Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  David’s mission in Leningrad was to find those tanks. But he circled the city several times and there were none, another small detail the plotters had overlooked in their drunken, confused haze. Leningrad, with its liberal mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, would also have been expected to mount resistance.

  I managed to sneak a call to Natasha between filing stories to Sydney. Her opinion was that the coup would soon be over. ‘As soon as Nazarbayev [in Kazakhstan] and all the other leaders throw their weight behind Yeltsin, that’ll be the end of it.’

  But resistance, I argued, was not a word in the Soviet vocabulary. Subservience yes. Submission yes. But not resistance. ‘We’ve come a long way,’ said Natasha.

  The reaction of the republican leaders to the GKChP indicated they had a long way yet to go. They had watched Anatoly Lukyanov, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, declare that the Union treaty they had been about to sign was unconstitutional and that the parliament would ratify the GKChP and the state of emergency, and they remained neutral, refusing to condemn the coup, refusing to offer Yeltsin support in calling for workers across the country to strike and bring this hideous committee to its knees. Of course the Baltic leaders vowed to resist come what may. But that wouldn’t be enough. Perhaps the non- Baltic republican leaders, as they later claimed, were engaging a clever diplomatic tactic, but it looked pretty much like lack of courage. They could have demanded evidence of Gorbachev’s whereabouts and his state of health at the very least.

  There was, however, plenty of courage to be found elsewhere. In the Kuzbass coal-mining region of Siberia, workers went out on strike. In the huge military–industrial complexes of Gorky, workers called meetings on the shop floor and walked off the job. Throughout the day, region after region across Russia reported that they’d refuse to obey the GKChP’s decrees and its orders to keep working.

  In Moscow, as the tanks continued to roll into the city centre the news slowly sank in and more and more people walked out of their offices and institutes, out of their plants and factories and went to the Russian parliament. By late afternoon, as the putschists were preparing to hold their first media conference, protesters were stopping tanks as they tried to cross the bridge across the Moscow River which led to the parliament. They had commandeered state buses and parked them across the city’s side-streets to stop troop movements. They had brought razor-wire fencing and old tyres from their suburbs which they used to erect barricades around ‘resistance headquarters’.

  Kruchkov, the brains of the GKChP, had banked on people showing respect for the re-emergence of Soviet order. He was wrong. To have any hope of succeeding, Kruchkov and his only sober colleague in the GKChP leadership, Defence Minister Yazov, would need to use force. Instead, they committed another cardinal sin in the putschists’ litany. The orders the tank commanders were receiving as they encountered obstacle after obstacle on their manoeuvres around Moscow were to ‘stay calm’. Perhaps Kruchkov and Yazov too had learnt a thing or two from the post-Stalinist gospel according to Gorbachev.

  That afternoon, the coup began to look like a nonsense. As more and more army units arrived in Moscow, Yeltsin swore in a ‘war cabinet’ and assumed the office of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces in Russia. After all, no-one knew where Gorbachev was and the troops on the streets couldn’t be asked to obey Yeltsin unless he was their commander. No sooner had Yeltsin assumed his new powers, than eight of the APCs parked outside the parliamentary building went to his side. It was a turning point.

  *

  At ‘plotters’ headquarters’ there was anything but order. In fact there was complete disorder. The Defence Minister Dmitri Yazov and K.G.B. chief Kruchkov were arguing. The others were drunk.

  It was the rift between the two arms of force in the Soviet Union which was the most serious, though not entirely unexpected, setback to the putschists’ cause. Logically, Defence Minister Yazov needed in Yeltsin’s words, ‘a real fully fledged full-throated putsch that would once again force the world to believe in the might of the Soviet tank’. The K.G.B. chief Kruchkov needed ‘as clean and as sophisticated a transfer of power as possible to ensure respect and compliance’. But neither was possible for the same reasons – the people had resisted and the troops were divided. Perestroika had changed people and the biggest failure of both men left carrying the GKChP burden was that they failed to realise this. Instead, they argued with each other about what to do next.

  At six o’clock on the night the tanks rolled into Moscow, the plotters held a media conference. They were about to break another rule in the putschists’ handbook. None of their predecessors had tried to publicly justify their actions. With my ‘Russian guard’ of Max and Sasha, I weaved and bobbed my way back to the city centre, to the Foreign Ministry press centre on Zubovsky Boulevard where, in January, Gorbachev had sheepishly refused to answer questions about his role in the Lithuanian assault. There too, at the press centre, tired, angry soldiers who’d been dragged from their sleeping quarters in the early hours of the morning sat on top of tanks and APCs, wondering, no doubt, what they were meant to do if a foreign correspondent tried to defy their orders!

  Again, I asked permission to board one of the tanks and again permission was granted. Only this time, the commander began pumping me for information. Had I heard anything of Gorbachev’s whereabouts? Was the parliament supporting the GKChP or not? Could I confirm that eight APCs had defected to Yeltsin’s side outside the Russian parliament?

  Yes, troops were defecting I told him and turned the tables: ‘Would you defect to Yeltsin’s side if you were asked?’

  ‘I wish he would ask!’ he replied. It was sad and Kafkaesque.

  Inside the building he was protecting, the putschists were trying to hold themselves together for a performance which would either make or break them. They had to convince the media and the diplomats who’d crammed into the press centre that what they were effecting was a constitutional transfer of power. With straight faces they had to lie and say Gorbachev was ill. And they had to convince everyone that this was not the end of reform and that they were capable of leading the country. Of course none of this was possible because none of it was true.

  I squeezed into the foyer where a huge screen had been erected to beam the putschists out to those unlucky enough not to be sniffing the same air as the committee members still on their feet. Valentin Pavlov was still sick in bed, apparently treating himself with increasing doses of alcohol. Yazov, the Defence Minister, was watching the charade on television in his office and Kruchkov didn’t even bother to turn up. It was all left to the weak Gennady Yanaev, inarticulate at the best of times. Now he looked pitiable. He sweated profusely and his hands quivered. He could barely speak for the anxiety which was clearly overpowering him.

  ‘Who has control of the nuclear button?’ asked a reporter from Moskovski Novosti.

  ‘The Minister for Defence,’ answered Yanaev.

  ‘Is this a state coup?’ asked another reporter.

  ‘No, this is a constitutional transfer of power from the hands of the Soviet president who is unable to carry out his duties,’ answered Yanaev, fumbling for the words.

  At the Defence Ministry where Yazov was watching what was meant to be a display of certitude and strength, he must have felt a broken man. He’d apparently laughed at his hardline colleagues when they’d talked of getting rid of Gorbachev. Now he was one of them. According to Yeltsin, Yazov’s wife, who had gone to ask her husband what was going on, begged him to give it all up. ‘Dima,’ she said, ‘who are all these people you have gotten mixed up with? Call Gorbachev,’ she urged him.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ he told her as he wept over his desk.

  That night, Vremya, the state-controlled television news was the only fare going. The other channels had been reduced to dramatised Russian fairy tales and opera. But on Vremya, a scintilla of truth broke out. An uncensored report on the day’s events made it to air. There was Yeltsin astride a tank outside the Russian
parliament, and Yanaev’s shaking hands as he faced the world. Thousands more left their homes for the parliament or ‘White House’ as people called it.

  *

  At the Russian parliament some ten thousand people huddled around camp fires and waited, sure that Kruchkov and Yazov would eventually send their tanks to storm the bastion of resistance. Every now and then, a member of the Yeltsin coterie would emerge from the building to encourage the crowd to stay on.

  I spent much of the night there until I had to return to the office to prepare for a live cross to AM. Wandering among the crowd were the glitterati of Soviet and Russian politics and culture – Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist, Father Gleb Yakunin, the dissident Russian Orthodox priest whom Russians adored, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, with whom I hadn’t spoken since he told me to fuck off when I asked him about the politics of dissent a year earlier. I put the same question again: did he regret not having supported the country’s dissidents when he was asked to in the 1970s, when there weren’t tens of thousands of people huddled in the darkness, preparing to throw themselves beneath tanks to protect their right to decide their own future. Yevtushenko ignored me and walked towards the front of the building. Ten minutes later he appeared on a balcony to read a poem he’d written for the moment.

  As the night wore on, more minds were being convinced of the benefit of resistance. The republican presidents, one by one, sent word of their support to Yeltsin. No doubt they’d seen Yanaev’s trembling hands and watched as the number of protesters in Moscow swelled. Better to be on the winning side, after all! And that night, 19 August 1991, the resisters looked like they were winning. The barricades were constantly being strengthened and by midnight included the Mercedes Benzs of the rouble rich who were offering their copiers and fax machines to help Yeltsin get his word out to the people.

  That night, my friends stayed at parliament while I returned to the office to file reports and catch a few hours’ sleep.

  *

  At five the next morning, I woke Max and Sasha. They’d fallen asleep where I’d left them, not far from the statue of Pavlik Morozov, the 13- year-old who’d been turned into a bronzed hero for having reported his father for hiding grain from the state during Stalin’s forced collectivisation. Pavlik’s murder by farmers who opposed Stalin had given the regime another hero.

  ‘It’s been boring here,’ Max said. ‘Nothing’s happened at all, except the rumour is that the parliament will be stormed before the end of the day.’

  It hadn’t been boring at the putschists’ headquarters. Kruchkov had been sent a memo by K.G.B. analysts detailing the ‘grave errors’ which had been made in attempting the coup.

  The ground troops commander, Valentin Varennikov, offered a solution – liquidate the protest at the Russian parliament. But this would turn out to be easier said than done. Support for the move in the upper echelons of the military was clearly waning.

  Alexander Lebed was a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and the second in command of the Tula Airborne Division. Before the coup he and his commander, Pavel Grachev, had told Yeltsin that in the event of trouble, they and their troops could be relied on for support. Now both men were making good on that promise. In Yeltsin’s war room, Lebed told the Russian leadership that there was utter chaos within the military. Chains of command had been broken. The K.G.B.’s elite Alpha commando unit, trained to carry out the most difficult acts of terrorism, had pledged not to take part in any blockade or storming of the Russian parliament. The Dzerzhinsky Division had gone back to sleep after the initial convoy left barracks to take Moscow. On the morning of Day 2 when Lebed called the base to ask how many tanks were leaving for Moscow, a sleepy junior sergeant told him, ‘Nobody’s going anywhere!’ Nor was the Tula Division moving.

  The division commanders no doubt were swayed by the support for Yeltsin. Komsomol, the Young Communist League, was appealing to young people, especially soldiers, not to take part in the putsch. According to Yeltsin, academics, institutes, artists, unions, even the fledgling Russian stock exchange – all urged people to disobey the GKChP’s decrees.

  The putschists now knew that unless they acted decisively, they’d fail and spend the rest of their days behind bars. Kruchkov and Yazov desperately tried to persuade the generals to follow their orders.

  The planned storming would take place at two o’clock the next day. The army, the K.G.B. and the Interior Ministry troops would surround the parliamentary building and block all access to it. Paratroopers would drive a wedge through the protesters, leaving a path for the Alpha Division to penetrate the building using grenade launchers. They would then find Yeltsin and arrest him. Interior Ministry troops would move around Moscow, taking resisters to K.G.B. headquarters where they’d be charged.

  It didn’t take long for the commanders of the divisions meant to carry out the task to give Yeltsin each and every detail.

  *

  I was at the parliamentary building when word of the plan to storm it leaked to the resisters. At first I thought it was just another rumour, whispered from person to person. But this was more than rumour. A middle-aged woman handed out fliers prepared inside the parliament. They stated that Yeltsin had intelligence that plans were underway to storm the building and arrest him, and that afterwards the resisters would be rounded up and taken to prison.

  An eerie sort of calm descended. So far, throughout the ordeal, not once had I felt physically threatened. But as I looked around at people reading Yeltsin’s flier, I wondered whether we’d all be mowed down by the Alpha group as it lobbed its grenades up the front steps towards the parliament. Or might we be crushed by the tanks that encircled the area, or by the stampede of resisters as they tried to flee? I must have turned white because Max looked at me and, putting his arm around my shoulder, led me over to the embankment of the Moscow River where I sat and cried. He thought I should leave and return to the office. But I couldn’t.

  As we pored over Yeltsin’s information, there was silence. People were listening for the unmistakable rumbling of tank treads. And at one point, it sounded as though they were close. But as they rumbled down Kutuzovsky Boulevard, it was soon obvious that the tanks weren’t turning into the street which would bring them to the parliamentary building. They were going to the Kremlin.

  We waited and waited – it surely must have been close to an hour – but nothing changed. I decided to dash back to the office briefly to file for PM and the news bulletins. But as I started to walk down Kutuzovsky Boulevard to a point where I’d be able to flag down a car, I decided to ask CNN whose offices were just across the road from the parliament if I could use their phones. As I began dialling Sydney, one of their Russian interpreters came rushing at me with some copy from TASS, in Russian. A factory in Pskov on the Russian border with Latvia and Estonia, not far from Leningrad, had been ordered to send to Moscow urgently a quarter of a million pairs of handcuffs. And Kruchkov had ordered two floors of the Lefortovo Prison in central Moscow to be cleared. Until now, I’d thought the coup a sham.

  Back at the parliament, women and children were asked to leave. Those who were left had no means of finding out what was happening because the military had closed down Radio Echo. The only information we had was coming from prominent Russians who had access to the military and K.G.B. intelligence being leaked to Boris Yeltsin. But even that was very little. A parade of luminaries tried to help tired resisters understand the need to keep up the pressure. Yelena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, wasn’t worried by the GKChP. ‘They will fail,’ she told the crowd. ‘But you must begin to take responsibility, shed your Soviet past. Ask yourselves where is Gorbachev. Tell the troops we want Gorbachev back,’ she bellowed through a microphone to a crowd of 20,000 or more. ‘It’s not that we suddenly support him but the people have the right to vote him down in free and fair elections.’

  The only question which remained was how the generals would convince the division commanders to obey their orders
and attack the parliament.

  *

  By evening, the tension was overwhelming. Max would say every few minutes: ‘Soon, very soon.’ Sasha was more optimistic. He’d been phoning people he knew in the K.G.B. and it was clear to him that there was division not only in the military but within the K.G.B. So we waited.

  At the Kremlin, desperation was setting in. The ground forces commander had drawn up the plans and disseminated them to his generals. But he reported that no matter how willing, the generals themselves couldn’t clamber into the tanks and drive them to the parliament. The division commanders had told the top brass that they were deeply worried. The GKChP was making moves which would not be supported by the troops. Some were already retreating to their bases.

  If only the resisters had known the truth. At the parliament, there was mayhem. Many more thousands of people had come to resist and protest. And now they had broken their silence.

  I found Eduard Shevardnadze in the crowd, making his way towards the parliament. He was distraught. I walked by his side for a few minutes, not saying anything. I didn’t know what to ask him. In the end I thought he might offer some news of Gorbachev. But he clearly felt no pity for his old friend whatsoever.

  He gave me a stern look of disapproval as though I’d just mentioned the name of the devil, the man whose fault this whole mess was in the first place.

  ‘I have no idea where Mikhail Sergeyevich is, nor in what state of health he is, other than “not sick”.’

  Neither Shevardnadze nor the crowd which was mobbing him had any idea that the coup d’état was about to take a turn for the worse, even though many of the tanks around the city were actually retreating.

  *

  Ilya Krichevsky was 28 years old when the hardliners mounted their coup attempt. Not quite a decade earlier, he’d been a tank commander in the Taman Division, which now encircled the White House.