Eyewitness (39 page)

Monica Attard

Monica Attard was the ABC’s Moscow correspondent from 1990 to 1994, when she returned to become presenter of the nightly current affairs program
PM
. Her radio reports from the front-line streets of Moscow in 1991 are among the most vivid ever broadcast in Australia. Attard seemed to be everywhere that was important in those tumultuous days, speaking to an extraordinary range of contacts and people she met in the street – and on the backs of tanks. This was the kind of immediate, documentary-style radio reporting that Chester Wilmot and Frank Legg had in mind 50 years before. It had the urgency and flavour that more modern technology such as the internet could not provide. She won a Gold Walkley for her coverage in 1991. Her book
Russia: Which Way Paradise?
is the result of the experience and was published in 1997.

Monica Attard is one of Australia’s most respected news and current affairs journalists. She is the recipient of a total of four Walkley Awards. Following her time with
PM
, Attard moved to ABC Radio’s
The World Today
. Monica’s latest role is as presenter of
Sunday Profile
on ABC Local Radio.

*

Fear, which picks out objects in the dark,
Guides a ray of moonlight to an axe.
From behind the wall comes an enormous knock –
What is there? A spectre, a thief, or rats?

–A
NNA
A
KHMATOVA
, from ‘The Seventh Book’, 1921

On the 17th of August, 1991, Boris Yeltsin was in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, where he was signing a bilateral treaty with the Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. Nazarbayev was happy. The two republics had just made a substantial step towards taking hold of their own affairs. Gorbachev’s central government had played no part in this event. The Kazakh wanted to eat, drink and be merry. Yeltsin, however, felt a heaviness he couldn’t ascribe to anything physical. He had a ‘sense of vague, unfocused anxiety’.

In Moscow a powerful group of men close to the president were anxious too. The day before, the K.G.B. chief Vladimir Kruchkov, the Defence Minister Dmitri Yazov, the Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, and the Vice-president Gennady Yanaev had gathered in a Kremlin office to talk over the ‘crisis’. To them, the situation seemed hopeless.

The country was falling apart. Gorbachev had refused to return ‘order’ to the country as far as they were concerned. Protesters had all but done away with the authority of the party while Gorbachev had allowed its power to be constitutionally whittled down. He’d abandoned Article Six. Yeltsin was gnawing at what was left of the party’s once almighty hold on power. He’d even outlawed its propaganda cells in all Russian workplaces. And in three days’ time, Gorbachev would help Yeltsin bury the USSR by signing the Union treaty when he returned to Moscow. Together they would consign the workers’ paradise to the dustbin of history.

All of the coup plotters except Vladimir Kruchkov felt frustrated. Only the grey man of Lubyanka had given serious, strategic thought to what to do. A few of the plotters were assigned the gruesome task of confronting Gorbachev. He’d be given an ultimatum: either support a state of emergency or step down.

In the afternoon of the next day, the 18th of August, there was a knock at the door of Gorbachev’s Foros villa. The leader had visitors. Gorbachev began to sweat. How unusual, he thought, to receive uninvited, unexpected visitors. He picked up a phone to call Moscow to see what all this was about. But the line was dead. All lines into the villa had been cut. ‘
Noo vsyo
’ [‘Well, that’s it’] Gorbachev told his wife, Raisa Maximovna, as he went from phone to phone with mounting despair.

The delegation which had come to Foros from Moscow was rude, according to Gorbachev. They told him that a State Committee for the State of Emergency had been formed. It was called the GKChP. The plotters showed Gorbachev a list of its members. Gorbachev was shocked, ‘deeply hurt’ he would say later. Finally, the penny had dropped. He had been betrayed. The ringleaders were men he had nurtured and trusted.

The delegation told Gorbachev, incorrectly, that Boris Yeltsin had been arrested and they urged him to put his name to the GKChP. He refused. ‘Then resign,’ one of them demanded. Gorbachev told them they were criminals. If they were really worried about the crisis which had gripped the Soviet Union, they should convene the parliament and discuss the problems in an open forum. He was, of course, dithering, his mind darting through all the possibilities and consequences of his refusal to go along with the coup. But to this suggestion Gorbachev received a reply he didn’t want to hear. The delegation muttered concern about his health which they claimed had suffered during the
perestroika
period. Gorbachev knew what they were up to.

‘General Valentin Varennikov, the commander of the ground forces, spewed out the usual line,’ said Gorbachev after the coup attempt was defeated and he was brought back to Moscow. ‘The country was being torn apart by extremists and people were tired. I told him I’d heard all this before. And I said to them they must be mad if they think the country would simply follow another dictatorship. People are not that tired.’

*

When the delegation returned to the Kremlin, Yanaev, Gorbachev’s vice-president, wanted to know – incredibly – whether Gorbachev had agreed to the GKChP. Told that Gorbachev was angry and had dissociated himself from the hardliners completely, Yanaev began to worry.

A year later, as he sat in his apartment waiting to be tried for treason, he told me that he had wanted to speak with Gorbachev himself. The bottom line was that he didn’t want to assume the presidency and with it responsibility for the coup and worse still for running the country. I wondered whether the question of morality had played any part in his anxiety. But the man who sat before me was no moral beacon. He was a drunk who mouthed the Leninist mantra for a bit of payola – a huge apartment, a car, free airfares and power. It was more likely that his sudden concern for Gorbachev’s welfare was born of pure fear that no-one would take him seriously. And nobody did.

‘To be honest, I wasn’t up to it. The country was in a mess, I knew I couldn’t fix the problems. So how can they blame me for the coup?’ he asked me.

Indeed, Yanaev was the consummate Soviet – subservient not just to the party but to any form of authority, unable to make decisions, unwilling to accept responsibility. On the night before the GKChP seized power, Yanaev sweated over a document sitting on the table before him. It had been drawn up by the K.G.B. chief and declared to the country and to the world the formation of the committee and the state of emergency. It would use as its justification the lie that Gorbachev was too ill to rule. Yanaev procrastinated but eventually succumbed to habit.

‘You see, I was ordered to sign the document and I am telling you, I never believed that responsibility for the GKChP would be mine alone. Lukyanov [Chairman of the Supreme Soviet] told me the parliament would support me,’ he said.

All the plotters signed the document as it was passed around the table. All except Alexander Bessmertnykh, the Foreign Minister appointed to replace Eduard Shevardnadze. He was too frightened. He wanted to see the medical reports to prove Gorbachev was too ill to rule and, of course, there were none.

So Bessmertnykh left the room. He didn’t protest. He didn’t send the message to his ambassadors across the globe that Gorbachev was being ousted, that the plotters would say he was sick but that this was a lie. He didn’t call for help. Bessmertnykh did the only thing his Soviet conscience would allow him to do and kept silent.

*

I’d had a late night on the 18th of August, talking to Sasha, my K.G.B. friend, then sharing his concerns on the phone with Natasha who didn’t believe the hardliners would be so stupid as to mount a coup. ‘I’m telling you,’ she said, ‘they know that this is not 1956 or 1968, and it’s not 1981 either [when Solidarity was crushed in Poland]. They can’t just roll out the tanks and hope for the best. There are Mercedes Benzs in Tadjikistan for God’s sake!’

At 1 a.m. I rang off and went to bed. At 4 a.m., Gennady Yanaev, drunk and, according to Russian newspaper reports after the event, unable to find the toilet in his office suite, assumed control over the Soviet Union and its military arsenal.

At 4.30 a.m. all military units were put on high alert, ordered to occupy Moscow, and be prepared for battle. An elite unit was ordered to arrest Boris Yeltsin, though the order was later rescinded.

At 6 a.m., a television announcer broke the news. Barely able to disguise his anxiety, he read out a statement issued by the GKChP. The country had lost its way, it said. The law of the USSR was being violated by people who were trying to grab dictatorial powers. They were preparing to stage an ‘unconstitutional coup’. The people were demanding that something be done to stop it. Vladimir Kruchkov was speaking.

As the news flashed up on wire services across the world, my phone blasted me out of my sleep. ‘Monica, it’s Kerrie Weil. Where’s Gorbachev?’

The executive producer of
PM
had heard the news about the GKChP before I had.

‘I’m fairly sure he’s in the Crimea. Why?’

‘According to AFP [Associated France Press] he’s sick and some sort of committee has been formed to run the country.’

I grabbed my bag and bolted for the door, in my panic forgetting even to change out of my pyjamas. It had always been handy having our office and apartments in the same block and within two minutes I was wading through the masses of stories which Reuters and TASS had spat out in the 15 minutes since the GKChP had declared itself. My hands were shaking uncontrollably as I looked for the one story on TASS which would confirm what we suspected had happened. It was the simplest of statements.

‘A state of emergency has been declared on the territory of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The president Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is ill and in his absence a State Committee for the State of Emergency has been formed. The committee consists of: Gennady Yanaev, Valentin Pavlov, Vladimir Kruchkov, Dmitri Yazov, Boris Pugo, Valeri Boldin, Yuri Plekhanov, Oleg Shenin, Oleg Baklanov, Alexander Tizyakov and Vasily Starodubstev.’

I’d never even heard of Tizyakov and Starodubstev! I fumbled through my Soviet version of
Who’s Who
and found them. Tizyakov was the President of the Association of State Enterprises, no doubt violently opposed to the recommendations coming from the reform camp that subsidies to state enterprises be cut. Starodubstev led the Union of Collective Farm Chairmen, a group also intractably opposed to the notion of private enterprise and what that meant – private farming.

I stared at the copy for several minutes. So that was that! Everyone was expected to believe what the GKChP said and watch as six years of
perestroika
and
glasnost
were dismantled. Over and over I read the line that Gorbachev was too ill to continue his duties. It sounded like a fabrication. The phones began ringing hot. Kerrie Weil, the sub-editors in radio news, other journalists from around the ABC, public radio in France, everyone wanting to confirm what the international wires were saying – that Mikhail Gorbachev was sick, that a state of emergency had been declared across the Soviet Union.

I switched on the television but could find only midnight to dawn movies. I tried calling the Foreign Ministry but the guard on duty knew nothing and he said the building was empty. I woke Nikolai Shishlin, my old friend from the Central Committee’s International Department. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a coup,’ he said. But was Gorbachev ill?

‘Not when I last saw him,’ said Shishlin.

The minutes were ticking away. I’d have to file for news and go to air for the early edition of
PM
. I couldn’t confirm that Gorbachev was sick but I could say that a state committee had declared itself to run the country.

I wondered what my parents would think when they heard my report that a coup d’état was underway. Just two days before, I’d canvassed the possibility in conversation with my father who’d said that if the hardliners tried to get rid of Gorbachev, they’d have to be vicious and determined because the world would come to Gorbachev’s defence.

As I tapped out my first story for the noon news bulletin, I dialled my parents’ number. Begging them not to worry seemed pointless. ‘As long as we hear you, we know you’re OK,’ said my father. My mother just felt anxious.

*

At Archangelskoe village, just outside Moscow, Boris Yeltsin was asleep when the coup was declared. His daughter Tanya flew into his room with the news: ‘Papa get up. There’s a coup,’ she told him. ‘That’s illegal!’ Yeltsin said in an astonishing display of naivety. Tanya told him about Kruchkov, Yanaev and the others. ‘Are you kidding me?’ asked Yeltsin. Within minutes, his phone too would begin to ring hot. His faithful lieutenants urged him to leave his
dacha
as soon as possible because, ‘no doubt, there’ll soon be an order for your arrest. Come to the parliament.’ Yeltsin thought for a moment. Would Russian soldiers arrest him or would they disobey orders?

*

By eight o’clock, Moscow was a city occupied by its own forces, besieged by columns of tanks and armoured personnel carriers taking up positions around the Russian parliament, rumbling down two of Moscow’s main boulevards, Tverskaya and Kutuzovsky towards Manezh Square on the edge of the Kremlin. By nine o’clock the Manezh would be the main focus of tension. Tanks, APCs and soldiers armed with assault rifles filled the square while elsewhere in the capital motorised rifle and tank divisions perched outside important buildings – the Foreign Ministry, the Finance Ministry, the grey Stalinesque
Gosplan
building and the Central Telegraph Station.

I called
PM
and suggested that we pre-record coverage of the GKChP’s declarations for the early edition of the program in case the international phone lines were cut. The program’s presenter, Paul Murphy, bolted for the studio and we began recording. He asked about Gorbachev: Was he still in the Crimea? Did he know what was happening in Moscow? Did he approve? I had no idea whether Gorbachev was still at his villa in the Crimea, nor whether he had any idea of what was happening in Moscow but instinctively I was sure that he hadn’t handed the State Committee the power to carry out his duties, nor would he have sanctioned the deployment of tanks to the streets, if for no other reason than that he didn’t have the stomach for violence. Indeed there was no word on Gorbachev’s whereabouts until much later in the day when Kruchkov told Yeltsin that he was in the Crimea under house arrest, cut off from the world by three platoons of forces – the navy, air-force ground services and border guards. Later, Gorbachev would tell us that he tried negotiating with his captors to send a message to Moscow, but to no avail. He walked around the villa, desperately apprehensive, furious, frustrated, but above all incommunicado.