Boris Yeltsin had ordered his foreign minister to go abroad to rally support for the Russian opposition among Western leaders and the public. His ultimate destination was the United States—more precisely, the New York headquarters of the United Nations. If it came to the worst and Yeltsin himself was killed or arrested, Kozyrev was to set up a Russian government-in-exile. Yeltsin also sent a group of his loyal lieutenants to Sverdlovsk in the Urals, his home city and power base—the “geographic center of Russia,” as he later described it to George Bush—to set up an alternative government center in one of the area’s Cold War–era Soviet bunkers. In Moscow Kozyrev was leaving behind his wife and a young daughter from his first marriage. His chances of seeing them again anytime soon were nil. The KGB officers following Kozyrev did not attempt to prevent him from buying a ticket and leaving the country. They had no orders to that effect. Kriuchkov had nothing against the leaders of the opposition, including Yeltsin himself, leaving the country. Kozyrev got the impression that the KGB men were telling themselves, “We’ll let him go.” So he went.
The three-hour flight to Paris gave Kozyrev an opportunity to collect his thoughts. A career diplomat who had been admitted to the prestigious Moscow Institute of International Relations (with the help of the KGB, as he later acknowledged), Kozyrev, like his boss, Boris Yeltsin, began to question Soviet ideology and practice when he found himself in an American supermarket during his first trip abroad. It was not the mere abundance of food that struck the young Soviet diplomat but the fact that the customers were ordinary people, many of them black or Latino. It was one thing for a loyal Soviet subject to admit that the West could provide a wealth of products to the capitalist elite but quite another to realize that blue-collar workers and minorities, allegedly exploited by those elites, had access to goods that Soviet apparatchiks could only dream about.
Then he got a copy of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, a novel prohibited from distribution in its author’s homeland, and read it in a single day, sitting on a bench in New York’s Central Park. One of the many ironies was that he read the Russian novel in English. He left it on the bench, afraid to take it to the Soviet diplomatic compound where he was staying. To his surprise, Kozyrev found nothing anti-Soviet in the book. Why, then, was it banned? Eventually he concluded that the regime of which he was a product, and which he was serving with distinction, did not allow its subjects the right of opposition or even autonomy. Pasternak was not anti-Soviet; he simply had not toed the party line. Along with Doctor Zhivago, Kozyrev left on the Central Park bench his belief in the system to which he officially continued to belong. Privately, as he himself expressed it, he eventually became an antisovetchik, the term the KGB used to describe dissidents.
In the Foreign Ministry, Kozyrev was one of the young diplomats who slowly but surely pushed their bosses, Eduard Shevardnadze and Mikhail Gorbachev included, to go on from a broadly defined policy of glasnost to a public embrace of freedom of speech and human rights as internationally recognized. Kozyrev never trusted Gorbachev, who remained for him a dedicated communist and party apparatchik. Yeltsin, who had openly rebelled against the party, was different. In the summer of 1990 Kozyrev made his choice. He left a coveted position as head of a directorate in the Soviet Foreign Ministry under Shevardnadze to take up the post (then largely ceremonial) of foreign minister of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The ministry had absolutely no representation abroad and, unlike the parallel structures in Ukraine and Belarus, was not even involved in the activities of the United Nations: Ukraine and Belarus, along with the Soviet Union, were UN members, while Russia was not. Kozyrev knew that by joining Yeltsin and his team he was going into opposition, but he had a vision of a new, democratic Russia and was prepared to take the risk.
At his confirmation hearings in the Russian parliament, the then thirty-nine-year-old foreign-minister-to-be formulated his vision as follows: “Democratic Russia should and will be just as natural an ally of the democratic nations of the West as the totalitarian Soviet Union was a natural opponent of the West.” Then came the coup. Kozyrev’s men, whom he took with him to the Russian Foreign Ministry from the Soviet one, stood behind Yeltsin. They strongly believed in the vision of a democratic Russia allied with the West. The real question now was whether the West saw it the same way. Did Western leaders even realize that the real struggle was no longer between Gorbachev and the party hard-liners but between democratic Russia and the military junta that threatened freedom all over the world?1
Kozyrev had his task cut out for him. Western leaders, while disturbed by the news from Moscow, were initially reluctant to condemn the coup or raise their voices in support of the imprisoned Gorbachev, to say nothing of supporting Yeltsin’s appeal for an all-Russian political strike. In Paris, Kozyrev’s current destination, President François Mitterand made a statement on the morning of August 19 that all but recognized the coup as a fait accompli. The same sentiment was shared by the Canadian minister of foreign affairs, Barbara McDougall. President Bush’s first statement on the morning of August 19 was also short of a condemnation of the coup. On the evening of that day, Vice President Gennadii Yanaev even praised Bush’s nonconfrontational approach at the press conference for foreign correspondents broadcast throughout the Soviet Union. It was a major disappointment for Kozyrev and Yeltsin’s entourage. And all this in spite of Kozyrev’s frantic efforts on the first day of the coup to rally Western support for Yeltsin and his demand to put down the anticonstitutional coup and restore Gorbachev to power.
Upon his arrival in Paris, Kozyrev called Allen Weinstein, the director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and the future archivist of the United States, to dictate a statement of his own. Weinstein was not a member of the Bush administration, but Kozyrev apparently knew no one in the White House or in the State Department to whom he could turn at that crucial moment. Weinstein proved an excellent choice. A native of the Bronx and the son of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, he cared deeply about developments in the Soviet Union and had good connections in the media. On the following day Kozyrev’s statement, perhaps edited by Weinstein, appeared in the Washington Post.
In his statement, the Russian foreign minister claimed that the original lukewarm reaction to the coup by leaders of the democratic world had made the plotters believe that they had succeeded in deceiving the West. “More recent statements from President Bush, Prime Minister John Major and other Western leaders,” continued Kozyrev, “have corrected that misconception. It is crucial that the West continue to condemn the coup attempt and not recognize—or promise eventual recognition to—the plotters.” He went on: “President Gorbachev must be restored immediately as the President of the Soviet Union, and the West should demand immediate and direct contact with him as well as international medical experts to assure his health.”2
Neither Yeltsin nor Kozyrev fully trusted Gorbachev, whom many in Moscow suspected of playing a double game—using his former aides to do the dirty work of crushing the democratic opposition and then returning to Moscow as the savior of the nation. But calling for Gorbachev’s return meant exposing the plotters’ greatest weakness—the lack of constitutional and legal justification for their arbitrary ouster of a legitimate head of state. The “bring back Gorbachev” strategy provided Yeltsin with the kind of legitimacy his earlier actions had lacked in the eyes of the West. It also appealed to the hearts and minds of the Western public, still dizzy with the Gorbymania of the late 1980s. When Bush finally called Yeltsin on the second day of the coup, he told the besieged Russian president that he supported his call for Gorbachev’s return. Bush and Yeltsin now had a joint agenda that went beyond the long-term strategy of building democracy. Its two main objectives were to stop the coup and save Gorbachev.
The “recent statement” by President Bush that, according to Kozyrev, “corrected the misconception” about the West’s complacency with regard to the coup was made at a Rose Garden press conference opened by
Bush on August 20 at 10:35 a.m. EST, two hours after his telephone conversation with Yeltsin. “The unconstitutional seizure of power is an affront to the goals and aspirations that the Soviet peoples have been nurturing over the past years,” he declared. There followed a piece of news that electrified the audience: “I have this morning spoken with Boris Yeltsin, the freely elected leader of the Russian Republic, and I assured Mr. Yeltsin of continued U.S. support for his goal of the restoration of Mr. Gorbachev as the constitutionally chosen leader. Mr. Yeltsin is encouraged by the support of the Soviet people and their determination in the face of these trying circumstances. He expressed his gratitude for our support of him and President Gorbachev.” The White House correspondents wanted details, but there was little the president could add. One of the questions went to the core of the dilemma facing the administration: “Mr. President, what kind of support, though, are you going to give Yeltsin, or are you—just have to stay on the sidelines and offer verbal encouragement?” Bush stuck to the line already announced: support would be limited to encouragement of the opposition and pressure on the plotters, who would have a hard time surviving without Western economic assistance. But privately, Bush was already prepared to go further.3
After the press conference, Bush went to the Oval Office, where he was joined by his advisers to discuss what more could be done to support Yeltsin. Every hour brought additional news about challenges to the coup. There were unconfirmed reports to the effect that the coup leaders were facing their first defections: Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov had reported himself ill, and Marshal Dmitrii Yazov had allegedly resigned from the Emergency Committee. There were also divisions among the military commanders and leaders of major republics, including such heavyweights as Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, who declared themselves against the coup. Considering these developments, Bush and his advisers agreed to increase pressure on the regime. The general statement on denying legitimacy to the coup plotters took on specific features. The new American ambassador to the USSR, Bob Strauss, who had just been sworn in and was about to go to Moscow, was instructed not to present his credentials to the new leaders. The broadcasters at the Voice of America (VOA) were asked to help Yeltsin spread his message across the Soviet Union. They obliged.4
The Voice of America had three correspondents in the Soviet Union—two in Moscow and one in Vilnius. The station was on the air fourteen hours a day, broadcasting to all parts of the Soviet Union, from the Baltics in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Far East. It began covering the coup twenty minutes after the takeover was announced on Soviet radio and television. VOA listeners in the Soviet Union were able to hear Yeltsin’s statement condemning the coup on the morning of August 19. What could be done to increase the impact of VOA broadcasts on the situation? Soon after 5:00 p.m. on August 20, the US Information Agency, responsible for VOA broadcasting, faxed a report to the White House on changes made in the broadcast schedule in the course of the second day of the coup. “Fifteen new transmitter hours were added today to increase frequencies and beef up VOA’s Russian signal—hours per day are unchanged at 14, but the signal is now louder and easier to catch.” The VOA switched to all-news coverage, with almost hourly live reports from its Moscow correspondents.
On the following day, VOA reports from the streets of Moscow were relayed through a Finnish cell phone network recently installed in the Soviet capital. “The unusual routing of his [[a correspondent’s]] voice reports by phone,” stated another report to the White House, “was Moscow street—VOA office—London—Washington—Greenville transmitters—U.K. relay—Soviet listener, all in milliseconds.” Broadcasts of the Voice of America and other Western media, including the BBC, became a principal source of information for Soviet citizens on the actions of Boris Yeltsin and the opposition forces. In the capital they supplemented information provided by the radio station Moscow Echo, and in the provinces they were the only source of news about resistance to the coup. According to a US Information Agency report sent to the White House during the coup, “With only nine newspapers now reportedly publishing in the USSR, and republic and other independent radio and TV stations virtually pre-empted by official Soviet transmissions, American and other Western media will be playing an increasingly important role in informing Soviet audiences.” When Dan Rather of CBS News asked one of his guests, a specialist in Soviet politics, “How would news of Yeltsin’s call for a general strike get to audiences in the USSR?” the answer he got was, “The Voice of America will do the job.” Indeed it did.5
IT WAS AT 5:35 P.M. ON AUGUST 20 that news of automatic gunfire around the Russian White House and in close proximity to the American embassy reached James Baker in the State Department. There was little that the secretary of state could do about the rapidly unfolding events in Moscow. “I’ve seldom felt so powerless in my life,” remembered Baker later. As he flew across the Atlantic that night to attend a NATO meeting in Brussels next morning, he “kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the Ops Center or Sit[[uation]] Room to call with news that KGB and Interior Ministry troops had attacked and overrun the barricades, killing Yeltsin in the process.”6
Around the same time as news of the shooting in Moscow reached Baker, Marshal Dmitrii Yazov returned to his office at the Ministry of Defense from a late-night meeting of the Emergency Committee in the Kremlin in the worst possible mood. In Moscow it was the early morning of August 21. The meeting, which had begun at 8:00 p.m. the previous day, had revealed deep divisions within the committee. It began with a stunning proposal from Gennadii Yanaev, who read the text of a statement denying rumors of a planned attack on the White House. He wanted it broadcast on radio and television. Those present, who included quite a few government officials and politicians sympathetic to the coup, could not help noting that the statement came as a complete surprise to Yazov, Kriuchkov, and other members of the committee.
The plan to attack the White House had been commissioned by Yazov and Kriuchkov on the morning of August 20. By midday they had a detailed plan. Paratroopers and units of riot police would surround the White House at night and disperse the crowd, making way for commandos of the KGB Alpha unit and army unit B. The commandos would storm the White House, blasting their way through with grenade launchers, clear the premises, and arrest Yeltsin. The operation, code-named Thunder, would take place at 3:00 a.m. on August 21. The army units taking part would begin to converge on the White House at midnight. Yazov promised reinforcements. The plotters now had only to wait for darkness. This was to be Yeltsin’s last night of freedom. Upon being arrested, he would be taken to the state hunting grounds in Zavidovo, where Leonid Brezhnev had once hunted wild boars with foreign dignitaries, including Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and, later, secretary of state. To the commandos, some of whom had stormed the presidential palace in Kabul in December 1979, the whole operation looked like a piece of cake.7
But now there appeared to be dissension at the very top of the plotters’ pyramid. Yanaev, the acting Soviet president and formal leader of the plot, was hedging his bets so as to avoid responsibility for the coming assault. If anything went wrong—and many things could go wrong—he would be safe from reproach, a responsible leader who refused to condone violence against his own people. Once the second-tier officials invited to the Emergency Committee meeting were released and the plotters were left alone in the room, Yanaev’s demeanor suddenly changed. He no longer tried to play the liberal. Like everyone else, he voted for Yeltsin’s arrest. The assault on the White House would go forward as planned, but the conduct of the meeting left serious doubts in Yazov’s mind. Were the others trying to use the army to do their dirty work, which would make him a scapegoat? If so, it would not be the first time that the army had been used and then blamed for decisions made by politicians.8
The military thought that had been the case in Vilnius in January 1991. Troops were sent in against protesters and then blamed for the violenc
e once millions of Soviet citizens saw the television footage and Gorbachev ordered a stop to the operation. Gorbachev had then told his aides that Kriuchkov and Yazov were good for nothing. The military brass was enraged. Liberals such as Yazov’s deputy minister and Air Marshal Yevgenii Shaposhnikov were appalled by the very idea of using the army against the civil population. “After Vilnius, after the images seen on television of one of our soldiers beating a civilian with the butt of a machine gun, I understood that a decisive and final end had to be put to that,” he wrote a few years later. Officers never suspected of liberal sympathies, such as the paratroop commander General Pavel Grachev, were appalled by the duplicity of the political leadership. On the evening of August 20, Grachev told Shaposhnikov with regard to the planned attack on the White House, “Let them just hint that I be the one to give the order, and I’ll send them packing.”9
The thinking of the military commanders was very much informed by their earlier experiences of being used against civilians. In Tbilisi in April 1989 and in Vilnius in January 1991, the government had ordered them to crush pro-independence demonstrations but refused to take any responsibility when things went wrong and people were injured or even killed. In both cases, the government had blamed the military. Now the same could happen in Moscow. Besides, the situation in Moscow presented the generals with a new challenge. In the Baltics and the Caucasus, largely Russian and Slavic elite units had been unleashed against non-Russian protesters. In Moscow, they would have to be used against Russians. Under such circumstances, would the troops follow orders? Yeltsin’s supporters not only plied the troops with attention but also overwhelmed them with lectures on the nature of democracy and patriotism. They told the young boys not to shoot at their compatriots.
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