Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  At around 1:00 P.M., a fight broke out in the composing room at the Izvestia plant on Pushkin Square. A few of the reporters had brought back a copy of Yeltsin’s appeal to the people for resistance to the coup, and, with the support of the printers, they had already set it in type for the evening edition. But Yefimov’s deputy, Dmitri Mamleyev, demanded that Yeltsin’s words not appear.

  The printers were furious. Pavel Vichenkov, one of the foremen, shouted, “We voted for Yeltsin! You can publish the statements of the committee, but we insist on Yeltsin’s statement going into the paper as well.”

  “It’s not your job to decide what goes into the paper,” said Yevgeny Gemanov, one of Yefimov’s men. “That’s the job of the editors. Your job is to print what you are told to print.”

  “You can shoot us,” a worker, Pavel Bushkov, said, “but we’re not going to put this paper out without Yeltsin’s statement. We live the life of animals, in poverty, and we don’t want our children to live the same way.”

  Yefimov had missed the start of the battle because he was racing back to Moscow from his vacation house. As soon as he walked through the door, a small group of reporters surrounded him and demanded he publish Yeltsin’s statement. Yefimov said there was no way and yanked the metal type from the printing press.

  Ordinarily, Yefimov would have had his way. But now the printers, like the Siberian miners or the factory hands of Minsk, said they would sooner quit than give in. They would sooner destroy the presses than publish Izvestia without the appeal of Boris Yeltsin.

  Twenty hours late, Izvestia appeared on the streets of Moscow and in every city and village of the Soviet Union. The Emergency Committee’s proclamations blared out from page one. Yeltsin’s appeal to resist the coup was on page two.

  It was time for the junta to face the press. An early-evening appearance at the Foreign Ministry press center was part of their strategy to put a face of normalcy on the situation, to create the impression somehow that this was not a putsch but a legal, constitutional transition. This was their chance to compete on the evening news broadcasts of the world, to counter the image of Yeltsin, like Lenin at the Finland Station, rallying the people from the top of a tank.

  In the first hours of the coup, Kryuchkov, for one, felt euphoric. There were no strikes, no demonstrations. Radical republican presidents such as Zviad Gamsakhurdia in Georgia made no move to act against the coup. Yanayev, for his part, wandered around his office and the Kremlin hallways. Other men were making the decisions. But this was his moment. At the press conference, he had to convince the people beyond the camera that all was well, that he was in control.

  The problem was that Yanayev could not control his own self. He sniffed like a smack addict in need of a fix, and his hands trembled like little wild animals quivering in front of him. He was lost from the start. His answers were transparent lies, his attempt at calm had the brittle ring of hysteria. The reporters, except some of the obvious reactionary plants, showed no fear or respect in their questions. They even laughed at him! Gorbachev had been stripped of his “nuclear football,” the case containing the codes. All the codes were now in the hands of the military and the KGB. A junta in control of a vast nuclear power, and they laughed!

  About halfway through the disaster, Yanayev called on a twenty-four-year-old reporter from Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Tatyana Malkina. Just a year before, Malkina had worked as a low-level researcher at Moscow News, rummaging through the clips, doing scut work for the older reporters. Now she was a staffer on the hottest paper in Moscow. She got out of her seat, took the microphone, and fixed her eyes on the half-drunk pretender to power.

  “Tell me, please,” she said, “do you realize you have carried out a state coup? And which comparison do you find more appropriate—1917 or 1964?” The Bolshevik coup or the overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev?

  For an instant, the man who would be king looked at his own wretched hands; he seemed sad, as if he wondered if the shaking would ever stop.

  At the Ministry of Defense, Dmitri Yazov watched the press conference with his wife, Emma. She wept as she watched the pathetic spectacle and begged her husband to call Gorbachev and call off the coup.

  “Dima, what have you joined?” she said through her tears. “You always laughed at them! Call Gorbachev.…”

  But the marshal told his wife that was impossible now. The connections had all been severed.

  Working out of a war room on the third floor, Yeltsin signed a decree creating a backup shadow government and dispatched a team of twenty-three civilian and military leaders in the Russian government to set it up in a secret headquarters thirty-five miles outside Yeltsin’s home city of Sverdlovsk in the Urals.

  “The idea was to act in the name of the Russian government if the White House was captured,” said Aleksei Yablokov, Yeltsin’s environment minister and one of those who went to Sverdlovsk. Working in bunkers thirty feet underground that had been built during the cold war, the Russians began sending an unending series of faxes and telexes calling on local organizations and governments around the Soviet Union to resist the decrees of the junta.

  The leader of the Urals Military District was one of the most reactionary generals in the country, Albert Makashov. It had been Makashov who had run against Yeltsin for the presidency on a purely Stalinist platform. Now Makashov was telling his charges to round up any suspicious people, including “cosmopolitans,” the old Stalinist code word for Jews. But his troops paid little attention. The passions of the city of Sverdlovsk were with Yeltsin. More than 100,000 people staged a demonstration defying the junta in the main city square. There were no arrests.

  Valentin Pavlov convened a meeting of all the government’s ministers at 6:00 P.M. Environment Minister Nikolai Vorontsov, the only non-Communist in the group, took notes on the session and read some of them to Masha and me before they came out in the press days later.

  “It was a chorus of agreement,” said Vorontsov. Every minister but three expressed absolute support for the coup. After Pavlov repeated the tale of the “counterrevolutionaries” with their Stinger missiles and evil intentions, one minister after another rose to say the committee was their last hope. They made little secret that what they wanted most of all was a chance to stay in power, to hold on to the last sweet scraps of privilege. Vladimir Gusev, the head of the state committee on chemistry and biotechnology, was a typical case, telling his fellow ministers, “If we step back even an iota, we will sacrifice our jobs, our lives. We will not have another chance.”

  When Pavlov finished the meeting, he spoke with Yazov on the phone. Yazov could tell immediately that the prime minister, whom everyone knew as “Mr. Porky,” was drunk again.

  “Arrest them all,” Pavlov said at one point.

  Yazov knew things were going badly. Where was the plan? He was beginning to think that the collapse of the plot would be better than its success. But he pressed on.

  The junta, of course, had banned the Russian Republic’s new television station. The public would have no chance to see the puckish hosts of the news program Vesti. There would only be Central Television, and for news, there would be only Vremya. Just like the old days.

  Even the best directors and reporters at Vremya knew they could not be heroes. They could not take to the airwaves with appeals for resistance. Their entire operation was riddled with informers, agents, and officers of the KGB. It was out of the question. Besides, all the really irreverent people had long ago gone to Vesti and the more liberal shows.

  But a young Vremya reporter named Sergei Medvedev watched the CNN feeds and decided he had to do something. His editors gave him an assignment for the 9:00 P.M. broadcast: film a feature on “Moscow today.” The idea, he knew, was to show how calm everything was, how “life is going on as normal.” In fact, it was true. Much of Moscow, like nearly all of the rest of the country, did seem normal. People went to work. Some watched television and read the papers and tried to figure out what had happened. There were millions of
people who thought the coup might even do some good; and there were millions who could not have cared less. But Medvedev also made sure to fill in the rest of the picture. He got some brief footage of the scenes around the White House: the barricades, the protesters. He even included a clip of Yeltsin on the tank. He handed it over to his editors and hoped for the best.

  Yelena Pozdniak, a veteran director at Vremya, also decided she would do what she could to preserve, at the very least, a marginal sense of honesty. She got the word from Kravchenko and his deputies that if it was technically possible, she should edit out Yanayev’s trembling hands at the press conference, the laughter in the hall, the scoffing reactions of the correspondents. Although that was easy enough to do, Pozdniak thought, “Let them see it all!” She’d had enough of the lies. In the days of Brezhnev, she had cleaned up the stutters and blurts of the leaders on a nightly basis. Brezhnev had the verbal style of a senile crocodile and required special polishing. “He used to have a favored word, kompetentnost [“competency”], to which he always added an extra letter: kompententnost,” Pozdniak recalled. “I had to find another speech where he said it correctly and then dub that in so no one would notice.” But not this time.

  Valentin Lazutkin, Kravchenko’s deputy and a semiliberal man, also made his move. On the air, his rebellion would look slight, if not invisible; the broadcast was filled with the proclamations and approved commentaries of the committee. But he put Medvedev’s piece on the air and he let the clips of the press conference run, complete with Yanayev’s waggling hands.

  “People got to see that Yeltsin was alive, that he was free and working, and that meant there was hope,” Lazutkin said. The minute Vremya went off the air, the calls started coming in: three Politburo members and, worst of all, Boris Pugo, the interior minister.

  Pugo was in a rage. “The story on Moscow was treacherous!” he said. “You have given instructions to the people on where to go and what to do. You will answer for this.”

  Later, Yanayev called, too. He did not seem to know what to talk about, and so Lazutkin politely asked him how he had liked the newscast. “I saw it,” Yanayev said. “It was a good, balanced report. It showed everything from different points of view.”

  “But they said I would be punished for it,” Lazutkin said.

  “Who are they?” Yanayev asked. “From the Central Committee? Fuck ’em.”

  Beginning that night, Lazutkin acquired a new friend: a colonel of the KGB. The colonel went wherever Lazutkin went, listened to all his conversations, watched as he made all his decisions.

  “Why are you here?” Lazutkin asked.

  “For your security,” the colonel said.

  But soon the KGB man came around. He and Lazutkin exchanged smiles as the coup began to erode. And then they took out the bottle, the eternal equalizer of men.

  “Cheers!” the agent said.

  “Cheers!” said the man who had shown Big Brother with his pants down.

  Lazutkin’s son was proud of his father’s subtle rebellion, but he could not call him to say so. Sergei Lazutkin was at the White House, on the barricades.

  AUGUST 20, 1991

  For the three days of the coup, Yeltsin did not sleep. Early on the morning of the 20th, he and his aides looked out the windows and out to the barricades. There were still people outside the White House, about ten thousand or so gathered around portable radios or little campfires. But those inside were nervous. They needed huge crowds. They had to depend on the most undependable thing in the history of Russia: the stubborn, free will of its people.

  In the hallways, people milled around, fueled by nerves and rumor. There were middle-aged men armed to the teeth, men who had not held a rifle since the day they left the army. A few hundred young men who worked for new security guard agencies, such as “Bells” and “Aleks,” signed up with the Afghan vets. In the corners of offices, under secretaries’ desks, there were little mountains of machine guns, grenades, Molotov cocktails. Mstislav Rostropovich, who had played his cello less than two years before in front of the remnants of the Berlin Wall, returned to his homeland now and stood guard near Yeltsin’s office for a few hours cradling an AK-47 assault rifle. Some of the best-known “men of the sixties” were coming: Yuri Karyakin, the Dostoevsky scholar; Ales Adamovich. The New Wave politicians were there, too: Sergei Stankevich with his peachy cheeks and leather jacket looking like a student council president trying to be cool; Ilya Zaslavsky, limping urgently from office to office; the constitutional scholar Oleg Rumantsyev and the lawyer Sergei Shakrai hunched over desks, drafting decrees for Yeltsin.

  Yeltsin’s men seemed to have a pipeline to all the goings-on at the key points of the coup. They had military men calling them with intelligence reports, Russian KGB calling in with information about Kryuchkov. At about the same time, Yazov was at the Ministry of Defense cursing about a lack of active support from the Party, cursing the passive resistance of some of his top generals. One group after another was telling him they were “not prepared” to attack, and he, too, felt that it was all going wrong, that a “lake of blood” would not bring victory but deeper shame.

  As traffic picked up out on the streets, Yeltsin’s people could see that the crowd around the White House was thickening. With the help of leaflets pasted up in subway stations and bus stops, people heard more about the truth of what was going on and what was needed. Yeltsin called a demonstration for 10:30 A.M.

  Standing on the White House balcony above a huge Russian tricolor and behind a bulletproof shield, he showed his combative face and sounded his baritone, warning that the “junta used no restraint in grabbing power and the junta feels itself under no restraint in keeping it.”

  “Doesn’t Yazov have his hands covered in blood from other republics? Hasn’t Pugo bloodied his hands in the Baltics and the Caucasus?… The [Russian] prosecutors and the Interior Ministry have their orders: whoever fulfills the commands of this illegal committee will be prosecuted!

  “The troops have refused to follow these putschists blindly. I believe it is necessary to support these troops and together with them observe a sense of order and discipline.… I am convinced that here, in democratic Moscow, aggression of the conservative forces will not win out. Democracy will. And we will stay here as long as it takes for the junta to be brought to justice!”

  It was not a brilliant speech, but it gave more than 100,000 people the chance to see the symbol they were risking themselves to protect, whatever his faults and vanities, Yeltsin was now the symbol of democracy, he was the man they had elected—not Gorbachev. Of all the speakers on the White House balcony, it took Yelena Bonner, Sakharov’s widow and no friend of Gorbachev, to mention the man who was now languishing in fallen luxury in Foros: “I had my disagreements with Gorbachev,” she said, “but he was the president of this country and we cannot allow a bunch of bandits to take over.”

  Oleg Kalugin, who had eluded arrest by his former colleagues at the KGB, introduced a lieutenant colonel in the secret police who appealed to “Volodya” Kryuchkov to stop the coup which was “about to collapse.” The much-loved comic Gennadi Khazanov imitated Gorbachev the way Rich Little used to do Nixon. In his best Gorbachev voice, full of softened g’s and grammatical slips, he said, “I feel healthy, but I just can’t help thinking that you can’t carry off a clean policy with trembling hands.”

  Then Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the poet of equal parts irreverence and self-promotion, got his chance at the microphone.

  No! Russia will not fall again on her knees for interminable years,

  With us are Pushkin, Tolstoy.

  With us stands the whole awakened people.

  And the Russian parliament, like a wounded marble swan of freedom, defended by the people, swims into immortality.

  It was far from Yevtushenko’s worst, and the crowd loved it. All the same, I preferred the four-liners that were already spreading around Moscow, including:

  We’re told that order’s now assured us,

/>   But the junta’s hand can’t rest;

  They’re a little Pinochetist

  And just slightly Husseinesque.

  In a cool drizzle, I walked down Kutuzovsky Prospekt, across the bridge, and to the White House. I saw a group of men in their twenties, well-dressed Soviet business types, carrying stacks of pizzas from the Pizza Hut down the road. Another delegation of ruble millionaires had been dispatched to McDonald’s for further provisions.

  I stayed all afternoon and into the night. At 4:00 P.M. there was a rumor that plainclothes KGB agents had gotten into the building and had been caught. Then Yeltsin cut short a phone call with John Major, the British prime minister, saying that tanks were on their way to the White House. There was, it turned out, no such raid in progress. The Kremlin was busy with other things. For one thing, Yanayev contacted Saddam Hussein and promised to restore good relations with Iraq. In all, the coup won support from Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and Fidel Castro.