That night the Russian president bedded down in the doctor’s surgery on the third floor of the White House, where the windows faced the inner courtyard. His family were spirited from the dacha for safety in an unmarked van with curtained windows to a two-bedroom apartment in the suburb of Kuntsevo belonging to one of his bodyguards.
By Tuesday morning, August 20, George Bush, who initially had stopped short of condemning the coup committee—on Scowcroft’s advice he had called their action extraconstitutional rather than illegitimate so as not to burn their bridges with the coup leaders—had got a better idea of what was happening. He managed to get through to Yeltsin. “Boris, my friend,” cried the U.S. president. Yeltsin was overwhelmed. “I am extremely glad to hear from you!” he shouted in response. “We expect an attack, but your call will help us.” “We’re praying for you,” said Bush.[163]
From a balcony at the Russian White House, protected by lead shields held by Korzhakov and another bodyguard, Yeltsin read out a second statement. In it he called on soldiers and police to disobey the orders of Yazov and Pugo but not to seek confrontation.
In St. Petersburg Mayor Sobchak confronted troop commanders and persuaded them not to enter the city. At his side opposing the putsch was his special assistant, KGB officer Vladimir Putin. “Sobchak and I practically moved into the city council,” Putin recounted years later. “We drove to the Kirov Factory and to other plants to speak to the workers. But we were nervous. We even passed out pistols, though I left my service revolver in the safe. People everywhere supported us.”[164]
Putin was concerned that his behavior as a KGB officer could be considered a crime of office if the plotters won. He expressed this fear to his boss, and Sobchak called Kryuchkov on his behalf. Astonishingly the mayor was able to get the chief organizer of the putsch on the phone to discuss such a matter of minor consequence given the scale of events—that Putin was resigning from the KGB forthwith.
Kryuchkov by now seemed to realize his mistake in not securing the arrest of Yeltsin. Public opposition was consolidating around the Russian president. The emergency committee was falling apart. Pavlov and Bessmertnykh had disappeared. Yanayev was drinking himself into a stupor. The defenders of the White House now included many high-profile personalities, including Politburo veteran Alexander Yakovlev, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner. Shevardnadze was also there, asking aloud if Gorbachev himself was implicated in the coup. At five o’clock in the morning Yeltsin remembered it was his daughter Lena’s birthday and rang to congratulate her. Later he gave her a spent cartridge as a present.
That afternoon one of the military’s youngest commanders, forty-one-year-old General Alexander Lebed, went to the White House and secretly informed Yeltsin’s defenders that an attack would begin at 2 a.m. the next day. Lebed had been impressed by Yeltsin when the Russian president had visited the headquarters of the 106th Airborne Division in Tula earlier in the summer. He observed him making friends with servicemen, taking off his watch and presenting it to a lieutenant and then pulling an identical one from his pocket to give to a sergeant.
All women were told to leave the White House, and the defenders got ready for an assault. Preparations were made to smuggle Yeltsin to the sanctuary of the nearby U.S. embassy.
Meanwhile Yazov found he could not get a single military commander to lead an attack on the White House. Field Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the fortynine-year-old air force commander, quietly tried to persuade the old soldier to quit the coup committee. When Yazov asked him instead to prepare helicopters to land KGB Alpha Group troops on the roof of the White House, Shaposhnikov threatened to send a pair of aircraft to bomb military vehicles in the Kremlin. In Stalin’s days Shaposhnikov would have been shot, but under Gorbachev the conflicted military had become a debating society.
The Alpha Group mutinied when ordered to attack the White House. Alexander Yakovlev concluded afterwards that “they refused to have blood on their hands for the sake of such idiots as Kryuchkov and Yazov.”
The danger passed. In the early hours of Wednesday Yazov ordered all troops to withdraw from Moscow. The operetta-like coup collapsed. Kryuchkov telephoned Burbulis in the White House at 3 a.m. and told him they could sleep peacefully. Next morning the KGB chief requisitioned a plane to take him and other junta members to Foros to try to come to terms with Gorbachev.
The Gorbachev family had watched the plotters’ press conference on television with incredulity. “What perfidiousness, lawlessness, infamy!” wrote Raisa in her diary. “Needless to say we are ready for anything, even the worst.” She was terrified that the lie about her husband’s illness meant they intended he should actually die.[165]
Gorbachev saw some virtue in Yeltsin’s stubborn personality at last. He told Chernyaev he was convinced that Boris Nikolayevich had shown his true nature and nothing would break him.
On the second day the nuclear suitcase and its colonel-guardians had been escorted to the airport, where a plane was waiting to take them to Moscow. By nightfall the three suitcases were in the hands of Defense Minister Yazov and chief of the general staff General Mikhail Moiseyev. Ruslan Khasbulatov later testified that the colonel-guardians of Gorbachev’s chemodanchik destroyed the cipher to communicate with strategic command, but the vast nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union had temporarily come under the sole control of the hardliners.[166]
As the coup was collapsing, Raisa suffered a minor stroke. “I felt a numbness and a limpness in my arm and the words would not come,” recalled Gorbachev’s wife. She was put to bed by the family doctor, Igor Borisov, who was with them in the house when it all started. Her power of speech came back shortly afterwards, but she would never fully recover.
At three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon they heard on BBC news that Kryuchkov was leading a delegation to Foros in the presidential jumbo. This caused panic at the dacha. Gorbachev feared that with the coup in danger they were coming to do him harm. He ordered the five members of his personal security detachment, which had remained loyal, to block the driveway and deploy with machine guns along the staircase. “This is it, they are going to make us fit Yanayev’s announcement [that Gorbachev is unwell],” thought Raisa.
Shortly after five o’clock two Zils arrived from the airport bearing Yazov, Kryuchkov, Baklanov, Lukyanov, and two others who wanted to plead with Gorbachev for their safety and negotiate a way out of the crisis. They were, by Kryuchkov’s account, hoping to persuade Gorbachev to face down the Russian government and halt its drive towards full sovereignty for the sake of the integrity of the Soviet Union. But the beleaguered president refused to meet either the KGB chief or Yazov.
Gorbachev’s telephone lines were restored shortly after 6:30, though only for outgoing calls. He immediately got through to Yeltsin, who responded in the most affectionate terms. “Mikhail Sergeyevich, my dear man, are you alive?” Thirty minutes later he got a call through to George Bush. “My God, I’m glad to hear you,” said Bush. “My dear George. I am so happy to hear your voice again,” cried Gorbachev. “They asked me to resign but I refused.” Bush responded, “Sounds like the same old Mikhail Gorbachev, full of life and confidence!” The U.S. president then called Yeltsin, whom he had recently described as a “wild man,” and told him, “My friend, your stock is sky-high over here.”[167]
Soon afterwards a second plane landed at Foros bearing armed members of the Russian government led by Alexander Rutskoy and Ivan Silayev, to escort the Gorbachevs safely back to Moscow. When the ministers arrived at the dacha, Raisa saw they were carrying Kalashnikovs. She cried out, “What, have you come here to arrest us?” When she learned the truth, she broke down in tears.
Past quarrels were forgotten as everyone cried and hugged each other. Gorbachev was almost incoherent with excitement, insisting over and over, “I made no deals.” Rutskoy thought that Raisa, walking unsteadily to kiss each visitor, looked as if she was “almost dying” from heart failu
re.
Fearing that a rogue unit might try to blast the presidential plane out of the air, the Russian vice president used a decoy aircraft to bring the Gorbachevs back to Moscow, with a miserable Kryuchkov sitting alone in the back, not fully aware that he was facing arrest.
At 2:30 on the morning of Thursday, August 22, Mikhail Gorbachev descended from the steps of the plane in a windbreaker and stained pullover. Raisa came behind him on the arm of her ten-year-old granddaughter, Kseniya, who was wrapped in a blanket. “I have come back from Foros to another country, and I myself am a different man now,” said Gorbachev. In the car on the way to the presidential dacha, their daughter, Irina, broke down in sobs. Raisa was in a bad way: She had spent the journey lying on the floor of the aircraft.[168] The distressed condition of his family, Gorbachev explained years later, was why he did not go immediately to the Russian White House to thank the defenders still gathered there in large numbers. It was a serious political blunder nevertheless. The affection that had surged through the crowds for the previously unpopular Gorbachev quickly began to ebb.
Gorbachev was diminished by the experience, and Yeltsin’s stature was enormously enhanced. During the coup Yeltsin had rallied progressive forces within the Soviet Union not only to defeat the putschists but to enable his rival, President Gorbachev, to return to office to continue the peaceful process of reform. The failed coup demonstrated that the big, awkward, hard-drinking muzhik from the Urals was the leader best able and most inclined to offer the Russian people an alternative to the doomed communist experiment.
Many international observers had failed to see that for over a year there had been a steady drift to the Yeltsin camp of young, educated, ambitious men and women who believed in democratic ideals. Never having more than a narrow base of active support in the big cities, they were attracted to Yeltsin because he was popular with the narod (the people), he had clout with the military, and he could bring them along to their goal.
Despite this, a few days after the coup Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, was still describing Yeltsin as a demagogue, opportunist, and grandstander. When this leaked to the Washington Post, the new U.S. ambassador, Robert Strauss, sent a message to Washington that such Yeltsin bashing was stupid, as it only gave Yeltsin another pretext for disliking Gorbachev, the darling of the West.[169]
Kryuchkov, Yazov, and other coup leaders were arrested. The KGB chief wrote a letter to Gorbachev saying he was sorry and in general “very ashamed” of his role. A weeping Yazov was seen pulling on a cigarette and muttering, “I’m a damned old fool,” just before he was detained. His decision to bring tanks into Moscow turned out to be a strategic mistake. It forced the military to take sides, and they preferred Yeltsin, a popularly elected president of Russia, to Yanayev, an inebriated, nonelected vice president of the Soviet Union. He begged the Gorbachevs’ forgiveness. Pavlov also implored the president to forgive him.
Pugo and his wife committed suicide by gunshot. Field Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev, who rushed to Moscow to join the coup but played no part, was found hanging in an office in the Kremlin, one floor below Gorbachev’s cabinet. The sixty-eight-year-old war veteran left a letter for the president, written between two attempts at killing himself, saying, “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying.”
The Communist Party’s chief treasurer, Nikolay Kruchina, responsible for party assets reputed to be worth $9 billion, plummeted to his death from his seventh-floor apartment. It was also called a suicide. His predecessor Georgy Pavlov died the same way six weeks later. They took many of the secrets of the fate of the party’s enormous wealth with them.
On his first full day back, President Gorbachev stumbled again. He decided not to show up at a large demonstration on Thursday morning outside the White House to which he had been invited to celebrate the defeat of the coup. Shevardnadze despaired at yet another blunder. Chernyaev reminded Gorbachev several times that he was expected outside the White House, but the freed hostage “spurned the joyful, popular celebration.” The result was that when Gorbachev’s name was mentioned at the demonstration, there were boos and calls of “Resign!”
Gorbachev decided instead to hold a press conference in the foreign ministry press center, where eight hundred national and foreign journalists and officials gave him a standing ovation. This was more to his liking. Astonishingly he defended the Communist Party as still capable of renewal, despite the complicity of its top cadres in the attempted coup. To Chernyaev this was yet another appalling misjudgment that “swept away the wave of sympathy and human compassion that you saw among ordinary people, on the street, on the first days after the putsch.” Interpreting for Gorbachev, Pavel Palazchenko thought to himself, “This will cost him dearly.” He commented to an English-speaking colleague, “The party’s over.” Afterwards Alexander Yakovlev told Gorbachev bluntly, “The party’s dead. Why can’t you see that? Talking about its renewal is senseless. It’s like offering first aid to a corpse.”[170]
On Friday, August 23, Gorbachev sought to make amends for failing to acknowledge the role of the White House deputies in defending democracy. At 11 a.m. he called the speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, to say he wished to speak to the Russian parliament. He could be there by twelve.
The large auditorium and the balconies filled up instantly. Gorbachev was applauded when he came to the podium, but as he attempted to defend members of the government who had supported the junta, there were roars of indignation.[171] Yeltsin, six inches taller in height, loomed up beside him and with a flourish produced a transcript of a meeting of Gorbachev’s cabinet attended by about sixty senior and junior ministers and chaired by Prime Minister Pavlov on the first day of the coup.
Gorbachev protested he had not read it. “Read it now,” commanded Yeltsin, towering over the red-faced Soviet president. Gorbachev did so obediently. It revealed that almost the entire cabinet had betrayed him, whether through conviction or cowardice. One after another they had backed the emergency committee. Yeltsin produced Decree Number 79 suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party, which he ostentatiously signed in front of the assembly. As Gorbachev stuttered, “Boris Nikolayevich, Boris Nikolayevich… I don’t know what you’re signing there… ” Yeltsin snapped, “I have signed it.”
The scene of Yeltsin’s bullying, relayed throughout the world, revealed that Gorbachev was no longer master in the “other country” to which he had returned. “I think he may have had it,” remarked George Bush after he saw Yeltsin “rubbing Gorbachev’s nose in the dirt” on television.
As Yeltsin gloated with what Gorbachev regarded as “sadistic pleasure,” the Soviet president suffered interrogation for over an hour from excited deputies. One rushed to the microphone to declare hysterically that all communists must be swept from the country with a broom. Gorbachev snapped back: “Even Stalin’s sick brain did not breed such ideas!” He saw in their eyes no pity and much hatred.
At 1:30 p.m. Khasbulatov whispered to Yeltsin, “Time we ended this.”
“Why?” asked the Russian president, no doubt recalling his own humiliations orchestrated by Gorbachev at party meetings.
“I can’t help feeling sorry for him,” replied Khasbulatov.
Yeltsin smiled and rose to bring the session to a close. He invited Gorbachev to lunch with him and Khasbulatov in his office. Though he was seething, Gorbachev still had to show his rival his appreciation for the defeat of the coup and his safe return to Moscow. With some emotion he related to them how he had heard Khasbulatov on BBC calling the plotters “criminals” and had told Raisa that if Russia rose up, they would surely regain their freedom.
“What was Raisa Maximovna’s reply?” asked Khasbulatov quickly. “She said she never would have thought that we would be saved by Yeltsin and his associates,” said Gorbachev.
When he left, Gorbachev’s limousine was delayed for half an hour by hundreds of Yeltsin supporters blocking the way, booing and jeering. The crowds
later besieged Communist Party headquarters on Old Square, from which party apparatchiks were frantically taking papers, televisions, fax machines, copiers, and telephone handsets. The throng moved to the Lubyanka, where the fourteen-ton statue of the founder of the Bolshevik secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was toppled from its pedestal with the help of a crane supplied by Mayor Popov.
Yeltsin gave a radio interview in which he criticized Gorbachev for surrounding himself with a dirty circle of hard-liners in the run-up to the coup. “You cannot absolve him of any guilt in the plot,” he said. “Who chose the officials? He did. Who confirmed them? He did. He was betrayed by his closest people.” He asserted his supremacy over Gorbachev by dictating whom he should appoint to replace the arrested comrades. Shaposhnikov, the jovial air force marshal with bushy eyebrows, thick jet-black hair, and grey moustache who had threatened to bomb the plotters, replaced Yazov. Former interior minister Vadim Bakatin moved into Kryuchkov’s office in KGB headquarters, where he horrified the top brass by giving the Americans a blueprint of the listening devices the KGB had planted in a new U.S. embassy building in Moscow.
Gorbachev would later defend his actions by explaining that if the coup had happened a year earlier, it might have succeeded, but he had been stringing the hard-liners along to camouflage his concessions until there was no turning back. The Soviet president found it more difficult, however, to shake off the charge that he had encouraged the plotters by his behavior in January, when he claimed to know nothing about the bloody military actions in Vilnius but never sought to punish those responsible. The emergency committee had reason to believe he would have done them the same favor, after it had carried out the dirty work and then brought him back to Moscow.
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