The Last Empire

by Serhii Plokhy

Once the decree was signed, Yeltsin tried to charm his victim. At the end of the meeting the victorious Yeltsin publicly took Gorbachev under his protection, assuring the deputies that the Soviet president was committed to the prosecution of those complicit in the coup. Once the meeting was over, Yeltsin told Gorbachev, “Mikhail Sergeevich! We have been through so much—such events, such turmoil! You had a hard time of it in Foros, and we didn’t know how that putsch of the Extraordinary Committee would turn out, and our family members, and Raisa Maksimovna . . . Let’s have a family get-together. Naina Iosifovna, Raisa Maksimovna . . .”

  Gorbachev looked at Yeltsin in bewilderment, probably not knowing whether to take him seriously. “No, not now,” he told Yeltsin. “We shouldn’t do that.”18

  ON THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY, August 23, George Bush and Brent Scowcroft were watching a televised relay of Gorbachev’s meeting with the Russian deputies and Yeltsin’s humiliation of his rival. “It’s all over,” was Scowcroft’s comment. Gorbachev, he told the president, was “not an independent actor anymore. Yeltsin is telling him what to do. I do not think Gorbachev understands what’s happened.” George Bush agreed: “I am afraid he may have had it.” The banning of the Communist Party was an important milestone in the ideological competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and seasoned cold warriors such as Bush and Scowcroft had every reason to celebrate. But more important for the moment was its significance for Gorbachev’s political survival.19

  Bush had seen it coming. The first signs of the new political situation in Moscow had become apparent on August 21, with the jubilant Yeltsin calling from the Russian White House for the first time since the coup. He sounded like a man completely in charge, as in fact he was. “As we agreed, I’m reporting on the latest events,” began Yeltsin after a brief greeting.

  “Please do,” responded Bush.

  “Russian Prime Minister Silaev and Vice President Rutskoi,” began Yeltsin, “have brought President Gorbachev back to Moscow unharmed and in good health. I am also reporting to you that Defense Minister Yazov, Prime Minister Pavlov, and KGB Chairman Kriuchkov have been taken into custody.” Silaev, who had spent the decisive night of the White House siege at home, returned to his president the next day and was now back at the center of the action. Bush encouraged Yeltsin with occasional remarks indicating his interest. Yeltsin went on: “And, upon my order, with sanction, the prosecuting Attorney General of the Soviet Union has begun a case against all conspirators.”

  A country in which the all-Union attorney general was acting on the orders of the president of Russia was obviously not the old Soviet Union. But for now it was all about celebrating the defeat of the coup. “My friend, your stock is sky-high over here,” said Bush to Yeltsin. “You displayed respect for law and stood for democratic principles. Congratulations. You were the ones on the front line, who stood on the barricades—all we did was support you. You brought Gorbachev back intact. You restored him to power. You have won a lot of friends around the world. We support and congratulate you on your courage and what you’ve done. If you will now accept some advice from a friend—get some rest, get some sleep.”20

  Sleep was the last thing on Yeltsin’s mind. It was 9:20 p.m. EST on August 21 in Kennebunkport and early in the morning of August 22 in Moscow. Yeltsin had just declared the coup defeated and thanked the defenders of the Russian White House. He had a brand-new day ahead of him, one he was eager to use to consolidate his power, no longer in confrontation with the coup leaders but in competition with Gorbachev. The battlefield was not limited to Moscow, Russia, or the Soviet Union. It also included the Western capitals and platforms provided by international organizations. Yeltsin supporters there presented a striking dilemma not only to the Russian and Soviet public but also to Western leaders: either support Yeltsin as a democratically elected politician devoted to radical reform or remain loyal to Gorbachev and bid farewell not only to democracy but also to reform.

  On that day Yeltsin’s young foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, arrived in Strasbourg at the invitation of the Council of Europe. His main message to the European leaders was, “The time has come to separate the sheep from the goats in Soviet politics.” This was a major change from a few days earlier. To begin with, the new message included no gesture to Gorbachev. On the contrary, according to an American diplomatic report, Kozyrev “repeatedly criticized ‘some people’ in positions of authority who are not committed to democratic ideals and lack legitimacy because they have never been elected.” The reference was clearly to Gorbachev, who had been elected president of the USSR by parliament, not by popular vote, as was the case with Yeltsin. Kozyrev was also skeptical that Gorbachev had “the psychological resources to initiate truly radical reforms.” Kozyrev, went the report, “commented that Gorbachev was in the grip of a ‘syndrome of fear.’” Gorbachev would do anything for reform, said Kozyrev, but only within the system. “He is afraid that he and his family would become nobodies—cease to exist—if the system that now supports them collapses.”21

  THE SOVIET PRESIDENT’S DOWNFALL became complete on Saturday, August 24. On the morning of that day, he and Yeltsin attended the funeral of three young men who had died defending the White House on the night of August 20. Gorbachev tried to use the occasion—his first appearance before Muscovites since his return from the Crimea—to express his gratitude to those who had defended democracy. He was also eager to show the all-Union flag, awarding the title of Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously to the three men. The crowd was moved, but Yeltsin, the real hero of resistance to the coup, managed to steal Gorbachev’s thunder. The Russian Federation had no awards of its own, and he had no authority to grant them. Yeltsin simply asked the mothers of the three young men to forgive him for not being able to save their sons. Once again, he won the day.22

  After the funeral, Gorbachev went to the Kremlin to sign a number of decrees. With one of them he dissolved the cabinet and replaced it with a committee chaired by Yeltsin’s prime minister, Ivan Silaev. With another decree, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the party, citing the attitude of its leadership during the coup. He also advised his former party colleagues to dissolve the Central Committee and asked local party organizations to decide their own fate. As president of the USSR, Gorbachev signed a decree placing Communist Party property under the control and protection of local soviets. Gorbachev was no longer prepared to lead a banned party that constituted no threat to him, as he believed it had earlier, and which represented no asset in the political struggle he had begun to wage immediately after the coup. He would devote pages of his memoirs to an attempt to prove that it was the party apparatus that had betrayed him in August 1991, not the other way around.23

  The party apparatchiks were foot soldiers but hardly the driving force behind the coup—by the summer of 1991 they were too demoralized and disorganized to become its true leaders—and the Emergency Committee’s appeal to the people made no mention whatever of the party or its policies and ideals. It was the KGB and military officers who had led the coup. As a group, however, the apparatchiks had stood to benefit most from a successful coup, which was supposed to reverse Yeltsin’s decree banning party cells at state enterprises. At a meeting of the Central Committee secretariat on August 13, 1991, five days before the coup, the party bosses had discussed ways to deal with the decree.

  The coup had seemed the only way to restore the party’s monopoly of political power. But with the coup a failure and Gorbachev resigning from the highest party post, the political force that had ruled the country with an iron fist, and often with a blood-smeared club in its hands, was going down to defeat without bloodshed. Some blood was spilled, to be sure, but it was that of party establishment figures who decided to end their lives rather than stand trial.24

  The first to depart was Boris Pugo, the minister of the interior, whose police formations and troops had been directly involved in the coup. On the morning of August 22, Russian officials reached him on the phone
at home and asked for a meeting. When a four-man group including Gorbachev’s economic adviser Grigorii Yavlinsky showed up at Pugo’s home, an old man with obvious signs of dementia opened the door and let them in. It was Pugo’s father-in-law. One of the visitors saw a pool of blood on the floor. They then entered the bedroom, where the fifty-four-year-old Boris Pugo lay on the bed, killed by a gunshot. Instead of waiting to be arrested, he had committed suicide. Next to him, near the bed, sat his mortally wounded wife. She reacted to questions but could not say anything. Valentina Pugo would die soon in a Moscow hospital. In a suicide note written earlier that morning, Boris Pugo asked forgiveness of the members of his family: “This is all a mistake. I lived honestly all my life.”

  Another supporter of the coup, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, committed suicide in his Kremlin office a few days later. He had been one of the Soviet negotiators of arms reduction treaties with the United States. On August 19, the first day of the coup, the sixty-eight-year-old Akhromeev, then Gorbachev’s adviser on military affairs, interrupted his summer vacation in Sochi to return to Moscow and report to his new boss, the acting president of the USSR, Gennadii Yanaev. He told Yanaev that he shared the Emergency Committee’s agenda and was prepared to help in its realization. Akhromeev was entrusted with the task of collecting and analyzing information on the situation in the regions. Yanaev also asked him to prepare a draft of his address to the Soviet parliament. Akhromeev worked on both tasks with enthusiasm.

  In a letter he wrote to Mikhail Gorbachev before committing suicide, the marshal explained his reasons for supporting the coup: “Beginning in 1990 I was convinced, as I am convinced today, that our country is headed for perdition. Soon it will be dismembered. I looked for a way to say that aloud. . . . I understand that as a marshal of the Soviet Union I have violated my military oath and committed a military crime. . . . Nothing remains for me but to take responsibility for what I have done.” To his suicide note Akhromeev attached a fifty-ruble banknote—money he owed the Kremlin cafeteria for lunches there.25

  Vadim Medvedev, a Gorbachev aide who had known both Pugo and Akhromeev well, later commented on their suicides: “I understand their tragedy: I knew Boris Karlovich [[Pugo]] well as a man of integrity in his own way, devoted to a particular idea, foreign to political intrigue or careerism. Nor do I have any doubt about the honesty of Sergei Fedorovich.” Both Pugo and Akhromeev believed in communist ideals and the indivisibility of the Soviet state. Akhromeev had fought for it in the Second World War. Pugo, the son of a “Latvian sharpshooter”—one of Lenin’s crack troops fanatically devoted to the revolution—had spent a good part of his life at the helm of the Latvian KGB and then of its Communist Party, stamping out nationalist dissent. The coup had given them hope of saving the world that had brought them up and given them career opportunities, high positions, and, last but not least, identity. For people such as Pugo and Akhromeev, its failure meant both personal fiasco and the collapse of their universe. Suicide released them from a world that regarded them not as heroes and saviors but as criminals who had acted against their own people and betrayed their president.26

  On the evening of Sunday, August 25, one day after Gorbachev stepped down as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and signed a decree on the transfer of party property, and the day on which Yeltsin signed his own decree seizing that property, Nikolai Kruchina, the sixty-three-year-old chief of staff of the Central Committee, went to his old office to discuss the property transfer with representatives of the Moscow government. The meeting, which ended soon after 9:00 p.m., did not go well for Kruchina. Normally a friendly individual, he surprised his KGB guard when, on his return from the Central Committee, he did not greet him as usual. Looking depressed and withdrawn, Kruchina went to his fifth-floor apartment in an exclusive building in downtown Moscow. He bade his wife goodnight and told her that he still needed to do some work. Soon after 5:00 a.m. on August 26, Kruchina stepped onto his balcony and jumped to his death.

  Kruchina committed suicide not because he was disillusioned with the ideals of the Communist Party or the actions of its leaders and members but because he felt that he had broken his oath of loyalty to his boss and, judging by what we know today, was afraid of an investigation into the party’s finances. The meeting that put Kruchina into a mood of depression on the evening of August 25 ended on a very worrisome note for him: as the man responsible for party finances, he had signed almost every major document authorizing secret transfers of party funds to business ventures both at home and abroad. When Vasilii Shakhnovsky, the Moscow city official who met with Kruchina that evening, told him, “We’ll need to have a special discussion about party finances,” the party’s chief of staff went pale. He abruptly ended the conversation, promising to return to the subject the next day. For him, that day never came.

  Party finances were the one thing that the chief of the party staff was not prepared to discuss with Russian officials. As later investigations showed, some of the party money had been transferred abroad, according to memos signed by Kruchina, for “good” communist causes, including clandestine support for communist parties and movements all over the world, from the United States to Afghanistan. But most of the transfers went to the new commercial banks and shady enterprises created by party apparatchiks and their business cronies during the last two years of Gorbachev’s rule. Having been maneuvered out of office, the party officials were seeking to convert their political power into financial resources. This strategy offered them a comfortable life outside the party apparatus and saved the country from a prolonged and potentially bloody struggle with the numerous and well-entrenched ruling class, which otherwise would have had everything to lose and nothing to gain from the transition. Still, the process was not bloodless. Kruchina became one of its first victims.27

  8

  INDEPENDENT UKRAINE

  NO ONE COULD TELL HOW MANY PEOPLE there were: thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand. The Ukrainian parliamentary deputies making their way through the crowds to the parliament building were in no position to count. It was the sunny Saturday morning of August 24, the day on which Yeltsin upstaged Gorbachev at the funeral for the defenders of the White House and on which the Soviet leader stepped down as head of the Communist Party. What would happen in Kyiv that day would send a shock wave around the Soviet Union considerably greater than the one set off by that day’s events in Moscow. The second Soviet republic would declare its complete independence from the Union.

  The Kyivan crowds had not gathered in the city’s downtown on August 24 to defend parliament, as had been the case in Moscow a few days earlier, but to condemn the communist parliamentary majority for its covert support of the coup. The previous day Yeltsin had signed a decree banning the Communist Party of Russia in full view not only of the confused Gorbachev but also of millions of excited television viewers all over the Soviet Union. Many of those gathered in Kyiv believed that the same should be done in Ukraine. The leaflets that summoned them called the Communist Party a “criminal and anticonstitutional organization whose activities must be brought to an end.” The people responded. Many brought along blue-and-yellow national flags and placards calling for a Nuremberg-style trial for the Communist Party.1

  The fate of the party was not their only concern; otherwise people would have gathered at the building of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee, only a few blocks from parliament. They did not do so because it was no longer in the party’s power to grant or revoke what they wanted. Carrying placards that read “Ukraine is leaving the USSR,” they demanded independence for their country. Only parliament could deliver that. The crowds, consisting largely of supporters of Ukrainian opposition parties, were in a resolute mood. Only a few weeks earlier, many of those on parliament square had lined the streets of Kyiv to welcome President George Bush to the Ukrainian capital. At that time they had carried placards with the same demand: now, however, they were directed not toward an American visitor who
m they implicitly trusted but toward their own domestic nemesis—the communist apparatchiks, whom they did not trust at all.

  John Stepanchuk, the acting consul general of the United States in Kyiv, who had been directly involved in preparations for Bush’s visit and was now in charge of the consulate there, had difficulty making his way through the crowds at the parliament building that morning. “There were thousands of people surrounding it, angry people,” he remembered later. “Angry at the Communists, angry at everything. They were just gathered there. They thought I was a Communist because I was dressed in a suit. So one woman started pulling my jacket calling ‘hanba,’ ‘shame.’ They thought I was one of the guilty.” The communist majority inside the parliament building suddenly found itself a besieged minority. Stepanchuk, seated in a diplomatic booth, “could see that the Communists were all glued to the window watching these crowds come closer and closer, wondering if they would ever leave the building alive.” The communist members of parliament “were all nervous, and smoking, walking around. This was the atmosphere of tension. It was known, of course, that Kravchuk would make a speech, but no one knew how far he would go.”

  Leonid Kravchuk, the silver-haired Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, who had made a positive impression on President Bush a few weeks earlier and then seemed to be in full control of the institution, was now clearly on the defensive. Not only the Communist Party but also his own behavior during the coup was now being questioned and put on trial. His own fate—the outcome of that day in parliament, outside its walls, and all over the country—would depend on the attitude Kravchuk adopted. With the crowds outside parliament chanting, “Shame on Kravchuk,” the Speaker was fighting for his political life.2

  WHAT HAPPENED IN MOSCOW on August 18, 1991, caught Leonid Kravchuk by surprise. It presented a major challenge to his grip on power in Ukraine and to the movement for Ukrainian sovereignty with which he had closely associated his name and his political fortunes. On the morning of August 19, he learned about the overthrow of Gorbachev from his main political rival, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Stanislav Hurenko, who called Kravchuk at his suburban residence to summon him to Central Committee headquarters. There was to be a meeting with the Emergency Committee’s strongman, the tough-talking General Valentin Varennikov, who had arrived in Kyiv after his encounter with Gorbachev in the Crimea.