In June, Kryuchkov flew to Havana at the personal invitation of Fidel Castro. According to a report in Izvestia months later, Kryuchkov concluded several secret agreements with Castro in which they assured each other that Cuba would remain Communist and in the Soviet sphere of influence—despite the conflicts between the two countries during the Gorbachev era. A few weeks later, Kryuchkov’s ally Vice President Gennadi Yanayev sent Castro a letter saying that he should not worry about the situation in Moscow: “Soon there will be a change for the better.”
On August 6, after Gorbachev and his family had flown to the Crimea for their summer vacation, Kryuchkov called two of his top aides and told them to write a detailed memorandum analyzing the situation in the country in terms of instituting an immediate state of emergency. The two KGB officials were joined by General Pavel Grachev of the Ministry of Defense. After two days at the KGB’s posh recreation and work complex in the village of Mashkino, the working group told Kryuchkov that a state of emergency would be an extremely complicated affair politically and might even cause further disorder in the country.
“But after the Union Treaty is signed it will be too late to institute a state of emergency,” Kryuchkov told them.
On August 14, Kryuchkov called the working group together once more and told them to work out documents for a state of emergency. They had no time to lose. By the 16th, a draft of the first declaration of the State Committee for the State of Emergency was on Kryuchkov’s desk. At two o’clock that afternoon, Kryuchkov called in his deputy Genii Ageyev and told him to form a group to go to Foros in the Crimea to plan the disconnection of Gorbachev’s communication system with the outside world.
In mid-August, Esther and I were preparing to leave Moscow after three and a half years. We were going to miss our friends, our life in Moscow, but there was a vacation to take and a year-old son, Alex, who had not gotten to know his grandparents and countless cousins. It was time. In those first weeks of August, we said good-bye to friends, and during the day I tried to finish up some pieces and interviews that I wanted to do before going home. Aleksandr Yakovlev, for one, agreed to see me a few days before I left, and I went with Michael Dobbs and Masha Lipman to meet him at his new office at the Moscow City Hall. We talked about many things, especially some of the main events of the previous six years, and at one point we asked if there would be a military coup. He said the reactionary forces were still dangerous, but as for a military coup, well, there was no tradition of it, and besides, the military “can’t run anything on its own—including the military.”
It was strange, then, that two days later, on the 16th, in his resignation from the Communist Party, Yakovlev issued a statement via the Interfax news wire, saying, “The truth is that the Party leadership, in contradiction to its own declarations, is ridding itself of the democratic wing of the Party and is preparing for social revenge and for a Party and state coup.” In view of what was to come, it seemed that Yakovlev had found something out, something specific, on the 15th or 16th. But months later, in a second interview, Yakovlev told me that he knew nothing about the actual planning for the coup. “It’s just that there was a certain logic at work, a feeling I had,” he said. “It made sense that they would struggle for their power. Without it, they had no future.”
On August 17, Shevardnadze told me later, Yakovlev and the other twenty-one leaders of the Movement for Democratic Reforms had met in a closed session and agreed unanimously that a right-wing coup was an imminent threat. “This should have been more than enough warning,” Shevardnadze said. “I reprove the president because he could have come to the same conclusion and the coup would have been prevented.”
The U.S. government was concerned as well. Intelligence reports only grew more anxious after Baker’s meeting with Bessmertnykh in Berlin. In fact, it turned out, according to documents recovered later, that Kryuchkov began holding meetings and drawing up plans for a coup as early as November 1990.
On the 17th, Esther and I went on a picnic in the country with a bunch of our friends and everyone’s babies. The kids splashed around at the river’s edge and smeared themselves with lunch. We watched the Russians sunbathe, marveling at how you could actually see their winter-pale flesh flame up as quickly as a sheet of paper.
After a while, Masha, Seriozha, and I took a long walk along the river and through the woods, past the dilapidated dachas and the old men in dirty T-shirts working on cars that would never run again, past kids chasing their dogs in the dust.
A few weeks before, the three of us had gone to a meeting of Moscow Tribune and heard Andrei Nuikin, a popular journalist and activist, say that a coup d’état was “not only possible, but inevitable.” Nuikin had been saying this for years, and we left the meeting that day thinking he was slightly off his rocker, like someone who has been poring over the Kennedy assassination just a little too long.
Now, as we walked, I asked Seriozha and Masha what they thought. The most important thing, they said, was that they had decided they would never leave, no matter what happened.
“We have this ‘last boat out’ policy,” Masha said. “And that is that if things go really bad, if there are tanks in the streets and people are starving, if the worst happens, then we’ll leave to save the kids. But not before that.”
“Besides, a coup would never hold,” Seriozha said. “I’d be shocked if they were stupid enough to try it, more shocked if it lasted.”
That same afternoon, at a KGB compound outside Moscow known as ABC, Vladimir Kryuchkov convened a meeting of conspirators. It was another of the KGB’s sanatoria, with a swimming pool, saunas, a movie theater, and masseuses. Kryuchkov could feel sure that the meeting would be confidential here. The compound was surrounded by guards and high walls. Gorbachev and his more liberal aides, Anatoly Chernyayev and Georgi Shakhnazarov, were all on vacation in the Crimea. And who listened to Shevardnadze or Yakovlev anymore?
Kryuchkov convened the session outdoors, at a picnic table. Present there were Defense Minister Yazov, Prime Minister Pavlov, Politburo chief Oleg Shenin, military industries chief Oleg Baklanov, and presidential chief of staff Valery Boldin. There were assorted snacks on the table, and everyone drank either Russian vodka or imported whiskey.
“The situation is catastrophic,” Pavlov said. “The country is facing famine. It is in total chaos. Nobody wants to carry out orders. The harvest is disorganized. Machines are idle because they have no spare parts, no fuel. The only hope is a state of emergency.”
Kryuchkov and the others agreed. “I regularly brief Gorbachev on the difficult situation,” Kryuchkov said. “But he is not reacting adequately. He cuts me short and changes the subject. He does not trust my information.”
This was not the first such meeting of the hard-liners, and these were the familiar complaints. But now the situation had changed, grown more urgent. Gorbachev was planning to return to Moscow to sign the new Union Treaty with Yeltsin and the other republican leaders on August 20. With Kryuchkov as their leader, the conspirators decided they could not wait. They would notify their other allies: Vice President Gennady Yanayev, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, and Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly Lukyanov. Months later Lukyanov ruefully told The Washington Post that Gorbachev had surely adopted “antisocialist positions” and that a state of emergency was required to “save the existing order.” But, he admitted, the opportunity to succeed had been “hopelessly missed.” Yeltsin and the other republican leaders were now too strong, too popular.
Still, the conspirators pressed on. They decided to send a delegation to the Crimea to confront Gorbachev. They would give him an ultimatum: support the state of emergency or step down. Someone suggested that one member of the delegation ought to be Boldin, Gorbachev’s chief of staff, his liegeman for more than a decade.
Yazov turned to Boldin and said, “Et tu, Brute?”
On his trip home, Yazov recalled later, he felt a fleeting sense of pity for Gorbachev.
“If he had signed the treat
y and then gone on vacation,” the marshal thought, “everything would have been fine.”
AUGUST 18, 1991
The morning after he’d been arrested, Marshal Dmitri Yazov sat in full-dress uniform and answered the first questions of the Russian prosecutor. Yazov said he felt like “an old idiot.” He would spend the rest of his life wondering how he could have been so stupid, how he could do something that would bring such dishonor on him and the armed forces that he had served for a half century. The plot was slipshod from the first, he admitted, the product of occasional emotional discussions and then the sudden impulse to head off Gorbachev and the republican leaders before it was too late.
“We were already meeting earlier at various places. We talked about the situation in the country,” Yazov said in his slow, slightly doltish voice. “It was unavoidable that we came to the conclusion that the president was to blame. He had distanced himself from the Party.… Gorbachev in recent years had been going abroad and often we had no idea in general what he was discussing there.… We were just not ready to become greatly dependent on the U.S.A., politically, economically or militarily.…”
QUESTION: In what form did you make a decision?
YAZOV: There was no real plan for a plot. We met on Saturday [August 17].
QUESTION: At whose invitation?
YAZOV: Kryuchkov’s.
QUESTION: Where did you meet?
YAZOV: At a point in Moscow at the end of Leninski Prospekt—a left turn near the police post, there is a road there.… At the end of the working day, Kryuchkov called and said we had to talk. I came. Then Shenin came, then Baklanov. And then it was said: maybe we should go to Gorbachev and speak with him.
QUESTION: Why was there such a hurry? Was it because the Union Treaty was to be signed [on the 20th]?
YAZOV: Of course. We were not happy with this draft and we knew the state would fall apart.…
QUESTION: What brought up the idea of an Emergency Committee?
YAZOV: We were in Pavlov’s office. Yanayev was there, and at about nine Lukyanov came. He came by plane. He’d been on vacation. Lukyanov said: “I can’t be a member of such a committee, I’m chairman of the Supreme Soviet, a legal organ which is ruled by this and that. Naturally, I can do something—I put out an announcement saying that the result of the Union Treaty would be the destruction of the constitution.” After that, he left. Yanayev was already rather drunk.…
The last good coup operation had been in Poland, in December 1981. On a freezing night between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., the military and the secret police rounded up thousands of Solidarity activists and sympathizers and locked them up in “internment camps.” The military regime secured the borders and then invaded its own country with tanks and troops, cutting up Warsaw and other key areas into carefully patrolled zones. They took over the radio and television stations. Over and over, they broadcast martial music, the national anthem, and the words of the Leader, the declaration of a “state of war.” In case anyone missed the point, the newscasters wore army uniforms. All demonstrations, all unions and student organizations were banned, all mail and telephone traffic censored. There was a curfew from 10:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. The Military Council told the population that they were acting to prevent a “reactionary coup.” They were acting in the name of “national salvation.” It was a perfect operation.
Perfect, but nothing new. In a letter dated September 26–27, 1917, Lenin wrote a letter that later became a widely distributed pamphlet called “Marxism and Rebellion.” Just a few months from grabbing power, he was clearly obsessed with the need for absolute ruthlessness and efficiency: “To approach a rebellion in a Marxist way,” he wrote, “that is, as one would an art, it is necessary not to lose a minute moving loyal battalions to the most important objects, to arrest the government … seize the telegraph and telephone. … One cannot at this critical moment remain true to Marxism and not treat rebellion as an art.”
The successors to Lenin and Jaruzelski made feeble attempts to ape the old efficiency. From a factory in Pskov, they ordered a quarter million pairs of handcuffs; they ordered the printing of 300,000 arrest forms. Kryuchkov issued secret orders doubling the pay of all KGB men and called them back from vacation to go on alert. He cleared out two floors of Lefortovo Prison and prepared a secret bunker in Lubyanka in case the leaders of the coup needed to find safe refuge. And to keep pace with the times, they would carry out the coup under legal pretenses: a nation in crisis, a president taken ill. They would fill the stores for a few months, drawing on military stockpiles kept in case of war. The people would acquiesce. Hadn’t they always?
Gorbachev was resting in splendor. When he came to power in 1985, he built himself a magnificent place to rest, a compound in the Crimean town of Foros that cost the Soviet government an estimated $20 million. He and his family lived in the main house, a three-story structure with a central hall done up in marble and gilt. It was the sort of opulence you see sometimes when a sheik moves into Beverley Hills. There was a hotel for the staff and security guards, a guest house for thirty people, fruit trees, an olive grove, an indoor swimming pool, a movie theater, an elaborate security system, and an escalator to the Black Sea.
It was a wonder that Gorbachev went on his vacation at all. At the worst moments, it was never really safe for him to leave Moscow. The Nina Andreyeva letter in 1988 was published as he was leaving for Yugoslavia. The planning for the Tbilisi massacre of 1989 came when he was in England. The conservatives in the Politburo often made right-wing speeches when Gorbachev was in the Crimea. And now, despite all the warnings and omens, he left Moscow again. He took long walks on the beach with Raisa. He swam, watched movies, read volumes on Russian and Soviet history. His doctors did what they could for his bad back. Gorbachev also took time to write a speech for the Union Treaty signing ceremonies and a long article on the future—an article that even pondered the possibility of a right-wing coup.
Gorbachev has said that he was not naive, he knew well what the conservatives were capable of; but he has also insisted that he had no prior knowledge that there would be a coup, or even a concerted demand for the declaration of a state of emergency. According to phone logs obtained by Cable News Network, Gorbachev talked four times with Kryuchkov on August 18; he also talked with Yanayev, Shenin, Pavlov, and the deputy prime minister, Vladimir Shcherbakov. Sometime after 2:00 P.M., Yanayev called Gorbachev and asked about meeting him at the airport in Moscow when he returned from vacation the next day. They agreed to see each other then.
Yanayev, who was probably making sure the mark was still in place, was the worst sort of Party nonentity. He was a vain man of small intelligence, a womanizer, and a drunk. I’m not sure it is possible to describe just how hard it is to acquire a reputation as a drunk in Russia. And Yanayev was not merely a drunk, he was a buffoon. On the day he went before the Congress for confirmation as vice president, one of the deputies asked him if he was a healthy man. “My wife has no complaints,” Yanayev said and snickered.
At around 4.00 P.M., Georgi Shakhnazarov, one of Gorbachev’s last remaining liberal advisers, called to check on details for the trip to Moscow. Then, almost as an afterthought, Shakhnazarov asked Gorbachev about his health. Gorbachev said he was fine except for his chronic back pain.
Gorbachev had worked hard on his speech for the treaty signing, and now he wanted to spend some time with Raisa and their daughter, Irina, son-in-law, Anatoly, and granddaughter, Oksana. But at 4:50, the chief of Gorbachev’s security detail told him that they had unexpected visitors, including Yuri Plekhanov, the head of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, the division charged with the security of the leadership.
Gorbachev picked up a phone to find out what this was all about. He had called no meetings and he was not accustomed to unannounced visitors. The line was dead. Then he picked up another, also dead. Gorbachev was stunned. Raisa came in to see what was going on. “Mikhail Sergeyevich has eight or ten telephone operators and all the phones were silent,” she
said later. “I picked up the receiver and checked it out and all the phones were silent, even that of the commander in chief. We have this phone everywhere—in our country house, in our flat—everywhere. It’s under a kind of lid and we do not even remove dust from this phone because we are not supposed to remove the lid. He picked up the receiver on that phone and there was silence there. We knew that was it. There was nothing else we could do.”
Before the visitors got inside the house, Gorbachev knew perfectly well something was very wrong. He called his family around him and told them “that anything could follow this.” They, in turn, said they were ready to see it through with him “to the end.” Later, when she described the scene, Raisa seemed to refer to the murder of the Romanov family after the Bolshevik coup to describe the depths of her own worst fears: “We know our history and its tragic aspects.”
“I paced the room and thought,” Gorbachev recalled. “Not about myself, but about my family, my granddaughters. I decided: in this situation, it is impossible to value my own skin.”
The delegation arrived: Plekhanov, Shenin from the Politburo, Baklanov of the military-industrial complex, Gorbachev’s personal assistant, Boldin, and, representing the army, General Varennikov, the head of ground forces. Gorbachev led them to his study.
“Who sent you?” he said.
“The committee,” one of them said. “The committee appointed in connection with the emergency.”
“Who appointed such a committee? I didn’t appoint such a committee, and neither did the Supreme Soviet.”
Varennikov told Gorbachev he had little choice. Either go along or resign.
“You are nothing but adventurers and traitors, and you will pay for this. I don’t care what happens to you, but you will destroy the country. Only those who want to commit suicide can now suggest a totalitarian regime in the country. You are pushing it to a civil war!”
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