Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

by Ed Strosser

  Oliver North parlayed his supporting role in Grenada into a starring role in the Iran/Contra scandal three years later, where he became famous for having the snappiest salute in the military. He later ran an unsuccessful Senate campaign, then became a writer and media commentator. He still hates Communists wherever he can find them.

  Fawn Hall became the most famous secretary in the United States by loyally shredding documents for Ollie North and telling the world about it. After getting fired she married music manager Danny Sugerman, and the couple shared a heroin addiction. The two eventually kicked their problem and stayed married until Sugarman’s 2005 death. Bernard Coard, who got the entire party started, was tried for the coup and killing Bishop, and was sentenced to death in 1986. That sentence was later reduced to life in prison, where he is to this day, still on the little island he ruled for a week. Even that has not gone smoothly: the prison was de­stroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, forcing Coard to live in a small prison annex.

  SIXTEEN.

  THE SOVIET COUP AGAINST GORBACHEV: 1991

  Few people ever face the question of how to respond when the life you have created is dying right before your eyes. Do you strike out ruthlessly at the cause of the demise? Do you accept fate and make the necessary adjustments for the impend­ing death of the only world you have ever known? Or do you just sit back and have a couple drinks while it all falls apart, trapped because you know it is useless to resist, like struggling to escape quicksand, but with the full knowledge that no man knowingly becomes the agent of his own destruction.

  The men who led the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 were faced with this decision. They were the cream of the mediocrities running the Soviet otherworld: leaders of the army, the internal security forces, the government, and the big­gest industries in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s reforms, perestroika and glasnost, were tearing apart their world. How would they respond? What about a coup? It failed spectacu­larly, despite the fact that these men controlled much of the empire; their entire careers had been dedicated to pulling the switches on the greatest command-and-control system ever devised. The system died on their watch, and their collective failure became a symbol of the fate of the Soviet Union.

  THE PLAYERS

  Mikhail Gorbachev — General secretary of the Communist Party, he tried to reform the USSR’s floundering political and economic life but accidentally reformed it out of existence.

  Skinny — Appearing in public with his wife established him as new breed of open-minded Soviet leader.

  Props — Received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for not invading his own empire as it tore itself apart.

  Pros — Believed fervently in Communism.

  Cons — Believed fervently in Communism.

  Boris Yeltsin — Мember of Congress of People’s Deputies, president of Russia, inveterate drunk, and expert complainer. Started his rise to power in the Communist Party when Gorbachev noticed how successfully he had demolished the house where the tsars were executed.

  Skinny — Believed Russia could fail spectacularly on its own without being yoked to the Soviet Union.

  Props — Stood alone atop a tank to defend the nonexistent Russian democracy.

  Pros — Ended the Soviet Union.

  Cons — Forgot to replace the Soviet Union with something else.

  The Coupsters — Тhe cream of the mediocrities manning the repressive organs of the Soviet Empire.

  Gennadi Yanayev — Drunken vice president of the USSR and fat tick living off the Soviet society, he took the lead as figurehead of the coup.

  Vladimir Kryuchkov — Head of KBG, many believed he was the prime mover behind the coup.

  Boris Pugo — Minister of the interior, he headed the dreaded black bereted OMON troops.

  Valeri Boldin — Gorby’s chief of staff and his chief turncoat.

  Valentin Pavlov — Heavy-drinking prime minister.

  Marshal Dmitri Yazov — Defense minister, who while nominally in charge of the most powerful force in the country, saw his troops flout his direct orders.

  THE GENERAL SITUATION

  When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the post of Communist Party general secretary in March 1985, no one had any in­kling of the revolution brewing inside him. For all anyone knew he was just another faceless bureaucrat, with a wine-colored stain on his forehead, who had clawed his way to the top of the Soviet political food chain. No one expected anything different from Gorbachev than what had been dished out by the previous Soviet leaders all the way back to Lenin: brutal housecleaning of the previous tenants, bully­ing of neighboring states, obtuse and indecipherable pro­nouncements on ways to “reform” or “improve” the massive seventy-year-long train-wreck of the Soviet “com­mand economy,” reshuffling of the blizzard of acronyms in the horrifyingly obscure bureaucracy, and, as always, the same bad suits and uninspired neckties. No one expected a genuine attempt at revolution from within, in a state that had supposedly institutionalized revolution and yet seemed to be collapsing in on itself from inertia and vodka.

  But that is what Gorbachev, known sweetly as “Gorby” to the Western press, did upon gaining the reins of leadership. “Glasnost” and “perestroika” — openness and restructur­ing — were his keywords. Gorby’s idea was to reinvigorate the gigantic barter-based economy by allowing Soviet citizens to learn some of the brutal truth about the criminal history of their country and to actually think, write, and speak about it. Despite the huge distraction of allowing the public to dis­cuss the Gulags and the endless series of crimes committed by the Soviet regimes, Gorby still childishly believed that the gigantic felonious enterprise that was Soviet society was ca­pable of fixing itself.

  After gaining control, Gorby quickly proved that even though he was a skilled political climber, he had a tin ear for running a huge, totalitarian government. His first proposal targeted alcohol reform. Needless to say, in a country where the daily consumption of vodka is vast and as common an experience for the average citizen as standing in line with muddy boots, this was perhaps his most truly radical step. And clearly doomed. The program included new laws for prosecution of people drunk at work, raising vodka prices, and cutting movie scenes of alcoholic consumption. His pro­gram succeeded in gashing a hole in the federal budget (as production switched to the black market) and in retrospect was Gorby’s first inadvertent step toward the complete dis­solution of the Soviet Union. Drinking less did not appar­ently appeal greatly to Soviet citizens, as the regular overconsumption of alcohol seems to have played a key part to staying inured to a bleak daily life.

  Gorby also had big ideas for the economy. His career had started when he helped his father harvest a record crop after World War II on a collective farm near his home in Stav­ropol, a sleepy farming region on the Caspian Sea. This ac­complishment, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor — a meaningless trinket highly valued by the chaff in the great command economy — apparently imbued him with a lifelong conviction that Soviet socialism could actually work. He held on to this view despite the per­secution of his grandparents, who were labeled bourgeois farmers during Stalin’s forced collectivization of farms.

  Gorby’s economic plans were novel in Soviet history be­cause they didn’t involve blaming, killing, or relocating large segments of the population for no apparent reason. Harkening back to that successful harvest in 1947, Gorby felt that the time was ripe to allow some measure of freedom for small business operations, know as “collectives.” These en­compassed such basic things as restaurants, which for the past seventy years the party had considered impossible to serve someone food outside the home without it being sub­jected to party control.

  In April 1986 the #4 Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, and Gorby was faced with his first major crisis. At first, the Soviet system responded in reflexive fashion by refusing to respond. After three days, however, workers at a Swedish nuclear plant found their work clothes covered in radioactive particles while duly noting that
their nuclear plant had not exploded. A worldwide search for an exploded nuclear reac­tor quickly led to the Soviet Union, and Gorby finally con­firmed eighteen days later, on television, that there had in fact been a massive technical malfunction in Chernobyl. This response, although extraordinarily belated, was at its most basic an honest one. It was a watershed moment for the regime.

  Establishing a pattern of taking small, achievable steps toward fantastically impossible goals, in 1986 Gorby al­lowed Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet intellectual hero and father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, to return after six years of internal exile. This tiny step was the first tacit acknowl­edgment of the seventy years of murder, terror, and other errors of the regime.

  In 1987 Gorby proposed multicandidate elections and permitted the appointment of nonparty members to govern­ment posts. He also passed laws giving cooperative enter­prises more independence, although curiously no provisions were made to provide a functioning political, legal, financial, or economic framework to support the cooperatives.

  Gorby was inadvertently given a boost later in 1987 when a young West German named Mathias Rust landed a small plane just outside the Kremlin in Red Square. This embar­rassment presented Gorby the opportunity to clean house at the defense ministry. Gorby’s new appointment, Dmitri Yazov, a World War II veteran, seemed perfect for the dismantling of the massive and inept Soviet army. Yazov later thanked Gorby by joining the coupsters.

  Gorby had succeeded in opening a window to clean out the musty smell of Soviet history, but he now found himself subjected to an unending beat of criticism on the slow pace of reform, which came from the growing legion of citizens unsatisfied by their newfangled opportunity to complain in public without being hauled off to a Gulag. Gorby thought they would be thankful and it would spur them on to further reforms. It didn’t quite work out that way.

  Chief among these critics was Boris Yeltsin, the party leader of Sverdlovsk, an industrial area in the Urals Moun­tains, and one of Gorby’s first political appointments to bite the hand that fed him. Yeltsin was different in that his be­trayal began almost immediately, was pronounced publicly, and seemed to have been arrived at through the use of some sort of common sense. Yeltsin, despite an incautious, probing intelligence that had prodded him to disassemble a hand gre­nade as a youth, costing him two fingers, had risen steadily through the party.

  Undaunted by the fact that his father had been tossed in a Gulag with a few million others by the Communists, Yeltsin had joined the party after obtaining his college degree in con­struction and rose through the ranks in Sverdlovsk to become party boss of the region. His practical achievements, such as demolishing the house where the tsar and his family had been killed by the founders of the party in 1917, were so im­pressive they brought him to Gorby’s attention. Yeltsin was appointed an alternative Politburo member (the real seat of power in the Soviet Union) and the head of the Moscow party apparatchik apparatus in late 1985.

  Yeltsin, who perhaps significantly was never given a cute nickname by the Western press, proved to be a master of showboating to a public impatient of the slow pace of reforms. This blatant politicking by Yeltsin annoyed Gorby so much that he found himself reverting to Communistic dou­blespeak and criticized Yeltsin for “political immaturity.” Gorby, establishing a pattern, neglected to toss him into the Gulag and soon found himself in the battle that was to define his career.

  Yeltsin’s criticisms of the glacial pace of reform continued, and by 1987 he so irritated Gorby that the leader stripped Yeltsin of his party job of running Moscow. Yeltsin, however, was handed a get-out-of-jail-free card by Gorby in 1989, when elections for the first and last Congress of People’s Deputies took place. These elections were revolutionary be­cause they were competitive, people actually voted, and few if any candidates received more than 100 percent of the vote. Handily brushing aside a smear campaign intended to wound Yeltsin for being a fall-down drunk, it perhaps backfired and helped his cause. He won a seat to the Congress and was back in the game.

  Despite the microscopic advances in democracy permitted by the party, to Gorby’s annoyance the republics of the USSR that had been under forcible Soviet rule for decades were still unhappy and continued to press for their independence. In Tbilisi, Georgia, in April 1989, anti-Soviet demonstrations were put down by the Soviet army, resulting in twenty deaths and thousands of injured. The Soviet put-down troops were led by Gen. Alexander Lebed, a tough-as-nails commander who had made his bones putting down disturbances in the Crimea and who distinguished himself by claiming he was one of the few Russians who didn’t drink. He was to play a key role in Gorby’s coup.

  In 1989 the Soviets also finally gave up trying to turn the people of Afghanistan into good Soviet citizens. They de­clared defeat and drove home. East Germany, also restive and sensing the winds of change in the air, allowed the Berlin Wall to be torn down in November 1989, which quickly led in turn to Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania abandon­ing the Soviet’s camp. The people of Eastern Europe had clearly lost all fear of the vaunted Red Army.

  Gorby tried to play catch-up as the countries of the USSR began to willy-nilly declare independence, and he opened up the government to a multiparty system in February 1990. The Lithuanians, whose country had been annexed by the Soviets in the secret protocols to the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact during World War II, declared that November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, would no longer be a national holiday. This was tantamount to giving the middle finger to the Soviet leaders, and Gorby now found his sense of propriety insulted. On January 12, 1991, the So­viets responded by attacking the Vilnius TV tower, led by black-bereted special troops with the James Bond–like name of OMON from their Interior Ministry. Thirteen Lithuanians died. Dmitri Yazov, the Soviet minister of defense and a coupster-in-training, accused the Lithuanians of provoking the army and on his own initiative attacked them. Gorby did nothing to punish Yazov. In March the Lithuanians pro­claimed their independence. What had started as an attempt by Gorby to reform the Soviet Union had turned into the dis­integration of the empire.

  Gorby continued to work on his fantastical plan to rear­range the economy, called the “500-Day Plan,” a command-economy answer to creating capitalism. It contained such gems of fantasy central planning as gutting the military-in­dustrial complex, which happened to be the backbone of the economy and the last refuge of the hard-liners. On October 15, 1990, Gorby received the Nobel Peace Prize. With his plan certain to push the hard-liners over the edge, Gorby made the only move that would keep him in power: he with­drew his support for the obtuse plan. Walking a tight line between true reformers like Yeltsin and the hard-line party men, Gorbachev had little wiggle room. These men were the princes of the Soviet otherworld, marching on inexorably, eyes fixed on the hazy, triumphant past, vacationing on the Black Sea, and enjoying the dubious fruits of the powerful Soviet oligarchs. They had climbed to the top of the gigantic criminal structure by constructing a nonstop barrage of bland, self-serving rhetoric that obfus­cated the murderous, incompetent, and criminal actions of the government. They saw no reason to relinquish their grip on a world that gave them meaning.

  The reformers saw clearly that Gorby was addicted to the insane logic of Soviet rule in which anything becomes per­missible in order to stay in power. Gorby’s faith in socialism led him to press on with those reforms that could end only in the dissolution of the empire. The danger was whether the streets would run with blood.

  In June 1991 Gorby was informed by American authori­ties that there was a plot to oust him, which involved his top ministers. Gorby’s response was to give the coup-minded ministers a tongue-lashing.

  He pressed on, seemingly contemptuous of the dangers. He dotted the i’s on the new Union Treaty that would shepherd the former Soviet Union into an absurd federation of indepen­dent republics with a single president and army. In a way, the disintegration of the Soviet Union had already begun as each republic had attained a certain autonomy.
And when Yeltsin became president of the Russian republic in 1990 and left the Communist Party, he became Gorby’s most significant oppo­nent. On the eve of signing this treaty, which the hard-liners feared would radically reshape their world without them at the center, the coupsters made their move against Gorby.

  The coupsters had everything going for them. At their fin­gertips was the institutional knowledge of seventy years of maestro performances of ruthlessly crushing any and all op­position with brutal, organized efficiency. It was the one job that their predecessors had always aced, staying in power by any means necessary. It was truly the fruit of the system. But the Soviet history of staggering incompetence had finally caught up to them.

  WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “COUP WHO?”

  Gorby, desperate to pull off his balancing act, surrounded himself with his betrayers. In August he took a vacation to his luxurious villa in the Crimea. He had perfectly isolated himself at a time when he was about to destroy the power base of the hard-liners he was trying to coax toward democ­racy.

  The coupsters finally made their decision to get rid of Gorby while meeting at a KGB safe house in a scene more like a drunken picnic than a devious plotters’ den. They had met before many times to grouse about their Gorby problems but now, with the Union Treaty to be signed the next day, it was time to act and for many of them to start drinking. They arranged to “handle” Gorby, but like the central planning for the glorious Communist future, which never required much doing, everything else was left hazy and vague.

  The coup, in official Soviet tradition, started with a lie. The official Soviet News Agency TASS reported on the morn­ing of August 19, 1991, that Gorbachev had resigned due to an undisclosed illness and that a “state of emergency” com­mittee had assumed power. In fact, Gorby had been confined to his luxury dacha quite easily, as one of the coupsters, Boldin, was his chief of staff. Another coupster told him, ac­cording to Gorby, “we’ll do all the dirty work for you,” hoping perhaps that Gorby would acquiesce and join them in overthrowing himself. He told them to go to hell. The hard-liners had finally acted, but no one had thought to neutralize Boris Yeltsin. Perhaps the coupsters were con­fused because Yeltsin seemed to be Gorby’s enemy, and Gorby was their enemy. They didn’t realize that the enemy of your enemy can also be your enemy. They also didn’t realize how many enemies they actually had. Within hours of the announcement that Gorby had been replaced, Yeltsin evaded the feeble attempt to trap him and made it to the Russian “White House,” the seat of power of the Russian republic, where he climbed atop a tank and boldly denounced the coup. Then he disappeared inside to organize the defense.