Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  By the early evening, support for the resistance was pouring in over the telex and fax machines. The leaders of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and other regions, after some hesitation, were speaking out against the junta. Even the Ukrainian KGB chief, General Nikolai Golushko, called to say that he did not support the coup. Just as important, there were pathetic signs of weakness, news that Pavlov had been hospitalized for “high blood pressure.” There were rumors that Yazov and Kryuchkov had resigned. Lukyanov, oily to the last, told one of Gorbachev’s aides, “I had nothing to do with the putsch.” The military leaders supporting the Russian government were growing bolder by the hour. Colonel General Pavel Grachev, commander of the airborne units, kept putting off Varennikov, the ground forces commander who wanted him to get in place for a raid on the White House. Shaposhnikov even ordered his men to be prepared to intercept and shoot down assault helicopters on the way to the White House. Later, Shaposhnikov said that he had even considered the possibility of making a retaliatory air raid on the Kremlin if the conspirators managed to storm the White House.

  In the war room, Yeltsin, Kobets, and Rutskoi knew that if there was going to be a raid it would have to come soon, that night. The plotters could see that the crowds around the White House were growing. In the West, some commentators were saying that Moscow had not reacted the way Prague had in 1989, when virtually the entire population was on the streets. True enough. But the Czechs could also rest assured that their leaders were not about to launch a full military attack against them. In Moscow, with fifty thousand troops in the city, with the Manezh, Red Square, the Ring Road, Lenin Hills, and other points lined with tanks, there were no such assurances. What assurances could there be after Baku, Tbilisi, Vilnius, Riga, and Osh?

  On the barricades outside, as people milled around, their feet sloshing in the puddles, there were new rumors every minute, and every rumor went out over the radio. There were self-appointed leaders with megaphones making pronouncements, few of which made any sense, all of which caused even greater nervousness and confusion. Just to stand still in that crowd took some endurance. For a while there was boredom, and then, with the newest rumor, the skin tingled the way it does before you jump from a high board or head, inexorably, into a car accident. I saw one man, a vet in his old jungle fatigues, holding a stick in one hand for protection and a bottle of vodka in the other for bravery. The most reassuring sight was the way the soldiers in their tanks welcomed kids aboard and flirted with the girls. There was hope in that.

  And there was real hope in the grit of these people. Along one barricade on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, I talked with a middle-aged woman, Regina Bogachova, who said she would sooner be crushed by a tank than move. “I am ready to die right here, right on this spot. I will not move. I am fifty-five years old and for years nothing but obedience and inertia was pounded into my brain. The Young Pioneers, the Young Communist League, the unions, the Communist Party, all of them taught me not to answer back. To be a good Soviet, a screw in the machine. But Monday morning my friend called me and said, ‘Turn on the radio.’ I didn’t need to. I heard a rumbling and went out on my balcony and saw the tanks rumbling down below, on the Mozhaisk Highway. These monsters! They have always thought they could do anything to us! They have thrown out Gorbachev and now they are threatening a government I helped elect. I will ignore the curfew. I’ll let a tank roll over me if I have to. I’ll die right here if I have to.”

  The dramas at the newspaper offices had only heightened.

  At Izvestia, Yefimov took a call from Yanayev and was told that he should not publish any more of Yeltsin’s decrees or any other material not authorized by the junta. Yefimov, of course, wheezed his ready agreement. When one of his deputies told him that he was acting so weakly that “none of us are going to defend you if they put you on trial,” Yefimov fired her. He was going to follow the orders of the junta, no matter what.

  At Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the staff worked day and night gathering material. Especially after the first day, when the junta showed its wavering hand, they were having a blast. This was their moment. Vladimir Todres, a twenty-five-year-old political reporter, said that he and his friends at the paper saw the coup as the defining event of their generation, the street-level, media-age equivalent of what the Twentieth Party Congress had been for Karpinsky, Gorbachev, and the thaw generation. “For us, the putsch was not a matter of simple politics,” Todres said. “Usually we hate politics, to tell you the truth. But this was the Pepsi Generation under threat. Our very existence was in jeopardy. The bikers feared for their motorcycles. The young businessmen worried about their markets. The racketeers even thought about their bottom line and came to defend the White House. Prostitutes, students, scholars, everybody had an interest in this new life, and we were just not willing to give it all up to these old men. And also, it was like being in a great movie. Life and art were all mixed up together. My friends who were abroad were heartbroken, not because they felt fear, but because they felt left out. They couldn’t be in the movie.”

  The journalism part of the movie was splendid. On the first day of the coup, Nezavisimaya Gazeta’s, editor in chief, Vitaly Tretyakov, had decided not to defy the coup plotters’ press ban. His thinking was that a quick, wrong move could endanger the staff and end the paper entirely. Some of the younger reporters were furious, especially when they heard that the printers at Izvestia were willing to challenge the ban and work the presses. Tretyakov insisted. But on the 20th, as it became slightly clearer that the coup leaders had neither the will nor the level of organization to mount a full-scale attack on the press as a whole, Tretyakov and the staff put out a photocopied version of Nezavisimaya Gazeta with the lead headline “The Feeble Coup: It Is Still Not Over.” The edition was filled with news about the putsch from Moscow and the provinces. The few thousand readers in Moscow who managed to find the underground edition learned that the coup was almost completely centered on Moscow. The main problem spots outside Moscow were the Baltic capitals, where troops quickly took up positions at the main television towers and other points, and the region of Tatarstan, where Party leaders calculated that they had a better chance of gaining independence from the Russian Republic if they supported the coup. The attack on Leningrad had stalled, and, despite some early wavering by the republican leaders, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and other key republics saw almost no visible sign of the coup on the streets. Otherwise, the country was quiet. You could walk for just a few minutes from the very center of Moscow and not know that there was a coup d’état in progress.

  But at the center of the coup, the reporters were working the story hard, especially Sergei Parkhomenko and Pavel Felgenhauer, the paper’s military correspondent. Felgenhauer stayed in the White House throughout the siege and was in constant contact with the military leaders who planned Yeltsin’s strategy of resistance in their makeshift “war room.” Felgenhauer, a bearish man who spoke fluent English, had never set out to be a journalist or a military expert. He had a Ph.D. in biology and had won what he called “a measure of international fame” with his thesis, “RNA Synthesis During the Maturation of Frog Oocytes.” He told me, “I quit science because you can’t do science anymore in this country. We can’t even afford test tubes or food for the frogs. So I became a journalist. I always liked to write.”

  Felgenhauer had followed military affairs the way some American kids follow baseball. It was all a game, a combination of action and statistics. “Pavel is a kid who likes toy soldiers. He’s a gigantic forty-year-old kid who is a genius,” Parkhomenko said. “He loved the coup because he got to play soldier and war correspondent all at once.”

  Parkhomenko could not believe the look of supreme contentment in his colleagues’ eyes as they sat in the White House. “As for me, I was terrified,” he said after the coup. “I thought I was a dead man. They try to say that it was all nothing, that there was never any danger. But that’s ridiculous. It was all a war of nerves, a dangerous telephone war. There were orders and counterorders
by phones. When the Russian government found out that a contingent of tanks was being sent, they set up rows of gas canisters so that there would be a huge explosion. Their strategy all along was to maximize the threat of bloodshed, to scare the shit out of the KGB and the putschists by essentially using unarmed people as a shield.”

  In Foros, Gorbachev listened to his Sony transistor radio. Several times a day, he passed along his demands to his captors: to be freed, to address the people. Raisa told him not to eat the food he was served; eat some of the food given to the guards instead. She was afraid he would be poisoned, shot. “We tried to keep calm,” Raisa would say later. “We tried to go through our normal day.” But it was impossible, and she, especially, suffered, losing control of one hand—from sheer fright, apparently. Late at night, Gorbachev’s son-in-law, Anatoly, set up a videocamera and taped Gorbachev reading what was essentially his last testament, declaring that he had refused the plotters and saying what he stood for.

  “… I have been deprived of my governmental communications, the plane which was here with me, also the helicopters.…”

  Gorbachev and his son-in-law made four copies of the film and snipped them up into pieces. They thought they could hide them somehow, sneak them out to Moscow.

  “… I am under arrest, and no one is allowed on the grounds of my dacha.…”

  Gorbachev’s aide Chernyayev said maybe he could swim along the shore to freedom and, from there, reach the Russian government. But it was absurd. There was nothing they could do. The battle, now, was elsewhere.

  The first shots came just before midnight, the distant popping sounds of tracer bullets. Had the storming of the White House begun?

  General Kobets knew that if the KGB and military units got past the barricades, they would lose the White House in “not less than fifteen minutes.” There were a number of elements still in the Russians’ favor. The barricades, organized by the war room, had been built high and strong by the protesters on the street. They might not stop everything—or anything—but they put an element of doubt and chaos into the plotters’ blueprints.

  Suddenly, tens of thousands of people who had come from all parts of the city to protect the White House began their defiant chant: “Pozor! Pozor!” (“Shame! Shame!”) And then, “Rossiya! Rossiya!”

  Until the next morning, few would learn what had happened. Three protesters were killed when they clashed with a tank near the barricades on the Garden Ring Road. Some of the demonstrators set fire to tanks with Molotov cocktails. The smell of burning gasoline in the air did nothing to ease the nerves of the huge crowds defending the White House.

  Now the coup had produced three martyrs. How many more were to come?

  The factory seamstress, Nadezhda Kudinova, took up her position on the barricades across Kutuzovsky Prospekt. She was soaked from the rain, but someone gave her dry socks and shoes. The usually surly administrators across the street at the Ukraine Hotel opened up their rooms for the women on the barricades to sleep in two- and three-hour shifts. All the while, Nadezhda kept her radio tuned to Echo of Moscow and listened to Rutskoi and Khasbulatov, who were urging calm—civil disobedience, but calm. Every few minutes there were bulletins about troop movements, the possibility that reconnaissance planes would signal an attack. “We always felt they were there with us,” Kudinova said. “They spoke in a special sort of language, in a heightened tone, like the words a man speaks before his death. They spoke to us very candidly, creating a feeling of unity beyond description. We heard them and they heard us.”

  The women defenders formed the front line of the southern barricade with a handpainted sign: “Soviet Soldiers: Don’t Shoot Your Mothers.” They were ready to die as heroes of war. “The people in the White House ordered us to step aside, not to jump on the tanks if they came,” Kudinova said. “But we knew that if the tanks came, we would step in front of them. We talked about where we should put the tanks that had defected over to our side, in front of the barricades or behind them. We put them behind the barricades, because if they had been captured, the coup loyalists would have shot their crews dead. They are just young kids, after all.”

  The plan to storm the White House was brutally simple.

  On the afternoon of the 20th, the deputy defense minister, Vladislav Achalov, presided over a planning session for “Operation Thunder,” a meeting that included such leading generals as Boris Gromov, Pavel Grachev, Aleksandr Lebed, and Sergei Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s lead military adviser, as well as KGB leaders Genii Ageyev and Viktor Karpukhin, the head of the elite Alpha Group. With the help of airborne and KGB troops, the Alpha Group would storm the parliament, blasting through the doors with grenade launchers, and then they would make their way to the fifth floor to arrest, or kill, Yeltsin. The Beta Group would suppress any resistance while the Wave troops, working with other KGB units, would arrest the other Russian leaders. The tanks would fire shells to deafen and stun the defenders of the White House, and helicopter gunships would provide support and storm the roof and balconies.

  The Alpha Group already had a reputation for bloody efficiency. In 1979, they burst into the palace of the Afghan dictator Amin and murdered him on the eve of the Soviet invasion. (This was later described in the Soviet press as the “fraternal invitation of the Afghan peoples.”) And it was the Alpha Group that had been the lead unit in Vilnius during the January 1991 massacre.

  Although Kryuchkov’s intentions were clear, the loyalties and intentions of the KGB as a whole were a muddle. KGB sources were the first to alert the Russian government that Yeltsin was to be arrested as the coup began. They provided the Russian government with crucial information about the communications systems of the Defense Ministry and the KGB itself. Moscow News reported later that the KGB gave Yeltsin’s team a printing press to publish its leaflets, and retired agents now in private business contributed more than a million rubles to a Russian defense fund. Early in the putsch, middle-rank officers in the KGB drafted a statement denouncing the junta.

  Yeltsin’s sources in the KGB told him that the Alpha Group would move on the 19th at about 6:00 P.M. But there was dissension in the ranks. After the coup, sources in the KGB told me that the middle and “upper-middle” ranks of both the secret police and the army had no faith in their leaders. They saw them as muddled dinosaurs, not to be trusted. They saw how, time and again, the leadership conceived its schemes—the war in Afghanistan, the assaults in Tbilisi, Baku, and Vilnius—and then avoided all blame. Gorbachev’s aide Aleksandr Yakovlev told me that even such generals as Gromov and Grachev, decorated veterans of the Afghan war, “were working both sides of the street, keeping in close contact with the White House even as they were sitting in on the planning sessions of the coup. They’re no democrats, but they refused to have blood on their hands for the sake of such idiots as Kryuchkov and Yazov.”

  “There is a huge crowd,” General Aleksandr Lebed said at the afternoon meeting with Achalov. “They are building barricades. There will be heavy casualties. There are many armed men around the White House.”

  Yazov arrived and said, “Well, what have we got?”

  Achalov said they simply didn’t have the force to storm the White House successfully. Yazov told his subordinates to call in more troops, “we can’t lose the initiative.” But he seemed to let the matter drop.

  At a separate planning meeting of the Alpha Group, a senior officer, Anatoly Salayev, got up and said, “They want to smear us in blood. Each of you is free to act according to his conscience. I for one will not storm the White House.” In Tbilisi, Baku, and Vilnius, the military and KGB rank and file had seen how they had been used to shed blood, and each time the leading men in power dodged responsibility. They simply would not let it happen again, especially not when it involved killing their own countrymen.

  In the meantime, KGB and undercover police agents continued to take photographs and videos of the scene outside and inside the White House. “We filmed everything,” Karpukhin told a reporter from L
iteraturnaya Gazeta. “We had agents both among the defenders and inside the parliament. At night, General Lebed and I toured the barricades. They were toys; we could have smashed them easily.”

  “What was the battle plan?”

  “At three A.M. the OMON police troops would clear the square. They would disperse the crowd with tear gas and water cannons. Our units would follow, from the ground and from the air, by using helicopters, grenade launchers, and other special means.… Then we would take the building.… My boys are practically invulnerable. The whole thing would be over in fifteen minutes.… It was all up to me. Thank God I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It would have been a bloodbath. I refused.”

  There were more mundane considerations, too, for the KGB. Like the difficulty of landing helicopters in rainy weather and on a roof that had deliberately been strewn with broken furniture and other debris. Like the problem of air force commander Shaposhnikov, who refused to allow the use of his helicopters for the raid and even threatened an airborne counterattack against the junta. There was also the threat of an extremely high body count. Anyone on those barricades that night—KGB informers included—knew that there was at the White House a general willingness to die, a refusal to clear the way for an attack. What’s more, there was also the possibility of humiliation, even defeat. Yeltsin and some of his aides spent part of the night in an underground bunker sealed by a twenty-inch-thick steel door. The KGB might have wondered what would happen if, at the cost of thousands of lives, they “took” the White House, but could not come away with Yeltsin. According to the prosecutor’s report, Generals Grachev and Shaposhnikov agreed that if the Emergency Committee began to storm the White House, they would retaliate and give the order to send bombers over the Kremlin.

  At 8:00 P.M., the Emergency Committee met at the Kremlin. Yanayev shocked his colleagues, telling them that he had heard “rumors” that the committee was organizing an attack on the White House. He proposed that they announce on television that the rumors were untrue.