At 4:50 p.m. the head of Gorbachev’s bodyguard interrupted the president to say that a group of people had arrived to speak with him. Gorbachev was not expecting anyone. Somewhat alarmed, he picked up a receiver to call Kryuchkov in Moscow. The line was dead. All four telephones on his desk and the internal phone were no longer working. In an outer office Anatoly Chernyaev suddenly realized that his government line, satellite link, and internal telephone were all down.
He guessed immediately what was up.
Gorbachev went to the veranda, where Raisa was reading a newspaper in the company of their thirty-four-year-old daughter, Irina, and son-in-law, Anatoly Virgansky, a surgeon. He warned them they might be arrested. “I will not give in to any kind of blackmail,” he promised Raisa.
He went back and found that Baklanov, Shenin, Boldin, Varennikov, and Plekhanov had rudely occupied his office. Baklanov did the talking. The country was facing disaster, he said. A committee of emergency was being set up. Yeltsin was under arrest or at least soon would be. The president must immediately sign the decree on the declaration of a state of emergency or resign and hand over powers to Vice President Yanayev. Then he could stay in Foros while “measures” were taken.
Gorbachev demanded to know who was on the committee and was shocked to hear that Yazov and Kryuchkov were its leaders. He tried to reason with the intruders. They could discuss and decide matters within the framework of the law, but martial law and the use of force were unacceptable, he said. With his instinct for maneuvering and compromise, he suggested a different course for the plotters: “Since a conflict of opinion has arisen between us, let us immediately convene a Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet. And let them decide. If they agree with your proposals by all means let it be done your way, but for my part I reject that and will not support it.”
The conspirators said they would brook no delay. Baklanov suggested, “You take a rest and while you are away we will do the dirty work and you will return to Moscow.” At that, Gorbachev blew up. He called the men criminals. “Go to hell, shitfaces!” he shouted. The bespectacled Varennikov, who towered over Gorbachev, could hardly disguise his contempt. “Hand in your resignation!” he barked rudely at the president. Boldin broke in, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, perhaps you don’t understand the situation . . . ” Gorbachev cut him off, “You’re an asshole. You should shut up!”
The Soviet president refused to authorize any declaration of martial law. Tempers cooled, and he shook the hands of the delegation as they left.
The Gorbachev family, including two grandchildren, Kseniya and Nastya, found themselves isolated by the new KGB guards around the perimeter of the dacha. Gorbachev confided to Chernyaev, “Yes, this might not end well, but you know, in this case I have faith in Yeltsin, he won’t give in to them.” Chernyaev could not help but blurt out, “These are your people, Mikhail Sergeyevich. You fostered, promoted, trusted them.” Gorbachev cursed himself for having a year before given Shenin the top job of party organizer. He had taken him to be a reformer.
Raisa could not sleep on their first night of house arrest. She was “tormented by bitterness at the betrayal of people who worked side by side with Mikhail Sergeyevich.” The treachery of Boldin was most hurtful to her. “We have been soul mates for fifteen years. He was like a family member with whom we trusted everything—our most intimate secrets.” Fearing they might be poisoned, she insisted the family eat only food delivered before the coup started.
3
Confused, the conspirators returned to Moscow. They had hoped to intimidate the vacillating Gorbachev into signing the decree and giving their putsch legitimacy, or else step down temporarily while they got rid of his awkward rival, Boris Yeltsin. Boldin realized now that they had miscalculated. Without Gorbachev’s authority they had no mandate. He later recalled that “everything went haywire from the start.”
On Sunday evening they gathered in Pavlov’s office in the Kremlin. Yanayev was summoned to meet them. He was tipsy when he arrived. But he was no pushover. Chain-smoking and downing shots of vodka with a shaking hand, Yanayev had to be cajoled into signing the document declaring himself acting president of the Soviet Union as a result of the “illness” of President Gorbachev. He finally did so just after the chimes of the Kremlin’s Savior Tower clock sounded eleven o’clock. Kryuchkov and the other conspirators signed a decree to establish martial law for six months. Anatoly Lukyanov, whose closeness to Gorbachev deceived people into thinking he was a democrat, also arrived in Pavlov’s office. He needed no persuading to give the coup a veneer of legitimacy as congress speaker. Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, summoned back from vacation several hundred miles southwest of Moscow, arrived after midnight. He found his name on the list of committee members and crossed it off. He left for home, not to emerge again until it was all over. But he didn’t prevent Soviet embassies taking orders from the committee and disseminating its propaganda. Boldin returned to the hospital, where he was heavily sedated.
Meanwhile, Yazov issued coded telegram 8825 ordering the top military leadership to move troops into Moscow. Kryuchkov assigned a special KGB unit to place Boris Yeltsin under surveillance in preparation for his arrest.
That Sunday evening Yeltsin was in Alma-Ata, almost two thousand miles from Moscow, meeting Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. He delayed his scheduled departure to partake of a sumptuous dinner with Kazakh folk music and “colorfully dressed girls whirling around,” during which he amused everyone by playfully performing with wooden spoons on the head of an assistant, Yury Zaiganov. Well fortified, Yeltsin left just after 8 p.m. local time for the long flight back to Moscow. When he arrived there, he was driven straight to his dacha at Arkhangelskoye. No one stopped him.
Shortly after six o’clock next morning, he was shaken awake by his daughter Tanya, who flew into the room shouting, “Papa! Get up! There’s a coup!”
Millions of people in Russia would never forget what they were doing when they heard the dawn proclamation on radio and television that Monday, August 19, 1991, that suddenly reintroduced fear into their lives. Sitting in his undershirt, Yeltsin watched Yury Petrov, state television’s star announcer, broadcast a statement by an emergency committee that Gorbachev was ill, that Vice President Yanayev had assumed the duties of the president, and that martial law existed in the USSR. The announcer said that the action of political movements was to be halted, illegally held arms were to be handed in, meetings and demonstrations were banned, and the mass media was to come under emergency control. After the announcement Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
was broadcast repeatedly.
Most of the Russian leadership lived close to the Yeltsin residence, and they began arriving in a panic at his dacha. Alexander Korzhakov turned up as Ruslan Khasbulatov, the speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet, came racing across from the dacha next door. They found Yeltsin slumped in an armchair, hung over and stunned. His top aides, Gennady Burbulis, Ivan Silayev, Mikhail Poltoranin, and Viktor Yaroshenko, all came in and congregated around him. Moscow’s popular deputy mayor, Yury Luzhkov, turned up, promised to organize resistance, and left. Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of the former Leningrad (which two months earlier had reverted to the name St. Petersburg) who happened to be in Moscow that day, arrived and vowed to rally opposition in Russia’s second city. Then he, too, departed, saying, “May God help us!”
Yeltsin called Pavel Grachev, commander of the paratroops, whom he had recently befriended, to ask what was going on. The forty-three-year-old general was moving troops around as ordered, but he promised to send a squad to the dacha to ensure Yeltsin’s safety. Perhaps the plotters did not have the total loyalty of the military.
By 9 a.m. Yeltsin had recovered sufficiently to dictate an appeal to the people of Russia to resist the “cynical attempt at a right-wing coup.” The fax machine was still working in the dacha, and within an hour the appeal was being circulated by leaflet throughout Moscow and broadcast on radio stations around the world. Gorbachev, isolated in Foros, heard about the embryonic resistance on a tiny Sony radio that he usually listened to while shaving.
The Russian president decided to make a run for the Russian White House. “Listen, there are tanks out there,” Naina protested. “What’s the point of you going?” He replied, “They won’t stop me.” As always his women made sure Yeltsin was presentable before he left. Tanya straightened his jacket so that his bulletproof vest was not noticeable. “Your head is still unprotected, and your head is the main thing,” cried Naina.
Yeltsin and Korzhakov decided to go directly to the White House in a convoy of official vehicles with a Russian flag of white, blue, and red fluttering from the bonnet of the black Chaika carrying the Russian president. Their departure was watched by a small KGB surveillance division under Commander Karpukhin that had been ordered to take up position in the woods around. Karpukhin would testify later that he had orders to arrest Yeltsin but that he let him drive away. But Kryuchkov had delayed issuing orders to arrest people on a list of eighty democrats singled out for detention, including Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev. He preferred to try at first to cow the opposition and not appear heavyhanded. It was one of many misjudgments that doomed the coup from the outset.
With Yeltsin squeezed between bodyguards in the back, the Chaika barreled unimpeded past tanks churning up Kutuzovsky Prospekt and then raced across Novo-Arbatsky Bridge and into the underground car park of the White House, arriving at around 10 a.m. In his office he found that all telephone lines had been cut but one: It had been installed the day before the coup and was not yet registered. Yeltsin was able to call allies in Russia and around the Soviet Union.
Outside the White House armored vehicles from the Tamanskaya motorized infantry division took up position but without orders of any kind. The division chief of staff, Major Yevdokimov, said he had no intention of harming any of the young men and middle-aged women who had started milling around outside the White House, furious at the idea that Yeltsin might be arrested.
Shortly after midday Yeltsin came out, flanked by bodyguards armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and climbed aboard a T-72 tank. He read his statement to about two hundred supporters, raising his voice over the sound of the heavy military vehicles rumbling past. He called for a general strike and opposition to the “right-wing, reactionary unconstitutional coup.”
After he hurried back into the White House, the crowd began to pile up concrete slabs and metal rods to form barricades. By late afternoon the numbers had swelled to several thousand.
The coup had already begun to falter. Around the city, tank crews were fraternizing with pedestrians. Pavlov’s nerves were failing him, and he started drinking large whiskeys. Yazov found him “absolutely plastered” in the Kremlin, and he had to be carried out to his car and driven home. He was in no state to take part in the televised press conference of the emergency committee, held at 5 p.m. in the foreign ministry press center.
That Monday evening, television viewers saw the committee for the first time—six men in grey-blue suits, sitting at a table on a stage with a pasty-faced Yanayev in the middle. His nicotine-stained fingers trembling, Yanayev justified their action on the grounds that normal life had become impossible. He lied that Gorbachev was “undergoing treatment” for illness. There was derisive laughter when an Italian journalist asked if they had consulted General Pinochet on how to stage a coup. The Russian and foreign reporters there managed to inform millions of viewers what state television had been withholding by asking questions about Yeltsin’s strike call and the resistance building up at the White House.
That night the Russian president bedded down in the doctor’s surgery on the third floor of the White House, where the windows faced the inner courtyard. His family were spirited from the dacha for safety in an unmarked van with curtained windows to a two-bedroom apartment in the suburb of Kuntsevo belonging to one of his bodyguards.
By Tuesday morning, August 20, George Bush, who initially had stopped short of condemning the coup committee—on Scowcroft’s advice he had called their action extraconstitutional rather than illegitimate so as not to burn their bridges with the coup leaders—had got a better idea of what was happening. He managed to get through to Yeltsin. “Boris, my friend,” cried the U.S. president. Yeltsin was overwhelmed. “I am
extremely
glad to hear from you!” he shouted in response. “We expect an attack, but your call will help us.” “We’re praying for you,” said Bush.
4
From a balcony at the Russian White House, protected by lead shields held by Korzhakov and another bodyguard, Yeltsin read out a second statement. In it he called on soldiers and police to disobey the orders of Yazov and Pugo but not to seek confrontation.
In St. Petersburg Mayor Sobchak confronted troop commanders and persuaded them not to enter the city. At his side opposing the putsch was his special assistant, KGB officer Vladimir Putin. “Sobchak and I practically moved into the city council,” Putin recounted years later. “We drove to the Kirov Factory and to other plants to speak to the workers. But we were nervous. We even passed out pistols, though I left my service revolver in the safe. People everywhere supported us.”
5
Putin was concerned that his behavior as a KGB officer could be considered a crime of office if the plotters won. He expressed this fear to his boss, and Sobchak called Kryuchkov on his behalf. Astonishingly the mayor was able to get the chief organizer of the putsch on the phone to discuss such a matter of minor consequence given the scale of events—that Putin was resigning from the KGB forthwith.
Kryuchkov by now seemed to realize his mistake in not securing the arrest of Yeltsin. Public opposition was consolidating around the Russian president. The emergency committee was falling apart. Pavlov and Bessmertnykh had disappeared. Yanayev was drinking himself into a stupor. The defenders of the White House now included many high-profile personalities, including Politburo veteran Alexander Yakovlev, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner. Shevardnadze was also there, asking aloud if Gorbachev himself was implicated in the coup. At five o’clock in the morning Yeltsin remembered it was his daughter Lena’s birthday and rang to congratulate her. Later he gave her a spent cartridge as a present.