All the plotters signed the document as it was passed around the table. All except Alexander Bessmertnykh, the Foreign Minister appointed to replace Eduard Shevardnadze. He was too frightened. He wanted to see the medical reports to prove Gorbachev was too ill to rule and, of course, there were none.
So Bessmertnykh left the room. He didn’t protest. He didn’t send the message to his ambassadors across the globe that Gorbachev was being ousted, that the plotters would say he was sick but that this was a lie. He didn’t call for help. Bessmertnykh did the only thing his Soviet conscience would allow him to do and kept silent.
*
I’d had a late night on the 18th of August, talking to Sasha, my K.G.B. friend, then sharing his concerns on the phone with Natasha who didn’t believe the hardliners would be so stupid as to mount a coup. ‘I’m telling you,’ she said, ‘they know that this is not 1956 or 1968, and it’s not 1981 either [when Solidarity was crushed in Poland]. They can’t just roll out the tanks and hope for the best. There are Mercedes Benzs in Tadjikistan for God’s sake!’
At 1 a.m. I rang off and went to bed. At 4 a.m., Gennady Yanaev, drunk and, according to Russian newspaper reports after the event, unable to find the toilet in his office suite, assumed control over the Soviet Union and its military arsenal.
At 4.30 a.m. all military units were put on high alert, ordered to occupy Moscow, and be prepared for battle. An elite unit was ordered to arrest Boris Yeltsin, though the order was later rescinded.
At 6 a.m., a television announcer broke the news. Barely able to disguise his anxiety, he read out a statement issued by the GKChP. The country had lost its way, it said. The law of the USSR was being violated by people who were trying to grab dictatorial powers. They were preparing to stage an ‘unconstitutional coup’. The people were demanding that something be done to stop it. Vladimir Kruchkov was speaking.
As the news flashed up on wire services across the world, my phone blasted me out of my sleep. ‘Monica, it’s Kerrie Weil. Where’s Gorbachev?’
The executive producer of PM had heard the news about the GKChP before I had.
‘I’m fairly sure he’s in the Crimea. Why?’
‘According to AFP [Associated France Press] he’s sick and some sort of committee has been formed to run the country.’
I grabbed my bag and bolted for the door, in my panic forgetting even to change out of my pyjamas. It had always been handy having our office and apartments in the same block and within two minutes I was wading through the masses of stories which Reuters and TASS had spat out in the 15 minutes since the GKChP had declared itself. My hands were shaking uncontrollably as I looked for the one story on TASS which would confirm what we suspected had happened. It was the simplest of statements.
‘A state of emergency has been declared on the territory of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The president Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is ill and in his absence a State Committee for the State of Emergency has been formed. The committee consists of: Gennady Yanaev, Valentin Pavlov, Vladimir Kruchkov, Dmitri Yazov, Boris Pugo, Valeri Boldin, Yuri Plekhanov, Oleg Shenin, Oleg Baklanov, Alexander Tizyakov and Vasily Starodubstev.’
I’d never even heard of Tizyakov and Starodubstev! I fumbled through my Soviet version of Who’s Who and found them. Tizyakov was the President of the Association of State Enterprises, no doubt violently opposed to the recommendations coming from the reform camp that subsidies to state enterprises be cut. Starodubstev led the Union of Collective Farm Chairmen, a group also intractably opposed to the notion of private enterprise and what that meant – private farming.
I stared at the copy for several minutes. So that was that! Everyone was expected to believe what the GKChP said and watch as six years of perestroika and glasnost were dismantled. Over and over I read the line that Gorbachev was too ill to continue his duties. It sounded like a fabrication. The phones began ringing hot. Kerrie Weil, the sub-editors in radio news, other journalists from around the ABC, public radio in France, everyone wanting to confirm what the international wires were saying – that Mikhail Gorbachev was sick, that a state of emergency had been declared across the Soviet Union.
I switched on the television but could find only midnight to dawn movies. I tried calling the Foreign Ministry but the guard on duty knew nothing and he said the building was empty. I woke Nikolai Shishlin, my old friend from the Central Committee’s International Department. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a coup,’ he said. But was Gorbachev ill?
‘Not when I last saw him,’ said Shishlin.
The minutes were ticking away. I’d have to file for news and go to air for the early edition of PM. I couldn’t confirm that Gorbachev was sick but I could say that a state committee had declared itself to run the country.
I wondered what my parents would think when they heard my report that a coup d’état was underway. Just two days before, I’d canvassed the possibility in conversation with my father who’d said that if the hardliners tried to get rid of Gorbachev, they’d have to be vicious and determined because the world would come to Gorbachev’s defence.
As I tapped out my first story for the noon news bulletin, I dialled my parents’ number. Begging them not to worry seemed pointless. ‘As long as we hear you, we know you’re OK,’ said my father. My mother just felt anxious.
*
At Archangelskoe village, just outside Moscow, Boris Yeltsin was asleep when the coup was declared. His daughter Tanya flew into his room with the news: ‘Papa get up. There’s a coup,’ she told him. ‘That’s illegal!’ Yeltsin said in an astonishing display of naivety. Tanya told him about Kruchkov, Yanaev and the others. ‘Are you kidding me?’ asked Yeltsin. Within minutes, his phone too would begin to ring hot. His faithful lieutenants urged him to leave his dacha as soon as possible because, ‘no doubt, there’ll soon be an order for your arrest. Come to the parliament.’ Yeltsin thought for a moment. Would Russian soldiers arrest him or would they disobey orders?
*
By eight o’clock, Moscow was a city occupied by its own forces, besieged by columns of tanks and armoured personnel carriers taking up positions around the Russian parliament, rumbling down two of Moscow’s main boulevards, Tverskaya and Kutuzovsky towards Manezh Square on the edge of the Kremlin. By nine o’clock the Manezh would be the main focus of tension. Tanks, APCs and soldiers armed with assault rifles filled the square while elsewhere in the capital motorised rifle and tank divisions perched outside important buildings – the Foreign Ministry, the Finance Ministry, the grey Stalinesque Gosplan building and the Central Telegraph Station.
I called PM and suggested that we pre-record coverage of the GKChP’s declarations for the early edition of the program in case the international phone lines were cut. The program’s presenter, Paul Murphy, bolted for the studio and we began recording. He asked about Gorbachev: Was he still in the Crimea? Did he know what was happening in Moscow? Did he approve? I had no idea whether Gorbachev was still at his villa in the Crimea, nor whether he had any idea of what was happening in Moscow but instinctively I was sure that he hadn’t handed the State Committee the power to carry out his duties, nor would he have sanctioned the deployment of tanks to the streets, if for no other reason than that he didn’t have the stomach for violence. Indeed there was no word on Gorbachev’s whereabouts until much later in the day when Kruchkov told Yeltsin that he was in the Crimea under house arrest, cut off from the world by three platoons of forces – the navy, air-force ground services and border guards. Later, Gorbachev would tell us that he tried negotiating with his captors to send a message to Moscow, but to no avail. He walked around the villa, desperately apprehensive, furious, frustrated, but above all incommunicado.
While he stewed, the cabinet in which he had for so long stubbornly placed his faith was tripping over itself in confusion. Yanaev was getting drunker by the hour and by the time some of Gorbachev’s old allies got to him in the Kremlin, three hours after the State Committee was declared, he w
as completely disorientated – and apologetic. He’d been roped into the whole affair he told them. The Prime Minister, Valentin Pavlov, wasn’t in much better shape. He’d long suffered from anxiety but now he was overwhelmed by the enormity of what he’d undertaken. He too was drunk but had the sense to go home sick, where he tucked himself into bed, unable to do anything – not even watch the chaos.
That left Defence Minister Yazov and K.G.B. chief Kruchkov as the brains behind the operation.
*
The ABC’s phones weren’t disconnected, which was good news. Surely no serious coup plotters could have overlooked the important detail of ensuring only their version of events left the country? In fact not only were the phone lines not disconnected, they seemed to improve in quality – a phenomenon not of my imagination but observed also by the few other foreign correspondents who’d remained in the city over the holiday period. So good were the lines that just about every producer at the ABC was ringing for an account of what was going on. In the end, it was impossible to give them any news because their demands had stopped me from getting to the city centre to see things for myself. Finally I asked Kerrie to call them off. I thought of racing back up to my apartment to get out of my pyjamas but in the end I didn’t have time. Just as I was about to walk out of the office, Sasha, my K.G.B. friend, turned up.
He’d decided to take Oleg Kalugin’s advice and wasn’t prepared to take part in Kruchkov’s coup, nor did he want to be at home when the phone call came for him to report for duty at K.G.B. headquarters. ‘I’ll drive you around Moscow,’ he said, which, under the circumstances, was a brave offer on his part and one I couldn’t refuse, particularly as his K.G.B. pass would get me to places I’d have been otherwise barred from. But first we wanted to make sure our coterie of friends was safe. Masha and her husband Rob were away. Natasha was at her home in Belye Stolby not far from Moscow. As we discussed whom to call first, Zhenya arrived with a young man I hadn’t met. His name was Nikolai and he was in his second year of military service. Nikolai was in Moscow on leave and didn’t want to have to go to battle for the GKChP. ‘Can I stay in your apartment?’ he asked.
I didn’t know what to do. As I ran through the possible consequences, Natasha called to see whether I was alright and whether I needed any help. ‘What will I do, Natasha? I have this young boy with me who doesn’t want to answer Yazov’s call for soldiers to return from leave. What am I going to do?’
‘If this is a serious coup,’ she said, ‘and they begin rounding up correspondents and find a defector in your apartment, so what? There won’t be enough room in the jails for you, my friend. They’ll deport you.’ Nikolai stayed.
On our way to the city centre we stopped to pick up Max, who’d also rung offering help. The three of us made our way to town. Perhaps not everyone had heard the news, perhaps they didn’t think the tanks on the streets meant serious business, perhaps they simply were too tired of all the politics to give a damn, but that morning as we drove to the Kremlin, past the Russian parliament, the people we saw seemed relaxed. With their mandatory plastic carry-bags in hand in case they came across a good buy on their travels, they strolled along, looking nonchalantly at the APCs and the soldiers atop them armed with rifles. A few protesters had gathered outside the parliament but hardly enough to constitute resistance, which was probably a good thing because Kruchkov and Yazov, on the morning of Day 1 of this very strange coup, were still serious about their actions and might have used force to quell any protests.
But in the hour it took to drive through the traffic and the tanks from the parliament to Manezh Square near the Kremlin (which are separated by no more than a ten-minute walk), Yeltsin had set up resistance headquarters at the parliamentary building and written an appeal to the people which was being broadcast on Moscow’s independent radio station. Echo Moscow had been calling on people all morning to come to the parliamentary building and it seemed they’d been slowly answering its request, because by the time we reached the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin had mounted a tank back at the parliamentary building and in a booming voice told a sizeable crowd that ‘the legally elected president of the country has been removed from power. We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’état. We appeal to all citizens of Russia to turn back the putschists and demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.’ My Russian friends were leaping with joy.
‘They didn’t think to take Yeltsin!’ crowed Max. (In fact the putschists had organised to have Yeltsin arrested, but the usual Soviet combination of inertia and incompetence meant the order was never carried out.)
Whether the thousands of people who answered Yeltsin’s call came to defend the Russian president they’d just elected or whether they came in Gorbachev’s defence, I’m not sure. Certainly that first day of the coup at Manezh Square, it was Gorbachev the people were screaming for. If Gorbachev was too sick to rule and had abdicated power to the GKChP then why were there tanks on the streets? This was no constitutional abdication. This was a coup and everyone knew it. ‘Where’s the proof that Gorbachev is sick?’ people asked the troops. Why was there no medical certificate or message from Gorbachev to confirm that he had handed power to the hardliners?
As the tanks stood motionless in their columns, the crowd swelled and women and men of all ages clambered towards the young soldiers who manned them. ‘Go home to your mothers,’ one woman begged. Another grabbed at the arm of a young guard and asked him to look her in the eye: ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ she asked him. He shook his head. ‘Then go back to your barracks like a noble Soviet soldier and leave us in peace.’ An old man was waving a photograph of Gorbachev at one young soldier: ‘Where is he, you fool? If you follow blindly, you’ll end up blinded, just like Gorbachev. But remember, you’ve been free for six years now. Turn your tank away – and go get Gorbachev!’
The stand-off seemed to go on for hours, but in fact it was only 30 minutes or so before the tanks and APCs began to move ever so slowly. Suddenly the crowd became hysterical. ‘Noo ladno, spokoyno,’ [‘OK, be calm’] the commander of the tank I was nearest bellowed to the crowd. All I could think was that times had changed.
‘Can I jump up?’ I asked the tank commander. He offered me his hand, pulling me on board where he and his subordinates were listening to Radio Echo. Somehow I felt safe, knowing that they were listening to the voice of resistance. Yeltsin was calling on troops to ‘throw down your bayonets’. Clouds of terror and dictatorship were gathering over Russia, he told them, ‘do not take part’. And these troops were listening.
The commander slung his rifle over his back and propped himself next to me, watching intently as I recorded Yeltsin over the little portable radio sitting on the edge of the tank’s circular hatch. He was a very ordinary young Russian. We started chatting quietly as around us the chanting grew louder and louder. He told me he came from Leningrad, that he had no idea if his parents knew what was happening in Moscow and that he had no idea whether his commanders agreed that perestroika had led nowhere as the putschists claimed. I asked if I could record our conversation. After all, here I was, sitting on a tank near the Kremlin, talking to its commander as though he were one of my friends. Surely he wouldn’t mind if I turned on my tape recorder. And he didn’t. He wasn’t at all coy or fearful of being interviewed in a situation which was meant to be frightening, threatening. He wanted to talk.
‘Do you know who’s behind the coup?’ I asked him.
‘Only from what Yeltsin’s been saying,’ he replied.
‘When did you first hear anything about occupying Moscow?’
‘This morning at 3 a.m. when they woke us and gave us our orders to come here.’
‘And did they tell you why?’
‘They said Gorbachev was sick and a committee was taking over.’
‘Did that sound right to you?’
‘I didn’t think about it really. But Yeltsin says it’s not true. Do you know anything?’
>
‘Have you asked where Gorbachev is?’
‘No.’
‘What did your commanders tell you was the purpose of this exercise?’
‘They told us nothing at all, other than the fact that we had to preserve calm in Moscow.’
‘If they asked you to shoot to preserve the peace, will you?’
He stopped and thought, then looked at me. ‘You know, I’m Russian, just like all of them,’ he said, nodding his head towards the swarm of people who now surrounded the tanks. ‘I think I’d rather go to jail for treason than shoot at my own people.’
Before I could ask another question, his walkie-talkie began blaring a message I couldn’t decipher. He politely asked me whether I wouldn’t mind jumping off his tank. ‘Another minute if you wouldn’t mind,’ I said as, still in my pyjamas, I began recording what I was seeing from this vantage point.
*
The declarations of the GKChP had it that tanks and APCs had also occupied Leningrad. The author David Marr was holidaying there, enjoying the bookshops of Nevsky Prospekt when the GKChP seized power. While I was in the city centre, he’d phoned Moscow several times looking for me, to offer help.
‘Are there tanks on the streets there?’ I asked him when we finally spoke.
‘Not that I can see,’ he said. But that’s not what was being reported on the news cables and by Yeltsin’s team who had put out a document claiming that the Defence Minister had issued orders to his deputy ministers across the USSR, to the commanders of military groups from the Baltics to Siberia and to the chiefs of directorates to follow the edicts of the GKChP and to quash all resistance. That meant that tanks would be needed everywhere, not just in the capital.
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