That day, August 25, was a family holiday to celebrate the birthday of my twins, who were turning three years old. So I hurried home from work as quickly as possible. It also happened to be the evening when my father was discharged from the Kuntsevo Central Clinic, which served the Kremlin and was where he had been treated for a stomach ulcer.
My father returned home after his solitary hospitalization feeling happy and in a good mood. Like all of Gorbachev’s close associates, he had gone on leave with him at the same time and underwent treatment at Barvikha, an elite sanatorium outside Moscow for high-level government officials. It combined a splendid park, rather comfortable accommodations, and vulgar luxury with good medical treatment.
Soon after his arrival in Barvikha, his sworn enemy, Yegor Ligachev—the former second-ranking member of the CPSU and, consequently, of the USSR, who had been forced to retire—showed up there. At once, as my father put it, “a rather strange swarm” gathered around Ligachev. Official automobiles and well-known people visited him. Father had stopped frequenting the dining hall to avoid running into Ligachev and his visitors. My father had told me this shortly before the coup.
I went to see him on the second day of the coup. Naturally, we started talking at once about what was going on. My father ushered me into the corridor, where we naively tried to avoid being overheard, and told me that in the room adjacent to his he had seen some sort of equipment being brought in. Then a man entered the room whom, long before these events, Vladimir Kriuchkov, the then head of the KGB, had pointed out to my father as “our secret weapon, our Otto Skorzeny.”1
Soon after my trip to Barvikha, my father’s physician took him out into the street, farther away from potential snoopers, and said, “Anatoly Gavrilovich, you’re in danger here. If you have no objections, I’ll immediately write a note saying it’s urgent that you be transferred to a hospital.” The doctor was not concerned about a danger to my father’s health but about a murderer equipped with a deadly apparatus in the neighboring room. The transfer took place.
Then came the holiday. Father and I were political animals, so right after congratulating the twins on their birthday, our conversation turned to the latest events and speculation about the future. I quoted something from our beloved Boris Pasternak, whom we both considered the best Russian poet. At first I thought my father’s reaction was a bad joke. “Why quote Pasternak?” he said with uncharacteristic excitement and a dismissive wave of his hand. “Now Dolmatovsky—there’s a real poet!”2 These words were completely ridiculous. Yevgeny Dolmatovsky was never considered a real poet any more than I was.
When the conversation turned to what was going on, again I was unable to fully grasp my father’s reaction and assessment. I then asked my wife to remove all the alcoholic drinks. In a state of apparent euphoria, of unnaturally heightened excitation, he predicted all the very worst things that would happen to the country and its people. For the first time in his life, he seemed to be disavowing himself and his convictions. I could not believe this was occurring naturally. Father was behaving so strangely that I was forced to tell him I would not return him to the hospital. He would not accept this. How could his son not allow him to regain his health?
“It’s very simple. I’ll call the chief Kremlin doctor, Dmitry Shcherbatkin, and explain the situation to him,” I said.
“That’s impossible! It’s too dangerous! It’ll be the ruin of you.”
“If you don’t want to, don’t go back to the hospital,” I said.
“I can’t do that. I promised I would return.”
After a couple of torturous hours, his speech and the expression in his eyes returned to normal. He finally agreed that he had been “in a strange state,” and soon he said he understood why. It turned out that the attending physician had prescribed some sort of water and brought it to him in an unlabeled bottle stoppered with a twist of paper. The nurse whispered that she didn’t know what it was and that if she were him she wouldn’t drink it. Father had paid no attention to what she said until this evening. He returned to the hospital, and, little by little, so as to give the impression he was drinking it, he began pouring the suspicious liquid down the sink. He sounded all right on the phone and resumed working. An official phone was installed in his room, and papers were brought to him from the ministry. Colleagues came to consult with him or to make decisions. His downward slide was halted.
In early 1992, however, he suffered a stroke. The entire right side of his body was paralyzed, and he was unable to speak. An incomprehensible mumbling was all he could manage. What happened next may strain credulity. The emergency physician dispatched from the Kremlin clinic first looked closely at Father’s medical file, which was begun when he was still in his old post in the USSR rather than in Russia; then the doctor took a cursory look at the patient himself—paralyzed, his face distorted, unable to speak. “Everything is okay; it’s just a matter of age,” the doctor said. The clinic wouldn’t even respond to a second call. This occurred on Saturday morning. He was not hospitalized until Monday. He soon recovered, but right there in the hospital something else happened, and he again lost the use of his right arm and his speech problem recurred.
Was the refusal to hospitalize him and the repeat incident just a matter of chance? There can be no definitive answer to this question. The medical records of the Kremlin clinic are actually classified and, moreover, subject to falsification. Records there were not kept in the generally used thick, bound notebooks but in loose-leaf binders from which pages could be removed at any time and others inserted. The physicians provided no reasonable explanation for this practice.
I was able to guess what happened and how from my knowledge of punitive psychiatry and my acquaintance with many psychiatrists. From my successful battle against the abuse of psychiatry, a psychiatrist I knew gave me a letter from physicians at one of the psychiatric hospitals in Leningrad. It said the following: A secret, shielded bunker had been constructed in this hospital. People randomly taken off the street were placed in it; their heads were shaved, and electrodes with antennas were connected to their brains. Then, under the direction of Academician Natalia Bekhtereva, they were subjected to the action of some sort of apparatus that had been installed in this place but to which none of the physicians in the hospital had access. After the “patients” were no longer needed, the antennas were removed, and they were simply let go in the city, with some of them in a truly lamentable condition.
Naturally, I tried to make sense of this letter. But the information was too dangerous to share even with people I knew and trusted. Therefore, I showed the letter only to my father. Several days later he passed along a request from Shevardnadze to forget about it, since too many powerful forces, including military and space medicine people, were involved. It was impossible to ignore this request from such a fearless and influential figure in our country.
Knowing all this and observing my father’s condition, I realized that he had most likely been subjected to similar inhuman experiments. Obviously, only Kriuchkov, the KGB chief, whose relations with my father had seriously deteriorated, could have given such an order. But on whose initiative, it was difficult to say, since father had too many powerful enemies.
But most revealing is the following. What I have just described happened on August 25, when the coup had apparently failed. Why then did the mechanism set in motion by the plotters, who were already under arrest, continue to function? Was this not evidence that the defeat of the State Emergency Committee was merely window dressing, a diversionary maneuver? Working in the Kremlin, I heard echoes of what was going on in the KGB. I knew how its new head, Vadim Bakatin, was carrying on and how in the Lubyanka they turned pale at his tirades, which carried through his ultra-soundproofed, closed office door. Against this background, the fact that after the coup the KGB-controlled and directed Kremlin clinic continued the course it had initiated prior to the coup appears rather ominous.
In addition, I had long been accumulating que
stions about the Kremlin clinic, including with respect to my father. As soon as his role in top-level decision making sharply increased after Gorbachev’s advent to power and he became one of Gorbachev’s most trusted colleagues, the physicians began dishing out preposterous advice to him. For example, they said, “Anatoly Gavrilovich, you work so hard that you absolutely must get a good rest during the afternoon. After lunch you must have a nap, and to do this take a sleeping pill.” A physician would not proffer such advice. No genuine physician would insist that his patient take two powerful sleeping pills every day (the second at night). Moreover, the Fourth Main Department of the Ministry of Health of the USSR—the Kremlin clinic—as knowledgeable people asserted, was headed by a general from the Ninth Department of the KGB who was personally involved in everything pertaining to the most influential patients and their doctors’ prescriptions. Everyone knew it was simply impossible for my father to take an afternoon nap. After he dined and took his sleeping pill, the phone would ring almost at once, with either Shevardnadze, Yakovlev, more rarely Gorbachev, or some other top-ranking official calling. Yet the physicians insisted, “You must sleep after lunch, especially since you work so late. You have a room to rest in and every opportunity to sleep with the aid of a sleeping pill.”
I never understood why he followed this advice. Perhaps he did so because he was just so fatigued. We regularly quarreled over his abuse of sleeping pills. I was convinced they would damage his brain. But for the time being, Father stubbornly stuck to his guns. Without additional intervention, a collapse such as he experienced could not have occurred under hospital conditions during the several days when we did not see each other.
The facts about psychiatric abuse for nonmedical purposes were widely known. Punitive medicine as such was met with silence, perhaps from a dearth of information. But it was indubitably a reality in Russia, where there were too many mysterious deaths, heart attacks, and strokes.
Unfortunately, there can be no answer to the question of why my father “deserved the honor” of being an object of special operations. All one can say fairly confidently is that they did not want to kill him. It would have been extremely easy to do so, but they simply wanted to take him out of action and to do so in a way that would compromise whatever he was doing.
Professional hitmen do not eliminate people without reason, not even simply for revenge. They always act pragmatically, pursuing one or another concrete objective. Not infrequently it is to eliminate inconvenient witnesses who possess dangerous information that could interfere with their plans. Could that be why from the beginning, Anatoly Kovalev did not believe the coup had failed? Judging from the subsequent course of events, perhaps he was right.
To answer the question of what exactly happened in Russia in August 1991, we must make a clear distinction between what lay on the surface and what was carefully concealed behind “seven seals.” On the surface, the outcome of the coup was the defeat of the party-nomenklatura reactionaries, the victory of democracy in the USSR, and the collapse of the Soviet empire. Most likely this is an overly simplified approach. I think that much of what has been occurring in post-Soviet Russia, including the advent to power of the special services, is largely an echo of those events.
It seems as if the coup set in motion a revolutionary course of events. But in what was essentially a ludicrous parody of the taking of the Bastille, the plotters’ seizure of a block of buildings of the Central Committee of the CPSU changed nothing. The CPSU was already then in its death throes, shorn of its power, and without any discernible support in society.
The desire to destroy and overthrow had gained the upper hand. Such actions as pulling down monuments, renaming streets, and completely negating the past had already occurred in 1917 and later. After the August 1991 coup, Russia once again overflowed with hatred. There is something almost mystical about the repetition of events in its history. Russia was increasingly overwhelmed by slogan mongering. The words freedom and democracy were sometimes used appropriately and sometimes not. A struggle to redistribute power and reapportion the perquisites that accompanied it got under way. Everyone claimed to be a democrat.
The people as a whole were sidelined from deciding the future of the country. To appease them, they were given, in confused verbiage, declarations of sovereignty that, most importantly, had been formulated in different circumstances. Boris Yeltsin gathered all power into his own hands by issuing one decree after another. A creeping coup d’état was in progress. All the extremist forces present in what was then still Soviet society converged to overthrow the president of the USSR.
Staraya Square, where, by an irony of fate, the Yeltsin government had installed itself in the headquarters of the Central Committee of the CPSU, again began to determine Russia’s fate. The leader of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk took advantage of his premature support of the coup and skillfully played on Ukrainian nationalism. The other republics, including Russia, fanned the flames of their own nationalism, forgetting that all of them were multiethnic in nature. Personal hatred of Gorbachev, who was blamed for every ill, became the main motivating force of postcoup events. A redistribution of power commenced, with the fifteen republics receiving the lion’s share. All of this, however, explains neither the August events nor what followed. If one tries to probe more deeply, one is driven to the conclusion that the real objectives of the coup are best explained by its aftermath.
The first outcome of the coup, in chronological order, was the banning of the CPSU in August 1991. I would not want to exaggerate the significance of this action. Communist ideology had collapsed by then. Moreover, the Communist Party itself soon revived and was operating in an altered guise. Two other elements deserve greater attention: (1) It was then that President Gorbachev began to lose power, and (2) the opportunity to ascertain reliably the fate of the party’s financial assets vanished.
The second outcome was the decision to dissolve the Congress of People’s Deputies, which was the only legitimately elected nationwide organ of power at the time. This was done spontaneously without preparation or prior consideration of its consequences. I am positive about this because on the eve of the congress I was burning the midnight oil, preparing for it, and not only many drafts and proposals regarding it passed through my hands but also documents already approved by Gorbachev, including the text of his speech and the draft resolutions of the congress. I left the Kremlin after Gorbachev, so that most likely it was someone who had the prepared drafts of all the documents in his possession who convinced Gorbachev even later to take this mistaken decision to abolish the Congress of People’s Deputies. (Colleagues told me it was Nursultan Nazarbaev, first secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party.) However, Gorbachev himself was psychologically prepared to make such a decision. He was afraid of the congress. I don’t know how Gorbachev could deprive both the country and himself of this, the only legal, nationally elected support.
The third outcome was President Gorbachev’s departure from power and the end of liberal reforms, thus achieving one of the main goals of the coup. Here it should be noted that at the time of the coup, neither the reactionaries nor those who called themselves democrats accepted Gorbachev. Reactionary elements in the KGB and the CPSU, as well as Yeltsin, especially hated him.
Yeltsin’s tendency to be easily manipulated is well known. Wasn’t this why he remained untouched during the August coup and why, after it ended, the leadership of Russia was immediately penetrated by agents of the special services?
The fourth outcome was the breakup of the USSR, which may not have been among the aims of the plotters. Yet it served the interests, including the material interests, of very many of them. I should note that, objectively speaking, the Soviet empire was ungovernable for several reasons. Among them were the accumulated mistakes committed by leaders over decades, the sheer size of the empire, and its interethnic, economic, and other problems. Therefore, its breakup was unavoidable. It is also possible that this was an entirely anticipated result of the
coup.
The fifth outcome was the introduction of “economic freedoms” in Russia and the redistribution of property that ultimately led to the emergence of the so-called oligarchs and the massive, almost criminal impoverishment of the people. Most of what was previously “public property” likely wound up in the hands of entities that belonged to the CPSU and the KGB. I say more about this later.
Finally, the sixth outcome was what initially appeared to be the weakening of a disbanded KGB, on the basis of which intelligence, counterintelligence, government courier, guard, and border patrol services were created. In reality, the exact opposite occurred. What happened was the special services were elevated to an unprecedented degree in world history as the monster replicated itself. The special services—whose personnel began to seize key positions in politics, the economy, the mass media, and other spheres of public life—achieved genuine, all-around power after the collapse of the USSR.
The special services did not undergo some sort of diabolical transformation. Simply their members had incomparably more opportunities to take advantage of the unfolding situation. The KGB was doing its usual work of recruiting and inserting agents everywhere it could, including in Yeltsin’s retinue, in parliament, in leading positions in government institutions, among the reformers and entrepreneurs, and in the mass media. Moreover, the KGB was changing. On the one hand, it began to merge with the power structure, and on the other hand, it allied with business and organized crime. Virtually omnipotent and controlled by nobody, the special services had unparalleled opportunities for unlimited expansion of their influence.
We should pay close attention to the following information from Yury Shchekochikhin, an investigative journalist and parliamentary deputy who died suddenly in 2003 under circumstances suggesting he was poisoned to shut him up. He did not identify his source due to security considerations. According to his information, in 1989–91, groups—namely, the “Patriots of State Security” (also called Patriots SS)—began to form spontaneously and were organized as secret associations resembling clandestine militarized units. Basically, the Patriots SS comprised former and current operatives of the special and militarized services of Russia and the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States who considered themselves the true patriots and servants of the state. The organizational formation and descent deep underground of these basic Patriots SS units were completed after the 1991 coup in which many such “patriots” took part. The chaos then reigning in the security system facilitated their development into influential organizations with strict discipline and a tight structure that was adapted to undertake effective underground activity over many years.3 The list of persons with whom Shchekochikhin’s source was acquainted from working in the clandestine structure of the KGB and other “patriotic” organizations, and whom he knew from their line of activity, is extremely interesting. It includes the future president of Russia Vladimir Putin, the well-known journalist Evgeny Kiselev, future oligarchs Vladimir Potanin and Alexander Lebedev, and many other prominent political figures and political operatives. If one accepts the accuracy of this information, the picture is terrifying. An unknown secret organization, even coming from what is undoubtedly an incomplete list, seized the commanding heights in the political sphere, the economy, the media, the banking system, and the criminal world.
Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin Page 13