The Last Empire

by Serhii Plokhy

  Raisa Gorbacheva was visibly shaken by the experience of the previous days. Exhausted by sleepless nights, she had suffered a stroke and lost partial control of one of her arms. Although the family appeared calm after the messengers from Moscow left the villa on August 18, pressure had begun to mount the next morning once the plotters announced that Gorbachev was ill. It became almost unbearable after the Gorbachevs watched the Emergency Committee’s press conference on the evening of August 19. If others had reacted with guarded optimism, thinking that such people were incapable of holding power for very long, the Gorbachev family had become even more anxious. The reporters’ persistent questions about Gorbachev’s health and Yanaev’s repeated assurances that what he most wanted was to have his boss return to Moscow triggered suspicions that the plotters would try to change the reality to match their statements—in other words, to make Gorbachev sick. That night Gorbachev taped an address to the country, condemning the coup and exposing the plotters’ lies about his health. The four small tape cassettes had to be smuggled out of the heavily guarded compound—not an easy task by any measure. And now, after three days full of concern and anxiety, came the news that a delegation was arriving to see for itself what had happened to Gorbachev.

  This time Gorbachev learned of his former aides’ imminent visit before they entered the premises. Raisa noted in her diary that her daughter and son-in-law had heard a BBC broadcast claiming that Kriuchkov had agreed to let a delegation fly to the Crimea to check on Gorbachev’s health. This was worrisome news. “We consider this a sign that the worst is to come,” wrote Raisa in her diary. “Within the next few hours actions may be carried out to translate the infamous lie into reality. Mikhail Sergeevich had ordered the guards to block the drives leading up to the house as well as its entrance and not let anyone in without his permission; to be ready for action and to use force if necessary.” All hope now rested in the remaining members of the security detail. The day after the plotters had paid their unexpected visit to Gorbachev, the guards had promised to stand by their commander in chief to the end. They were now intent on showing how serious they were about defending the president whom they had failed to protect when he was first threatened.

  The guards’ decisive actions had the desired effect on the visitors: Plekhanov held back his men, telling them that the guards were indeed prepared to shoot. The plotters then told the guards that they wanted to see the president and peacefully retired to the guesthouse, waiting for a summons from him. Gorbachev’s loyal aide Anatolii Cherniaev, informed about the plotters’ arrival by his secretaries, rushed to tell Gorbachev not to receive the visitors. Gorbachev assured him he would not: “I . . . gave them an ultimatum: if they do not turn on the communications, I will not talk to them. And now I will not do so anyway.” When the plotters restored the communications system, Kriuchkov was first on the line. Gorbachev refused to talk to his former aide. He got in touch with the chief of the General Staff, General Mikahil Moiseev, and ordered him to ensure that the plane carrying the Russian Federation’s delegation landed safely in the Crimea—the plotters were making preparations to ambush it on landing. The commander of the Kremlin garrison was informed that he could take orders from no one but Gorbachev. The minister of communications was ordered to cut the plotters’ lines. The president was again in charge.

  After the plotters gave in to Gorbachev’s demand and restored his communications, his main goal, apart from regaining control over the military and security forces, was to assess the new political situation and decide on a further course of action. Gorbachev’s aide Vadim Medvedev, who reached him by phone from Moscow late in the afternoon of that day, later remembered, “The president said that he had already made a number of calls to Moscow and to several republics and that he would now be speaking to Yeltsin.” By the afternoon of August 21, Gorbachev had fully reemerged as a powerful force in Soviet politics. Not only the plotters but also the Yeltsin democrats felt that they needed him and his political clout. Gorbachev was now prepared to pick winners and losers. Theoretically, he could try to make a deal with the plotters, as they hoped he would do. Instead, Gorbachev threw his weight behind Yeltsin.22

  Then, most unexpectedly, came a call from Washington. On Brent Scowcroft’s orders, the US military had tried over and over to reach Gorbachev, and finally they succeeded. Once Gorbachev was on the line, they rushed to find George Bush. “There is a God!” said the chief communist of the Soviet Union to the American interpreter Peter Afanasenko. “I have been here four days in a fortress.”

  Bush also referred to the Almighty when he heard Gorbachev’s voice: “Oh my God, that’s wonderful, Mikhail.”

  “I have to congratulate you and the position you took from the first minute. You have been stalwart,” Gorbachev told Bush generously (or, rather, on the basis of insufficient evidence, given Bush’s statements immediately after hearing of the coup). “Thanks for taking [[time]] off from your vacation. You affected everyone with your strong statements, except Gaddafi”—the eccentric Libyan dictator had not been reticent about expressing his support for the coup.

  Barbara Bush soon joined her husband. “Barbara is here and sends her love to Raisa,” announced Bush.

  Gorbachev was moved: “George, thank you and Barb both for your position of principle, but also for your humanity and friendship.” Cherniaev, who was present during the Bush-Gorbachev conversation, later remembered that “it was a joyful exchange.”

  Gorbachev told Bush, “We want to keep going ahead with you. We will not falter because of what has happened. One thing is that this was prevented by democracy. This is a guarantee for us.”

  Bush was pleased. “I’ll get that message out to the whole world now,” declared the jubilant American president.

  Less than an hour after Gorbachev got off the phone, George Bush was already talking to the press. He told the correspondents crammed into a small room of his house at Kennebunkport that he had spoken with the Soviet president, who was in good physical condition, was back in charge, and had “stated his sincere appreciation to the people of the United States and others around the world for their support for democracy and reform.” In closing, he said, “All in all, it’s a very, very positive development.” The president had much to celebrate: his carefully calculated strategy of supporting the nascent Russian democracy without immediately burning his bridges with the plotters had worked exceptionally well.23

  The Russian delegation, led by Vice President Rutskoi, arrived at Foros after 8:00 p.m. Raisa Gorbacheva, who saw people with assault rifles accompanying Rutskoi, asked whether they had come to arrest the Gorbachevs. No, Rutskoi assured her, they had come as liberators. Unlike the plotters, whom Gorbachev had left waiting for hours, Rutskoi was received right away. Gorbachev’s aide Anatolii Cherniaev noted in his diary that the meeting between Gorbachev and the “Russians” would be engraved in his memory for the rest of his life: “I look at them. Among them are those who repeatedly swore at M.S., argued with him, got angry, and protested in parliament and in the press. But now misfortune has suddenly brought it about that they are at one, and vital to the country in just that way. I even said aloud, observing that general celebration and embracing: ‘The union of the Center and Russia has taken place without any union treaty.’” The warm reception dispelled any doubts the Russians may have had about Gorbachev’s attitude. Until the very end, Yeltsin and those around him did not know for sure whether Gorbachev was behind the plotters or not. People on the streets of Moscow were surprised when Gorbachev’s translator, Pavel Palazhchenko, told them that the president had indeed been isolated by the plotters. But one look at the devastated Raisa Gorbacheva sufficed for Rutskoi to conclude that this was no political game: the isolation had been real.24

  Gorbachev left for Moscow with Rutskoi and his delegation on the Russian plane. Rutskoi had convinced him that it was much safer than the Soviet presidential plane, which the plotters might try to shoot down. The latter plane was the one on which mos
t of the plotters flew back to Moscow. Yazov cursed the moment he had agreed to join the committee and called himself an old fool. He was resigned to his fate and received the news of his arrest with calm and dignity. Kriuchkov’s hopes initially rose when he was asked to fly on the same plane as Gorbachev and the “Russians.” But he was searched before boarding, and no one but the guard would speak to him during the flight—he was used as a human shield to prevent an attack on the plane that many believed he might have arranged ahead of time. On landing, Kriuchkov was surprised to be arrested by Russian and not all-Union authorities. Upon arrival in his temporary prison, a guarded building in one of the resort compounds near Moscow, Kriuchkov asked for whiskey but received none. Times were changing.25

  III.

  A COUNTERCOUP

  7

  THE RESURGENCE OF RUSSIA

  THE REPORTERS AND OFFICIALS WHO GATHERED at Vnukovo airport near Moscow in the early hours of August 22 to welcome the president on his return from Crimean detention saw a tired but upbeat Gorbachev descend the steps of the plane. The guards kept their Kalashnikov machine guns at the ready—a reminder of the severity of the ordeal that the president and his family had just endured and a sign that the danger might not yet be over.

  Gorbachev was followed by Raisa and other family members, including their granddaughters Kseniia and Anastasiia. Raisa looked shaken and depressed. She still lacked the full use of one hand and would be hospitalized two days later. Gorbachev’s thirty-four-year-old daughter Irina, a medical doctor by training, who had been calm and composed throughout the ordeal, burst into tears on finding herself in the safety of the presidential limousine. Only the two granddaughters seemed oblivious to what was going on around them. Gorbachev later remembered that the younger one, Anastasiia, had been least affected during the first days of the coup: “She understood nothing, ran around, and demanded to be taken to the beach.” On the flight back to Moscow, the girls slept peacefully on the cabin floor.1

  While Gorbachev’s family sat waiting in the presidential limousine, the president addressed the media. He spoke mostly about the Crimean captivity and promised to say more about it in the days to come. But he also gave an assessment of the new political situation and the tasks awaiting him. “The main thing,” said Gorbachev before the television cameras, “is that all we have done since 1985 has already produced real results. Our society and people have become different, and that was the main obstacle in the way of the escapade undertaken by a group of individuals. . . . And this is the greatest victory of perestroika.” He thanked Boris Yeltsin personally for his stand during the coup and expressed special appreciation to the Rossiiane—the citizens of the Russian Federation—for their attitude. Looking to the future, Gorbachev stressed the need for continuing cooperation between the center and the republics in order to overcome the current political and economic crisis. He did not call for the immediate signing of the union treaty, which had triggered the coup and been derailed by it. He spoke instead about the need for “understanding.”2

  “We are flying to a new country,” Gorbachev had said to his aides on board the Russian plane taking him to Moscow. He probably did not realize how right he was. Thousands of Muscovites who awaited Gorbachev near the Russian White House for a good part of the night of August 22 did not get to see him. Either he was not informed about their presence or he was too exhausted to address them after his seventy-two-hour ordeal. At about 4:00 a.m. the Russian vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, told the jubilant crowd that Gorbachev was free and that the arrests of the plotters had begun. For one reason or another, on that night Gorbachev, who by refusing to back the plotters had provided justification for those resisting the coup, failed to address the people who had made his return possible.3

  There were many things in the postcoup situation that Gorbachev apparently failed to grasp or fully appreciate. One of them was the dramatically increased power of the street in Soviet politics. The masses that had occupied the streets and squares of Moscow during and immediately after the failed coup had become a force in their own right. They were also a potent weapon in the hands of Boris Yeltsin and his allies, who could speak to the masses, direct their actions, and make use of their support in political battles at the top. Gorbachev could not. The activism of the masses was indeed a product of his policies of perestroika and glasnost, but it was not his ideals that Muscovites had defended at the approaches to the Russian parliament during the days and nights of the coup. People did not want to “restructure” an old way of life; they wanted to build a new one.

  In the next few days Gorbachev would miss his chance to become a new kind of politician and would lose the all-important first round in his contest with Boris Yeltsin, the ever more powerful new master of Russia. This loss would have a profound impact on the future of the Soviet Union.

  IN HIS MEMOIRS, Gorbachev skips August 22, which one of his key advisers at the time, Vadim Medvedev, later considered a day of lost opportunities. On the first morning after his return from Crimean captivity, Gorbachev took some badly needed rest. At noon he drove to the Kremlin, where he summoned his closest advisers. The main question on the agenda was that of cadres. The president got busy removing plotters and their supporters from governmental posts and replacing them with people whom he believed he could trust. The appropriate presidential decrees were drafted by aides in Gorbachev’s presence, typed up, and immediately signed by him. The first priority was replacement of the head of the KGB and the ministers of interior and defense—there Gorbachev could not procrastinate. These were the pillars of presidential power at a time of crisis, and in the aftermath of the coup, Gorbachev needed those pillars more than ever.4

  Eager to fill vacant cabinet posts as soon as possible, Gorbachev promoted deputies of former ministers who he believed were not implicated in the coup. As acting minister of defense he appointed General Mikhail Moiseev, who had made a strong impression on President Bush and his advisers during his visit to Washington in the spring of 1991. Bush twice asked Yeltsin during their telephone conversations at the time of the coup whether Moiseev had “behaved” or not. Yeltsin said that he had not; Gorbachev thought otherwise. The position at the helm of the KGB was entrusted to Leonid Shebarshin, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence and a specialist on the Middle East, who had spent the first day of the coup playing tennis, thereby sending a signal that his office had nothing to do with the plot masterminded and administered by his colleagues. The minister of the interior, Boris Pugo, who had committed suicide earlier that day, was replaced by his deputy. What now seemed paramount was not the closeness of Gorbachev’s new appointees to the coup leaders, who were no longer a threat, but their distance from Yeltsin, who was reemerging as Gorbachev’s main rival for power.5

  The new ministerial appointments produced the first major crisis in Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s postcoup relations. While Gorbachev was drafting and signing new decrees, Yeltsin was rallying the masses. At noon he addressed a crowd of thousands of “victors” in Moscow, declaring the red, blue, and white Russian imperial tricolor the official flag of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, later recalled the reaction of his boss once he learned about Gorbachev’s prompt appointment of new ministers: “Naturally, such audacious independence exasperated Yeltsin. He decided to redo everything in his own way.” The Russian president now considered himself, not Gorbachev, the master of the situation.

  The ministers responsible for the military, police, and secret services could decide the political future not only of the country but also of Yeltsin himself. For these positions the Russian president wanted people who were either loyal to him or at least not fully dependent on and indebted to Gorbachev. Yeltsin’s main weapon in his counteroffensive against the weakened Gorbachev was information on the behavior of senior government officials during the coup that Gorbachev lacked. When the Russian president learned from television reports about the appointment of new chiefs of the security agencies, he
immediately called Gorbachev: “Mikhail Sergeevich, what are you doing? Moiseev was one of the organizers of the coup, and Shebarshin is a man close to Kriuchkov, the chief coordinator of the coup.” Gorbachev tried to maneuver his way out of the difficult situation. “Yes, it’s possible I’ve gone off track, but now it’s too late. All the newspapers have published the decree; it’s been read over television.” Yeltsin was not prepared to back down. He told Gorbachev that he would come to see him in his office the next day.6

  Canceling Gorbachev’s decree was part of Yeltsin’s game plan. Getting the Soviet president’s approval of his own decree enhancing the economic autonomy, if not outright independence, of the Russian Federation in the Union was the other part. Gorbachev annulled the plotters’ decrees but recognized the validity of Yeltsin’s decrees signed under the extraordinary conditions of the coup. Now Yeltsin claimed that on August 20 he had signed a decree on Russia’s economic sovereignty. According to that decree, as of January 1, 1992, all enterprises on Russian territory would be transferred to the jurisdiction and operational control of the Russian Federation. The Russian president also decreed measures to create a Russian customs service, form Russian gold reserves, and subject the exploitation of natural resources to licensing and taxation by Russian authorities. It was a ploy designed to make Gorbachev approve a decree that he would not otherwise have countenanced, as it undermined the economic foundations of the Union. The decree could not have been and was not signed on August 20. It bore no sign of having been drafted while the president awaited the storming of his premises.