.
The morning of August 20 began for Yanaev and others with the reading of a fresh KGB memo on the errors they had made the previous day. The committee, wrote the KGB experts, had failed to enforce the state of emergency, locate and isolate opposition leaders, disrupt communications between opposition groups, and seize opposition media resources. And there was more bad news: chances were dwindling that the Soviet parliament would approve the committee’s actions, as rumors were spreading among political insiders that Gorbachev was alive and well in his Crimean cage. That morning Kriuchkov, Yazov, and Interior Minister Pugo ordered their subordinates to prepare a plan for storming the White House.7
BORIS YELTSIN HAD SPENT all of August 19 in the White House. Naina Yeltsina, her younger daughter, Tatiana, and the rest of the family found safety in a small apartment on the outskirts of Moscow that belonged to Yeltsin’s bodyguard.
They had left Arkhangelskoe in a hurry soon after Yeltsin’s presidential limousine with the Russian flag on it sped off to Moscow. The family members got into a van brought by the guards. Boris and Maria, the young children of Yeltsin’s elder daughter, Elena, were told that if the security personnel ordered them to lie on the floor of the van, they should do so without asking questions. “Mama, will they shoot us in the head?” asked the young boy. His question sickened the whole family. Although the van was inspected by KGB troops on leaving Arkhangelskoe, it was allowed to proceed to Moscow. When Tatiana called from a street telephone on the morning of August 20, she could not get through to her father. As she later recounted, she was told that “everything’s normal. Papa has practically not slept at all, he is working constantly, and he is in a fighting mood.”8
At the White House, Yeltsin was in his element. Projecting a sense of strength and a belief in ultimate victory, he provided the kind of leadership that the plotters could only dream of. A charismatic politician who could sense the mood of the masses, Yeltsin was willing to take risks that his competitors, including Mikhail Gorbachev, were not prepared to run. Like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, Yeltsin was at his best in times of crisis. Once the crisis passed, he often felt lost and depressed. That had been the case after his removal as Moscow party boss in t
he fall of 1987, when he tried to commit suicide by slashing his stomach with office scissors. He would treat his depressions with alcohol, surprising both supporters and opponents with erratic behavior. But Yeltsin was at his best in a crisis, and this time, too, he rose to the occasion.9
Apart from climbing on top of a tank, the Russian president had spent August 19 issuing decrees that declared the coup unconstitutional and established his authority over institutions and troops on the territory of the Russian Federation. The Soviet KGB, Interior Ministry troops, and the army were to follow the orders of the Russian president alone, declared the decrees and appeals. But privately he was preparing for the worst. The reports received that day by the members of the Emergency Committee did not lie: not only was there no general political strike, but no individual strikes were in evidence either. By the end of the day a few mines went on strike in the faraway Kemerovo region, but that did nothing to help the defenders of the White House.
Yeltsin’s forty-four-year-old vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, was placed in charge of the White House defenses. Rutskoi was a former military pilot who had been shot down twice in Afghanistan. On one occasion he was captured by agents of Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and allegedly given an offer of immigration to Canada in return for cooperation with the CIA, but he remained loyal to his country. Rutskoi was released from captivity, awarded the star of Hero of the Soviet Union, and elected to the Russian parliament before being chosen by Yeltsin as his running mate in the presidential election of 1991. A maverick by nature and a trained military officer, Rutskoi was an ideal candidate to organize the White House defenses, which relied heavily on the expertise of former Afghan veterans. But neither Rutskoi’s poorly armed men nor the makeshift barricades constructed by the Muscovites in imitation of the barricades built by Lithuanians around their parliament in January 1991 were capable of repelling an attack by Kriuchkov’s commandos with the support of Yazov’s tanks. Yeltsin, Rutskoi, and the rest of the Russian leadership were well aware of that. Their only hope was that the plotters would not dare to attack or, if they did, that the troops would not obey orders to shoot.10
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