The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  Soon after sending Bush the letter, Gorbachev joined leaders of the Western industrial democracies in London, as Thatcher had urged. On July 17, Gorbachev met Bush at Winfield House, a mansion in Regent’s Park used as the official American ambassador’s residence. Gorbachev made an appeal to Bush for economic assistance, but Bush felt the Soviet Union was not ready.18 After lunch, Bush and Gorbachev sat alone, with only interpreters and aides, to again take up the thorny issue of biological weapons. “Gorbachev categorically denied all the accusations,” Chernyaev said. According to Chernyaev, an exchange between Bush and Gorbachev followed:

  Bush: Mikhail, I received your letter. I don’t know what’s going on; either we’re misinterpreting things, or your people are doing something wrong or misunderstanding something…Our specialists continue to alarm us … It’s hard for me to figure it out.

  Gorbachev: George, I have figured it out. I can tell you with confidence: we aren’t making biological weapons … I asked for a report on this matter. The report is ready, it’s been signed by Minister of Defense Yazov and other people. I told you the essence of this report, its main conclusions. I suggest we finish with this.

  Bush: Let’s do that. If our people are mistaken, or misleading us, they’re in trouble. But we need clarity. Maybe another meeting of experts would help.

  Chernyaev said he, too, was concerned about being misled. “And I broached it in a memo to Gorbachev: Did he know himself exactly where matters stood, was he sure he wasn’t being misled as had happened with the Krasnoyarsk radar station and in some other cases?” Gorbachev replied that he was confident. “I know!”19

  Nearly five years after Reykjavik, the United States and the Soviet Union finally agreed on a treaty to reduce the most dangerous strategic nuclear weapons. But the agreement, more than seven hundred pages long, was not as sweeping as Reagan and Gorbachev had envisioned at Reykjavik. Instead of the elimination of all ballistic missiles, or 50 percent fewer nuclear warheads, the treaty left the two superpowers with forces about 30 percent lower. Each had plenty of firepower: even after the treaty, the two countries would be allowed a total of eighteen thousand nuclear warheads. There were some notable gains: the agreement sliced deeply into the largest Soviet missiles. The number of SS-18s would be cut in half, to 154, and stringent new compliance measures would be imposed to prevent cheating—including twelve types of on-site inspections.20

  When Bush and Gorbachev signed the agreement in St. Vladimir’s Hall at the Kremlin on the afternoon of July 31, there was almost no trace of the old dispute over the Strategic Defense Initiative, the single issue on which the Reykjavik summit foundered. Gorbachev, who had protested so long and so loudly about weapons in space, did not mention it once. Bush noted it only in passing. Gorbachev had been urged to build a Soviet Star Wars machine by the military-industrial complex. He did not. Gorbachev had also been urged to build a massive retaliatory missile force—the “asymmetric response”—to overwhelm the American defensive shield. He did not. One of Gorbachev’s greatest accomplishments was in the things he did not do.

  An argument was often made in later years that it was the Strategic Defense Initiative that bankrupted the Soviet Union. It is true that Reagan’s vision gave Soviet leaders a fright—it symbolized the unbridled nature of American ambitions and technological superiority. But in the end, Reagan did not build it. The Soviet Union did not build one either. Gorbachev was determined to avoid an arms race in space, and Soviet technology could not possibly have met the challenge. The early plans for a Soviet “Star Wars” never reached fruition. The Soviet system bankrupted itself, and by late 1991, the end was near. When Gorbachev and Bush signed the strategic arms treaty, the Soviet economy was imploding, sucking oxygen out of everything, including the military-industrial complex. The fabled design bureaus and defense factories ran out of cash, and gradually ground to a halt. The powerful riptide of the economy pulled everything down with it.

  On August 3, the eve of his annual vacation, Gorbachev offered some private, candid thoughts to Chernyaev. Chernyaev remembers him sitting on the wing of an armchair. “I’m tired as hell, Tolya,” he said. “And tomorrow, right before I leave, I have another government meeting. The harvest, transportation, debts, communications, no money, the market falling apart.” He added, “Everywhere you look, things are in a bad way.” Gorbachev brightened when he remembered the agreement with Yeltsin July 23 on a new union treaty. Gorbachev and Yeltsin had discussed replacing some of the hard-liners, including Yazov, the defense minister, and Kryuchkov, the KGB chief, as they restructured the highest levels of government. Gorbachev planned to formally sign the new union treaty on August 20 at a Kremlin ceremony. “But his overall mood was still dark,” Chernyaev recalled.

  “Oh, Tolya,” Gorbachev said, “everything has become so petty, vulgar, provincial. You look at it and think, to hell with it all! But who would I leave it to? I’m so tired.”21

  Gorbachev took Chernyaev with him on the holiday to Foros in the Crimea. After lunch on Sunday, August 18, Gorbachev went to work on his speech about the new union treaty. He planned to fly back to Moscow on Monday for the ceremony on Tuesday. The treaty would radically decentralize the Soviet Union by giving the republics broad new powers, including control over their own resources.

  On Sunday, the hard-liners swung into action.22

  On the grounds of Gorbachev’s resort compound, code-named Zarya, or Dawn, duty officers stood by with a suitcase for command of the Soviet nuclear forces. The suitcase was known as the chemodanchik, or little suitcase, and formally called the Cheget. It connected to a special communications network, Kavkaz, that would enable the Soviet leader to authorize the launching of nuclear weapons. There was also a small portfolio with written codes. In the Soviet command and control system, as it stood in 1991, three leaders—the president, the defense minister and the chief of the General Staff—would have to give a permission to launch. All three were accompanied by the Cheget suitcases. This permission would be passed simultaneously to the General Staff headquarters in Moscow and the three commanders-in-chief: of land-based rockets, naval and air forces. Once permission was given, the actual launch order would be issued by the General Staff to the three commanders-in-chief. Thus, Gorbachev’s suitcase was not a nuclear button but a communications link for monitoring and decision making. There was also the option of switching on the secret Perimeter system. The nuclear suitcase and Perimeter were put into operation shortly before Gorbachev took office. Akhromeyev had played a key role in making sure the modernized system was on duty and ready. But Gorbachev regarded the whole apparatus with disdain. He abhorred the thought of nuclear war.

  At the Zarya compound, nine duty officers worked shifts in groups of three, two operators and one officer, squeezed into small rooms in a guest house about one hundred yards from Gorbachev’s lodge. The doors were always closed, and they took turns leaving for meals. When off duty, they left the compound and bunked several miles away at an isolated military lodge, which had only a local phone and no communications.

  At 4:30 P.M. on Sunday, Gorbachev talked over the phone with Georgi Shakhnazarov, one of his leading advisers, who was at a nearby compound, about the forthcoming speech.

  At 4:32 P.M., Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Kirillov, the commander of the nuclear watch, was startled by a signal from his equipment that all communications links were down. The television in his room went off too. The only working line was a radio-phone connected to a government phone exchange in Mukholatka, a nearby small town. Kirillov called there and asked to be connected to the commanders in Moscow. They said it was impossible, they had no communications with anyone. At 4:35 P.M., another duty officer called Mukholatka and asked why there was no line to Moscow. “Accident,” he was told.

  Ten meters away, in the same building as the duty officers, Chernyaev was in his small room, with the windows closed and the air-conditioning running. An assistant interrupted him to say a high-level delegation had arrived unexpectedly
from Moscow and was entering Gorbachev’s building. “Something strange is going on,” the assistant said. “Did you know they cut off communications?” Chernyaev immediately picked up the phone to call Moscow. All three receivers at his desk—to the government exchange, the satellite line and the ordinary internal phone for the compound—were dead.

  At 4:40 P.M., Kirillov was summoned out of the duty officers’ room. In the hall, he saw General Valentin Varennikov, commander of Soviet ground forces, standing with several other men. Varennikov asked about the status of the communications. Kirillov said the lines were dead. “That’s the way it should be,” Varennikov said, adding that it would remain so for twenty-four hours and that the president knew about it.

  Kirillov went back to the room and continued to try to get in touch with Moscow. The government exchange at Mukholatka stopped answering altogether.

  The Soviet nuclear forces were cut off from their civilian commander.

  At 4:40 P.M., Gorbachev, wearing shorts and a sweater in his study, was interrupted by his chief bodyguard, Vladimir Medvedev, who said a group had come from Moscow, demanding to see him immediately. Gorbachev rarely invited visitors to his working vacation, and was baffled how they had penetrated the tight security around him. Medvedev said they had been let in by Lieutenant General Yuri Plekhanov, chief of the 9th Main Directorate of the KGB, responsible for Gorbachev’s overall protection. One by one, Gorbachev picked up the phones at his desk—the government line, the satellite line, the internal line and the city line. All dead. Finally, he picked up the red phone to the strategic nuclear forces. Silent. Gorbachev found Raisa, who was reading a newspaper on the veranda, told her what was happening and to expect the worst. She was shaken but remained cool, he recalled. They went into the nearby bedroom and called in their daughter, Irina, and her husband, Anatoly, and explained. They all knew Russia’s terrible history of leaders assassinated, imprisoned and exiled. The last reformer, Khrushchev, had been forced from office. “You must know,” Gorbachev told his family, “that I will not give in to any kind of blackmail, nor to any threats of pressure and will not retreat from the positions I have taken.”23 Raisa said, “It’s up to you to make a decision, but I am with you whatever may happen.”

  When Gorbachev climbed the stairs to his second-floor study, he saw the visitors had already entered the small room. They were Varennikov, who had been in charge of troops in Vilnius; Boldin, Gorbachev’s trusted chief of staff; Oleg Shenin, a Politburo member; and Oleg Baklanov, the party secretary for the military-industrial complex. Plekhanov was also with them, but Gorbachev threw him out.

  Gorbachev demanded, “Who sent you?”

  “The committee,” they said.

  “What committee?”

  “The committee set up to deal with the emergency situation in the country.”

  “Who set it up?” Gorbachev insisted. “I didn’t create it and the Supreme Soviet didn’t create it. Who created it?”

  Baklanov said the committee—which became known as the State Committee for the Emergency Situation, known by its Russian acronym GKChP—was established because the country was sliding toward disaster. Baklanov added, “You must sign a decree on the declaration of a state of emergency.” The visitors demanded Gorbachev hand over his powers to the vice president, Gennady Yanayev. Baklanov said Yeltsin had been arrested, then corrected himself and said Yeltsin will be arrested. He also suggested that perhaps Gorbachev’s health had deteriorated terribly. He told Gorbachev that other members of the committee included Yazov, the defense minister; Pugo, the interior minister; Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB; Pavlov, the prime minister; and Yanayev. Most of them had been present in Boldin’s office before the Vilnius crackdown in January. Gorbachev seethed at the personal treachery. “I had promoted all these people—and now they were betraying me!” He refused to sign anything, and told the delegation of plotters to go to hell. Varennikov demanded Gorbachev’s resignation. Gorbachev insulted him by pretending not to remember his name. “Oh yes,” he said. “Valentin Ivanovich, is it?”

  Gorbachev said he would not resign.

  Boldin, Gorbachev’s longtime chief of staff, said, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, you don’t understand what the situation in the country is.” Gorbachev shot back, “Shut up, you prick! How dare you give me lectures about the situation in the country!”24

  Gorbachev swore at them as they left.

  For the next three days, Gorbachev and his family were effectively prisoners of their own compound, tormented and sleepless. Gorbachev feared Baklanov’s statement about his health meant they might poison him, so the family and staff refused to accept food from outside and lived off compound supplies. Raisa took charge of looking out for their safety. Gorbachev strolled openly around the compound to show anyone who saw him that he was healthy. Armed guards had appeared at the garage, gates to the compound and the helicopter pad. The exit road was blocked by trucks. They listened to a tiny Sony transistor radio, and heard on the BBC that in Moscow the coup plotters had announced Gorbachev was ill and his duties taken by Yanayev. Gorbachev’s own security detail managed to rig up a television antenna and they saw a press conference in Moscow at which Yanayev appeared drunk. They heard that Yeltsin had called on people to resist the coup. “I was sure, quite convinced that the whole business could not continue for long—they would not get away with it,” Gorbachev said. He and Chernyaev walked outside, where they could not be bugged. Gorbachev called the plotters “agents of suicide” and “scoundrels.” Gorbachev found it hard to believe Yazov and Kryuchkov had betrayed him.

  On Monday, August 19, Chernyaev found Gorbachev resting his back, lying on the bed, writing in a notebook. Chernyaev sat down next to him and began swearing about all that had happened in the last day. Gorbachev looked at him sadly, he recalled, and said, “Yes, this may not end well. But you know, in this case, I have faith in Yeltsin. He won’t give in to them, he won’t compromise. But that means blood.” Later in the day, Gorbachev, Chernyaev and Raisa huddled in a small pavilion at the beach, a place they hoped did not have KGB bugs. Raisa tore a few sheets of clean paper from a notebook and gave them to Chernyaev with a pencil. Gorbachev dictated a statement of demands for the outside world: turn on the phones and give me back the plane to return to Moscow and to work. In the middle of the night, they drew the curtains. With help from Irina and Anatoly, Gorbachev made a videotape denouncing the coup plotters. Raisa wrote in her diary, “Whatever happens to us, the people should know the truth about the fate of the President.” They took apart the videocassette and cut the tape into four pieces using manicure scissors. Each piece of tape was wrapped in paper and sealed with tape, hidden around the house until they could smuggle them out. The cassette was reassembled so it would not show that it had been taken apart.

  In Moscow on Monday morning at 8 A.M., Colonel Viktor Boldyrev, commander of the division in the General Staff that oversaw the nuclear system, was ordered by his superiors to bring the chemodanchik and the nuclear suitcase duty officers back to Moscow. Boldyrev replied that there was no way to communicate with them. The lines were still down.

  In Foros, at 9 A.M., the next regular shift of duty officers for the nuclear suitcase showed up at Gorbachev’s gate. They had been isolated at the military lodge and had no idea what had happened. At the gate, they were informed their passes were no longer valid. A radio played broadcasts from the GKChP. After an hour, they were told to go back.

  Boldyrev finally got through to Foros, with help from the KGB, and instructed all the duty officers to return to Moscow with the nuclear suitcase. That afternoon, at 2 P.M., the officers gathered up their equipment—including the president’s Cheget and the portfolio with the codes—and boarded a jeep for the airfield. They flew back to Moscow on Gorbachev’s plane, the one that was supposed to bring him to the Kremlin for a ceremony signing the new union treaty on Tuesday. The duty officers were met in Moscow by representatives of the General Staff, who took the suitcase.25

  Yeltsin
had been elected president of the Russian republic, the largest of the internal Soviet republics, in June. Combative and iron willed, he rallied the people of Moscow against the plotters. At his dacha on the morning of August 19, Yeltsin and a few allies wrote a statement of resistance. Then he donned a bulletproof vest under his suit, and sped into town. Tanks were rolling toward the nineteen-story building on the banks of the Moscow River known as the Russian White House, where Yeltsin had his offices. Yeltsin walked out of the White House toward a mass of people who had come to defend the building. As journalist Michael Dobbs recalled, “A roar went up from the crowd when they spotted the towering figure of the Russian president striding purposefully down the ceremonial steps in front of the White House.” Yeltsin climbed up Tank No. 110 of the Taman Division and read out his statement. “The use of force is absolutely unacceptable,” he declared. “We are absolutely sure that our compatriots will not permit the tyranny and lawlessness of the putschists, who have lost all sense of shame and honor, to be confirmed. We appeal to military personnel to display their high sense of civil courage and refuse to participate in the reactionary coup.”26

  The coup attempt collapsed Wednesday, August 21. Tanks and troops were poised for action on the streets of Moscow, but the KGB’s crack special forces troops, who were supposed to attack the White House, refused to do so.