There was a silence, witnesses told the Russian prosecutors, and then Yanayev said, “Is there really someone here among us who wants to storm the White House?”
No one answered. When Kryuchkov began to talk about how he was hearing from all over the country that the committee had won massive support, Yanayev said, no, he had been getting telegrams telling him just the opposite. The putschists were hoping to win support by flooding the stores with goods and lowering prices, if only for a few weeks. But it was all a fantasy. The military reserves were not what anyone thought they were. There was just enough to feed the army for a few days.
The coup was unraveling. At 3:00 A.M. on the 21st, Kryuchkov called the White House. He spoke with Yeltsin’s closest aide, Gennadi Burbulis.
“It’s okay now,” the spy chief said. “You can go to sleep.”
AUGUST 21, 1991
Thousands of people woke on the barricades that morning happy to be alive. They were still there, and that was something. Most of the talk I heard there was about the death of the three demonstrators on the Garden Ring Road; they pieced together the details of that quick burst of hysteria and gunfire that had killed Dmitri Komar, Ilya Krichevsky, and Vladimir Usov. Most of all, people were exhausted, sore, still nervous, still overstimulated by the stream of rumors. Some people were still passing around bottles of vodka and Armenian cognac. Nadezhda Kudinova headed for home, satisfied she had done what she had to do. “On the barricades,” she said, “there was this incredible feeling of fellowship, which you will never get on a queue or on a trolley where men will never give you a seat. In everyday life, I guess you just don’t notice it. But these were extreme circumstances, and somehow this week I saw the profound aspects of human nature. I never knew there were so many kind people in my country.”
What Kudinova and the others could not have known was that they had won. The coup, insofar as it had ever really taken hold, had collapsed. The combination of confusion, stupidity, drunkenness, lack of will, miscalculation, and happenstance (the blessed rain!) had all conspired against the committee. And just as a change in consciousness in the people had led to this incredible resistance, one could not rule out that even the conspirators had evolved beyond their ancestors. They had the same Stalinist impulses, but not the core of cruelty, the willingness to flood the city in blood, call it a victory for socialism, and then go off to a midnight screening of Happy Guys. They could pick up the pistol, but not always shoot it. They were bullies, and bullies could be called on their bluff.
Already the members of the committee were thinking about the future. Oleg Baklanov was still talking about arresting Yeltsin and his aides. “If we don’t get them, they will hang us,” he told General Gromov.
At three separate meetings—with Kryuchkov at Lubyanka, with Yazov at the Ministry of Defense, with Yanayev at the Kremlin—the Emergency Committee was making plans to shut it all down.
“We must think now what to do,” Yazov told his senior commanders. They responded quickly, voting unanimously to send troops back to their barracks and lift the curfew. Yazov knew that some of these officers had defied him, even provided intelligence to Yeltsin, and so he agreed, saying, magnanimously, “I will not be another Pinochet.” Then the generals demanded that Yazov quit the committee, but, for all his reservations, he refused.
“I’m not a boy,” he said, as he got up to leave. “I can’t act in this manner, joining yesterday and resigning today.… I’m sorry I ever got mixed up in this business.”
Yeltsin hung up the phone and knew it was over. Kryuchkov had called, suggesting they fly together to Foros. Yeltsin knew well that it might be a ruse, a way for Kryuchkov to flush him from his nest, capture him, and keep the junta going. But it smacked of desperation. He would stay in Moscow, but he would send Rutskoi, the Russian vice president, and Ivan Silayev, the prime minister.
“We’ve got the bastards,” Yeltsin told Burbulis. “They’re on the run.”
The retreat began after 11:00 A.M. when the first tanks turned around near Red Square. By 1:00 P.M., huge convoys stormed along the main arteries out of town, endless columns of tanks and personnel carriers chewing up the soft asphalt and heading toward their barracks.
I jumped into a car with Debbie Stewart of the Associated Press, who drove wildly along the tank column. Weaving in and out of the convoy and racing up and down the columns, we saw an amazing display of joy. The armies of Napoleon, Hitler, and other would-be conquerors of Moscow had time and again fled Russia in despair and defeat. These soldiers were retreating in relief and sheer pleasure, as if they had won the victory of an age. The machines made Leninsky Prospekt tremble. I could feel the rumbling at the base of my throat and on the soles of my feet. All along the convoy, the soldiers, most of them eighteen or nineteen years old, smiled and laughed. The worst had not happened. They had not shamed themselves. They had not shot at their brothers and sisters, their mothers and fathers. In gratitude, old women threw bunches of red carnations and white roses at the boys in their tanks. Construction crews stopped work and applauded the parade. The soldiers answered with the thumbs-up and applauded back.
“It’s over! We’ve got our orders!” a commander shouted above the furious din. “Thank God, we’re headed home!”
At one point along the retreat, at the huge sign on Leninsky Prospekt declaring “The USSR: Stronghold of Socialism,” a man named Sergei Pavlov pulled his Lada over to the side of the road and shouted out his window that he was ready to follow the parade all the way to the barracks. “I’m taking no chances,” he said. “I want to make sure the tanks are really leaving.”
Thus commenced the “race to Foros,” with both Yeltsin’s representatives, Vice President Rutskoi and Prime Minister Silayev, and the men of the putsch, Yazov, Baklanov, Tizyakov, and Kryuchkov, flying on separate planes. Lukyanov, in a marvelous touch, took yet another plane, as if to distance himself from all but his own peculiar position. He brought along Vladimir Ivashko, the deputy general secretary of the Party.
And while everyone else was migrating south, Yanayev sat in his office, disheveled, as two of Gorbachev’s men came in. The aides had been down the hall working during the entire coup d’état.
“Has everyone been arrested?” Yanayev said, his face twitching.
“Yes,” said the former steelworker Veniamin Yarin, in a blatant lie.
Yanayev whined about how the plotters had threatened him with jail and a “tribunal” if he didn’t cooperate. He had joined only “to avert bloodshed,” he said, meaning his own, not Moscow’s.
“Yanayev realized why I was there,” Yarin said later. “There was fear in his eyes.… And, yes, he was very drunk.”
Yanayev stayed in the office all night, and when Yarin returned early the next morning, there were empty bottles all over the floor. Yanayev was awake, but he could no longer recognize Yarin. As Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post wrote of the putsch, it began like Dostoevsky and was ending like the Marx Brothers.
On the flight to the Crimea, Rutskoi’s men—around fifty troops from the Ryazan officers’ school—sat in their seats cleaning their machine guns. One colonel said that if there was a problem at the dacha, “We’ll break through anything.” But Vadim Bakatin, the liberal interior minister who had been fired as Gorbachev began his shift to the right, spoke up and said the soldiers should stay out of sight and avoid any sort of provocation. “If there’s even a single shot, they’ll blame it on us when Gorbachev is found dead,” Bakatin said. The soldiers agreed to stay on the plane.
When the delegation of Russians arrived in Foros, they were let through the gates, but they saw snipers in the trees and on balconies. They were anxious until the very moment they made it to the door. There was no attack, no trap. Clearly, the KGB guards had been instructed to stand down.
Gorbachev wanted only to see the Russians. He refused to meet with Kryuchkov or Yazov. As he greeted Rutskoi and the rest, Gorbachev looked weary but relieved. He wore a light gray sweater and khaki
trousers and was literally trembling with excitement. He kept repeating that there had been a coup against a legitimate president, a commander in chief, that the briefcase with the secret codes had been taken away from him, that it was all a “blasphemy.” “There’s one thing I want to say,” Gorbachev explained. “I made no deals. I maintained a firm position, demanding the immediate summoning of a session of the Congress or the Supreme Soviet. Only they can decide the issue. Otherwise, after any other step, I would have had to finish myself off. There could be no other way out.… I was cut off from any communication. The sea was closed off by ships. There were troops all around. It was complete and total isolation.”
Bakatin and Yevgeny Primakov, two Gorbachev loyalists who had supported the resistance, told their man several times what a singular role Yeltsin had played and that when Gorbachev returned to Moscow there could be no more conflicts. Gorbachev promised he would do this. Some of the Russians, none too gently, reminded Gorbachev that the conspirators had all been the president’s men. It was true, Gorbachev admitted. “I had complete confidence in the people around me, and I relied on them. My gullibility undermined me. On the one hand, it’s probably good to trust people, but not to this extent.”
Gorbachev got testy when someone said he had to pass a decree saying that he was reinstated as president. “I never stopped being president!” he said. And as for the charge that he had been critically ill, it was all “nonsense, an absurd pretext.” Silayev had brought along two doctors—both heart specialists—but there was clearly no need. Gorbachev, Silayev said, “looked amazingly well.” Raisa was quite another story. The Russians were startled as they saw her try to navigate the stairs and come down to greet the Russians. “She was in horrible condition,” said one member of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Lysenko. “She wobbled as she walked, but she did make sure to kiss all of us.”
“Should we fly home tonight?” Gorbachev finally asked Raisa.
“Yes,” she answered softly. “We must fly immediately.”
Gorbachev did have a brief meeting with Lukyanov, his old friend from Moscow State University and the Komsomol. Right away, Lukyanov tried to explain his position, how difficult it would have been to convene an immediate emergency session of the Union parliament, how he had tried to fend off the coup.
Gorbachev was having none of it.
“We have known each other for forty years!” he said. “Cut the bullshit! Stop hanging noodles on my ears!”
At the Belbek military airport, the presidential plane, the Ilyushin 62 marked “Sovietsky Soyuz,” idled on the tarmac. A half mile away, near some MiG-29 fighter jets, was the smaller Tupolev 134 which Rutskoi had brought from Moscow. The Zil limousines raced between the two planes, trying to make it seem as if Gorbachev had been dropped off at his usual jet. He hadn’t. Finally, Gorbachev boarded the Tu-134.
On the runway, Gorbachev approached the state chief of civil aviation and his personal pilot and said, “Please don’t have hurt feelings, but I’ll be taking the Russian plane. Understand the situation. I’m doing the right thing.”
“Let’s go,” Raisa said, “but only with the Russians.”
With the collapse of the coup, the Russian Republic’s own news show, Vesti, returned to the air at 8:00 P.M., The lead announcer, Yuri Rostov, who had been thrown off the air by the head of state television, Leonid Kravchenko, could barely contain his glee. He was grinning and on the edge of tears. “Congratulations!” he told us. “The junta is at an end!”
Rostov did not bother with the niceties of objectivity and did little to control his contempt for the men he wryly called “the saviors of our Motherland”—the plotters who had engineered the coup. He also made sure to warn the viewers that Russia “should not repeat one of Gorbachev’s greatest mistakes: forgetting that the KGB is the biggest opponent of reform.” After going through the stunning news of the day, Rostov delivered the bulletin that may have delighted him most of all, the dismissal of “that man beloved by us and treasured by you TV viewers, Leonid Petrovich Kravchenko.”
In the early hours of the morning, Gorbachev sat in the forward cabin of the plane surrounded by his exhausted family. His granddaughter was wrapped in a plaid blanket, and slept on the floor. Rutskoi and Silayev talked quietly with Gorbachev, the better not to wake the others. They opened a bottle of wine and drank to the end of the coup.
Off in the rear cabin, Kryuchkov sat alone, a captive, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, but he was not asleep. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. Armed guards watched his every twitch.
When the plane landed in Moscow at Vnukovo Airport, the escort delegation told Gorbachev to wait a bit before coming down the steps until the guards were sure there would be no surprise attack. A guard with a machine gun came out the door first and scanned the airfield. There was nothing, no last trap. The conspirators had nothing left in them. Finally, Gorbachev appeared in the doorframe. He wore a beige windbreaker. His suntan looked, under the circumstances, ridiculous. His face was a cross of pleasure and fear as if he did not know quite what awaited him even now. Behind him was his daughter in her denim miniskirt, Raisa, and his granddaughter clumping sleepily down the stairs. Raisa was dazed, spent.
From the minute Gorbachev got off the plane, people kept telling him that he had returned to a “different city,” even a “different country.” The “slave mentality” that had plagued poets from Pushkin on was at an end, and Gorbachev seemed to agree. He could not afford to disagree. At least he understood that much.
Gorbachev paused in front of a television camera. Before anyone could ask a question, Yevgeny Primakov said, “No, Mikhail Sergeyevich is tired. The car is ready. We should go.”
“No, wait,” Gorbachev said. “I want to breathe the air of freedom in Moscow.”
Out on the tarmac, the Russian prosecutors arrested Kryuchkov, Yazov, and the industrialist Tizyakov.
“Did the people really see our actions as so terrible?” Kryuchkov said. “Well, now it is the end of the committee.”
Sergei Shakhrai, one of Yeltsin’s closest legal advisers, said Kryuchkov “lost control of himself when he was detained. He could not control his hands or his facial expressions or recognize his own things. The man could be seen to be in a state of profound depression.… Yazov behaved more calmly and was in possession of himself, though he was deathly pale. The first thing he requested was help for his sick wife.… Tizyakov was outwardly normal, but you could sense he was bursting with spite. You got the feeling that he was ready simply to bite and tear to pieces anyone who got too close.”
The men who had set out to save the empire were now under arrest. An officer of the law took away their shoelaces, belts, and all sharp objects. It was standard procedure.
The conspirators had launched the putsch to save the Soviet empire and their positions in it. Their failure was the finishing blow. No Baltic independence movement, no Russian liberals, had ever done as much to bring it all down. And now Yazov, at least, seemed to know it. “Everything is clear now,” he said as they led him into a van with bars on the windows. “I am such an old idiot. I’ve really fucked up.”
PART V
THE TRIAL OF THE OLD REGIME
For two days after the fall of the coup, the dictators of the proletariat and their assistants at Central Committee headquarters ransacked their desks and emptied their safes. They fed one incriminating document after another into the shredding machines. To destroy everything in the archives would have taken months or years, yet there was a chance, at least, that they could eliminate all evidence of the Party’s support of the coup and other recent embarrassments.
There was so little time. Thousands of furious demonstrators were shouting up at the windows of the Central Committee, demanding the destruction of the Party, the confiscation of its properties. The same crowds of students, housewives, workers, and intellectuals who had defended the White House now fanned out across the city, toppling the monuments of the regime and carryin
g signs reading “Smash the KGB!” “Send the Party to Chernobyl!” “Bring the Party to Trial!” But then the shredders began to jam and break, one after another. In their haste, the men of the Party had failed to remove the paper clips.
With the shouts from the street throbbing in their ears, some panicked officials suggested building a huge bonfire in the courtyards. Their juniors, however, advised them that if the demonstrators saw smoke coming from the Central Committee, they would know what was happening and would storm the building. What could they do? Party workers were already driving truck-loads of material away through the hidden tunnels and back exits of the Central Committee building, and even that was not enough. There was so much to destroy and hide! And so now these ashen men—men who had ruled an empire with an inimitable blend of insouciance and banality—began tearing apart documents with their bare hands. They would sooner die of paper cuts than leave the evidence to the hordes.
The Party men, of course, were not interested merely in history’s judgment. They refused to leave anything to the masses. To the very end, their serene sense of entitlement guided them. They stole telephones, computers, fax machines, television sets, video recorders, stationery. Anatoly Smirnov, an aide in the Party’s International Department, said that his superior, Valentin Falin, gave him 600,000 rubles in cash and told him to stash it in his personal safe. Immediately.
And change the nameplate on my door, Falin ordered. Falin was sure that if he identified himself as a “People’s Deputy” rather than as Central Committee secretary he would be immune from future prosecution.
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