As in 1989 and 1990, an army of amateurish democrats delivered Yeltsin’s message. Loosely coordinated by a group around Yeltsin and by Democratic Russia, they printed and photocopied materials, distributed them at Moscow subway stations, and rang doorbells. Retired schoolteachers rode the commuter rails of the capital region and passed Yeltsin fliers out of train windows. The chairman of the pilots’ union at Aeroflot, Anatolii Kochur, prevailed upon flight crews to cram bales of broadsheets into cargo bays and get them to activists in the outback. The punchline of the authorized candidate’s poster read Narodnogo deputata v narodnyye prezidenty!—“People’s Deputy for People’s President!” The main concern in the Yeltsin camp was that he would not make a majority in the first round and would lose to an anyonebut-Yeltsin candidate in a runoff.
Yeltsin campaigned against Gorbachev and the CPSU, not Ryzhkov or Zhirinovskii. In a firebrand interview on central television, he alluded to Gorbachev’s more soothing line in recent weeks as proof that communism, which had made Soviet citizens guinea pigs in a grotesque experiment, was on its last legs:
As recently as a month ago, he [Gorbachev] was saying everywhere that he is only for socialism, only for socialism, we cannot do otherwise. Just as for over seventy years we have been marching to a bright future, that is how [he says] we will continue, and somehow we will arrive. Our country has not been lucky. . . . It was decided to carry out this Marxist experiment on us—fate pushed us in precisely this direction. Instead of some country in Africa, they began this experiment with us. In the end, we proved that there is no place for this idea. It has simply pushed us off the road the world’s civilized countries have taken. This is reflected today, when 40 percent of people are living below the poverty line and . . . in constant humiliation when they receive produce upon the presentation of ration cards. This is a constant humiliation, a reminder every hour that you are a slave in this country.60
Support for Yeltsin, polls showed, flagged in late May, then rebounded. He had husbanded his small advertising budget for the home stretch. Come voting day, Wednesday, June 12, the one-man electoral juggernaut received 45,552,041 votes, or 59 percent of the valid ballots cast, to 18 percent for Ryzhkov and 8 percent for Zhirinovskii. He drew best in the Urals, Moscow, Leningrad (which was about to go back to being called St. Petersburg), the urbanized portions of central Russia and Siberia, and the Volga basin; he drew worst in the “red belt” of pro-communist regions on the steppes south of Moscow.61 Yeltsin’s testing of his authority with the demos, as Anatolii Luk’yanov had prophesied, contrasted sharply with Gorbachev’s quailing at that test in 1990. You, a Yeltsin ally said to Gorbachev, have been too timorous to try to obtain a mandate from society. Yeltsin dared, and got his agency by being chosen “not in the cloakrooms, not by a narrow circle, but by the people.” If the Soviet bosses went on attacking Yeltsin, it would continue to boomerang: “The anti-Yeltsin actions of the bankrupt top echelon have always had effects antithetical to those intended. They have brought forth the people’s wrath and elevated his authority.”62
A gala inaugural was held on July 10 at the Palace of Congresses. Yeltsin seated a Russian Orthodox priest, a rabbi, and a Muslim cleric in the front row as a cue to the television audience that his Russia would be an openminded place. Patriarch Aleksii II and Oleg Basilashvili, a parliamentary deputy and stage and movie actor from Leningrad, spoke before Yeltsin took the oath of office for a five-year term, with left hand on a copy of the Russian constitution and right hand over his heart. Yeltsin’s undertaking as president, he said, beaming, was to transport Russia into the community of nations as “a prosperous, democratic, peace-loving, law-abiding, and sovereign state.” He also tried to trim expectations: “The president is not God, he is not a new monarch, he is not an all-powerful worker of miracles, he is a citizen.”63
Gorbachev said to Shakhnazarov that he had to disabuse Yeltsin of suggestions for projecting the swearing-in onto a jumbo screen on Red Square, firing a twenty-four-gun salute, and taking the oath on the Bible, like an American president. The Soviet president arrived late and spoke briefly. The honoree responded in kind: As Gorbachev reached to shake his hand, Yeltsin took several steps forward and stopped, forcing Gorbachev to come to him. Gorbachev, seeing red at Yeltsin’s ambitions, as always, had a new regard for his acumen: “Such . . . a simpleminded yen for the scepter!” he let on to Shakhnazarov. “I am at my wit’s end to understand how he combines this with political instinct [chut’ë]. God knows, maybe this is his secret, maybe this is why he is forgiven everything. A tsar must conduct himself like a tsar. And that I do not know how to do.”64 After the inauguration, Gorbachev approved rooms in the Kremlin for Yeltsin. They were in Building No. 14, across a cobblestoned square from Gorbachev’s lair in Building No. 1.65
Gorbachev, having zigged toward the counterreformist pole in 1990, zagged back toward reformism in the spring of 1991. In dread of losing his support in the USSR congress and the Central Committee, of the republics coming to agreement at their own initiative, and of consumer ire at price increases, he restarted the effort to herd the republics together into a union treaty. The “Nine Plus One” talks (nine willing republics and the Soviet government) at the Novo-Ogarëvo state residence west of Moscow, built for Georgii Malenkov as Soviet prime minister in the 1950s, was one more sparring match with Yeltsin and dragged on from April 23 to late July. Gorbachev wanted a federation in which the center retained as many powers as possible.66 With some sadness, Yeltsin thought the Soviet Union as constituted by Lenin and Stalin was doomed. “I am a Russian,” he confided to a French academic of Russian origin in Strasbourg, “and I am not happy with the idea of the collapse of the empire. For me, it is Russia, it is Russian history. But I know it is the end. . . . The only way [forward] is to get rid of this empire as quickly as possible, or to accept the process.”67 He wanted in effect a confederation (although he stuck to the word “federation”), with Russia and the other sovereign republics controlling all taxation and natural resources and delegating a few functions (national security, railroads, the power grid, and atomic energy) to a central authority, which would haggle over its budget with them line by line. Verbal fisticuffs between Yeltsin and Gorbachev on May 24 spotlighted the disagreement over the monetary lifeblood of government:
YELTSIN: On taxes . . . we are thinking of transferring into the federal budget a fixed sum for programs that we are going to implement jointly, or that the union [government] will tackle, including ones for the republics. It will be done by amount and not by percent. That will be it. . . .
GORBACHEV: Hold on. You say it will be by program. But what about permanent functions of the state such as the army or basic scientific research?
YELTSIN: I am thinking of the army, too. We will have a look, so to speak. “Please show us everything” [we will say].
GORBACHEV: Boris Nikolayevich! In this case we will not have a federation. . . .
YELTSIN: We will deposit [the funds] in one bank and hand them over to you.
GORBACHEV: No, no. . . . There needs to be a federal tax.
YELTSIN: Not on every enterprise, no way. We are ruling that out.
GORBACHEV: In this case we will not have a federation.
YELTSIN: Why not? Why not?
GORBACHEV: In this case we will not have a federation.
YELTSIN: That is a federation.
GORBACHEV: We need a federal tax. . . . You want on every question to force us to our knees.
YELTSIN: It is you who wants to force us to our knees.68
Gorbachev yielded on taxation after Yeltsin called his bluff on a threat to pull out of Nine Plus One. “Do not,” Yeltsin upbraided Gorbachev privately, “take things to the point where we have to decide this question without you.”69 To increase Russian autonomy and defang the CPSU, Yeltsin on July 20 issued Decree No. 14, proscribing any party from having cells or operations within organs of government in the RSFSR. Gorbachev seemed powerless to do anything about it.
A d
raft treaty for a Union of Sovereign States was initialed by the Novo-Ogarëvo working group on July 23, published on August 15, and its signing fixed for August 20. It largely embodied Russian preferences on taxation, natural resources, and the lesser republics within the RSFSR (they were to sign only as subunits of Russia). The center would still have the power to declare war and manage the military, but even foreign policy and public safety were to be subject to joint jurisdiction. In recognition of Russia’s new global stature, President Bush, in Moscow for a summit with Gorbachev, was received by Yeltsin in his new Kremlin office on July 30. To Soviet and foreign correspondents after the meeting, Yeltsin talked up the treaty and the July 20 decree. At the state dinner in the Kremlin, he tried unsuccessfully to upstage Gorbachev by making a beeline for Barbara Bush and escorting her from receiving line to table. Gorbachev also reports Yeltsin pouting over not being seated at the head table at a dinner at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassadorial residence, and pressing a conversation on George Bush.70 The previous evening, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Nursultan Nazarbayev, the party prefect and now president of Kazakhstan, had met at Novo-Ogarëvo and agreed that Nazarbayev would replace Pavlov as prime minister after the treaty signing, the vice presidency would be dissolved, and other heads would roll. The KGB, whose chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, was one of those to be demoted, bugged their nocturnal conversation. Yeltsin warned Gorbachev that the walls had ears; Gorbachev did not believe him but acknowledged in his memoirs that Yeltsin had it right.71
The misbegotten coup d’état of August 19–21, 1991, whisked the rug out from under Gorbachev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet state. It was sprung by the conservatives with whom he had aligned himself in 1990–91 and was timed to forestall the signing of the union treaty. Confining Gorbachev to his summer residence at Foros, Crimea, the eight principals inundated Moscow with armor (about 750 tanks and vehicles) and troops, declared Gennadii Yanayev acting president, and appointed themselves a Public Committee for the State of Emergency, a condition they promulgated for a period of six months. As Yeltsin observed in Notes of a President, the committee, or GKChP, was a motley crew. It “had no leader. There was no authoritative person whose opinion would be a watchword and a signal to act.”72 Prime Minister Pavlov found refuge in the bottle; Kryuchkov of the KGB pulled strings behind the scenes; Vice President Yanayev spoke for the GKChP, ashen-faced and with trembling hands. Others represented the higher party apparatus and the military-industrial and agrarian complexes.
The worst oversights were vis-à-vis the born leader who was president of Russia. The fumbling plotters had puzzled at length about Gorbachev but gave little thought to Yeltsin or to his Russian administration. In February 1991, after Yeltsin’s public demand for Gorbachev to resign, a KGB colonel contacted Pavel Voshchanov, a journalist who accompanied Yeltsin on the U.S. trip in 1989, to ask for a meeting with Yeltsin to discuss how he and Yanayev could work together “to save the country.” Voshchanov took the message to Yeltsin, who said, “Let’s see what they are going to do, but we will not have any contact with this hoodlum [shantrapa].”73 The question resurfaced in a conversation on August 7 or 8 between Kryuchkov and the Politburo member and Moscow first secretary, Yurii Prokof’ev, who had delivered a diatribe against Yeltsin at the plenum removing him from the Moscow post in November 1987 and would give the GKChP qualified support. Prokof’ev pushed for a change of heart on Yeltsin: “Now [he told Kryuchkov] the main figure is not Gorbachev, in that Mikhail Sergeyevich has lost all of his authority, but Yeltsin. He is popular and the people support him. This is the figure on whom the problem will hinge.” Betting that Yeltsin’s authoritarian leanings and the animosity he nursed toward Gorbachev would be enough to make him putty in their hands, Kryuchkov “said roughly this: We will reach an agreement with Yeltsin, we will fix this problem without taking any measures beforehand.”74
Yeltsin had been to see Nazarbayev for talks in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, since August 16. Acting on a premonition, he delayed his return on Sunday, August 18, by four hours (he swam in a mountain stream and attended a concert). He had the pilots land at Kubinka, a military field some miles out of Moscow. Had they put down wheels as scheduled at Vnukovo airport, he said in an interview, he would have been arrested and shot by order of Kryuchkov, and the violence used as cover for a nationwide wave of repression. The claim about a plan to shoot him is not made in Yeltsin’s memoir account and seems implausible.75 A post-coup inquiry turned up evidence that KGB officials intended to divert his aircraft to another landing strip, at Chkalovsk, and to detain him there for a conversation with Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov and then “negotiations with the Soviet leadership.” At Kryuchkov’s direction, Viktor Grushko, his first deputy, chaired a meeting on this stratagem at one P.M. on August 17, in which Deputy Defense Minister Vladislav Achalov made it clear that force would have to be used, but, because of uncertainty about Yeltsin’s reaction, was unable to pull the others along. “After the landing [at Chkalovsk], the chief of the airport, on the pretense of delays on the part of those welcoming [the travelers], was to invite B. N. Yeltsin into another room, where Yazov would talk with him. In the course of the meeting, Achalov said that paratroopers and the Alpha Unit [of the KGB] would have to neutralize the guard of the RSFSR president, so as to exclude undesirable excesses such as taking a stand or the use of weapons. Since the participants in the meeting were unable to come to conclusions about how Yeltsin would react to this and what kinds of actions he would take in response, no final decision was made.” And none would be made.76
One of the kingpins of the coup, Oleg Baklanov, notified Gorbachev at Foros on August 18 that they had already arrested Yeltsin, and then modified his story to say they would do so shortly. The available documentation shows Yeltsin to have been high on the general list of seventy persons the GKChP marked for roundup once the tanks went into action. Sixty Alpha rangers were sent in the wee hours of August 19 to the enclosure of RSFSR government dachas in the village of Arkhangel’skoye-2, where Yeltsin slept the night. They had orders to take him alive and hold him on an island at the Zavidovo wildlife reserve ninety miles north of Moscow. Yeltsin was woken up shortly after six in the morning and huddled with his political team, most of whom had been staying at dachas within strolling distance. After first preferring to call a two-hour “precautionary strike” by workers, he moved to more radical tactics. The group put together an anti-coup appeal “To the Citizens of Russia,” which Yeltsin’s daughters typed up in the dacha kitchen and Ivan Silayev telephoned in to the Russian White House. One of its recommendations was for a general strike of indefinite duration.77
Around this time, Kryuchkov revoked the arrest order. He did it upon consultation with Anatolii Luk’yanov, Yeltsin’s former dacha mate, who had fallen in with the putsch and promised to get the USSR Supreme Soviet to provide it with legal cover (though not until August 26). “Kryuchkov was impressed by Luk’yanov’s advice to take a wait-and-see position, letting Yeltsin ‘declare himself’ and giving the people to understand that the democratic leader of Russia was against the imposition of order in the country.”78 Shortly afterward, Kryuchkov tried honey rather than vinegar. It did not work: “Yeltsin refuses to cooperate. I spoke with him by telephone. I tried to make him see reason. It was useless.”79 The one general who wanted “measures to extirpate B. N. Yeltsin’s group of adventurists” by force was Valentin Varennikov, the commander of Soviet ground forces, and he spent August 19 and 20 in Crimea and Kiev, Ukraine. If Varennikov, who fought in Berlin in 1945 and in Afghanistan in the 1980s, had been in Moscow, military behavior toward Yeltsin might have been more ruthless.80
By the time Kryuchkov made news of Yeltsin’s obstreperousness known to his co-conspirators, the president of the RSFSR, after discussion in his team of whether to stay in Arkhangel’skoye-2 and the risks of moving, had been allowed to speed off in a car a little after nine A.M., headed to his office at the White House. He put on a bulletproof vest as he left. Naina Yeltsina said it would no
t be much use, since his head would be unprotected: “And the main thing is the head.”81 His limousine and several accompanying automobiles drove past paratroopers and tanks. Korzhakov’s bodyguard detail was armed but under orders not to shoot unless the presidential automobile was hit. Yeltsin did not speak to his family again until he phoned Yelena to wish her a happy birthday on the morning of August 21.
Holed up in the White House, Yeltsin, his government, and the parliamentary chairman pro tem, Ruslan Khasbulatov, demanded Gorbachev’s release and coordinated resistance to the putsch and the junta that had mounted it. They propagated their edicts by telephone, fax, and the foreign media, since the Soviet media were closed to them. Yeltsin declared that as president of Russia he was assuming command of all military and police units located in the RSFSR. At half past noon, in gray suit (buttoned at the waist) and tie, he marched onto the White House driveway. He was motivated by curiosity as much as anything and dismissed a warning from Gennadii Burbulis that he would be in danger from snipers, from the bushes or a nearby roof. Four or five aides grabbed at his arm and tried to keep him from going forward. “He was completely fearless—either oblivious of the danger or just thinking it didn’t really matter.”82
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