The Last Empire (18 page)

Yanaev dodged the question, saying that neither precedent applied to this particular case. But the question that followed immediately from a foreign reporter was no less crushing: whether the plotters had consulted with the leader of the 1973 Chilean coup, General Pinochet. The audience burst into laughter and applause. The press secretary called for order. In answering further questions and countering accusations that the committee was acting unconstitutionally, Yanaev
promised to have the Soviet parliament in session by August 26. He also went out of his way to assure the audience of his loyalty to his “friend, President Gorbachev,” whose return after recovery he was eagerly awaiting. Before the conference Yanaev had received a message from Gorbachev, who demanded that his communications at Foros be restored and that a plane be made available to take him back to Moscow. The demand was rejected. Instead, the guards reconnected the television cable, making it possible for Gorbachev and his family to watch the press conference.
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The press conference was a failure for the plotters. Television cameras showed the whole country a tired apparatchik with a gray and less than healthy-looking face, an odd haircut designed to cover his baldness, a trembling voice, a runny nose, and restless hands that he did not know where to place. Yanaev, who was not well known in the country and was considered a nonentity by those who did know him, confirmed people's worst expectations. The press conference had shown people all over the country that the authorities could be not only argued with but even ridiculed. Later that evening it became apparent that the plotters did not have full control over Soviet television. The official news program
Vremia
(
Time
) included not only a reading of the Emergency Committee's statements and a report on the press conference but also a broadcast from the approaches to the White House, where Yeltsin's supporters were constructing barricades. Now everyone in Moscow knew that resistance was possible and where to go in order to join it.

The press conference highlighted a major problem facing the committee: it had no unquestioned leader. The mastermind of the coup was Kriuchkov, but formal authority belonged to Yanaev, who, as a seasoned apparatchik, was trying to save his place atop the Soviet pyramid in the only way he knew: by avoiding responsibility. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, having joined the committee and demanded harsh measures against his political opponents and strike participants, drank himself into an attack of hypertension and found safe haven in a hospital. Marshal Yazov and Interior Minister Pugo had been at each other's throats ever since their subordinates began to be deployed to crush pro-independence movements in the non-Russian republics, so neither of them was about to take responsibility for failures there. When Marshal Yazov's wife, Emma, came to see her husband at the
Ministry of Defense at the time of the press conference and begged him to quit the committee and call Gorbachev, he told her, “Emma, understand that I am alone.” He shook his head in desperation as he watched the broadcast of the press conference. “Dima,” said Emma, calling her husband by his nickname, “whom have you fallen in with? You always used to laugh at them!”
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As the plotters assembled in Yanaev's office after the press conference, the euphoria they had experienced a few hours earlier was gone. They now grasped that Yeltsin was a real danger to them and had to be dealt with. They decided to do something about that in the morning.

The morning of August 20 began for Yanaev and others with the reading of a fresh KGB memo on the errors they had made the previous day. The committee, wrote the KGB experts, had failed to enforce the state of emergency, locate and isolate opposition leaders, disrupt communications between opposition groups, and seize opposition media resources. And there was more bad news: chances were dwindling that the Soviet parliament would approve the committee's actions, as rumors were spreading among political insiders that Gorbachev was alive and well in his Crimean cage. That morning Kriuchkov, Yazov, and Interior Minister Pugo ordered their subordinates to prepare a plan for storming the White House.
⁷

BORIS YELTSIN HAD SPENT
all of August 19 in the White House. Naina Yeltsina, her younger daughter, Tatiana, and the rest of the family found safety in a small apartment on the outskirts of Moscow that belonged to Yeltsin's bodyguard.

They had left Arkhangelskoe in a hurry soon after Yeltsin's presidential limousine with the Russian flag on it sped off to Moscow. The family members got into a van brought by the guards. Boris and Maria, the young children of Yeltsin's elder daughter, Elena, were told that if the security personnel ordered them to lie on the floor of the van, they should do so without asking questions. “Mama, will they shoot us in the head?” asked the young boy. His question sickened the whole family. Although the van was inspected by KGB troops on leaving Arkhangelskoe, it was allowed to proceed to Moscow. When Tatiana called from a street telephone on the morning of August 20,
she could not get through to her father. As she later recounted, she was told that “everything's normal. Papa has practically not slept at all, he is working constantly, and he is in a fighting mood.”
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At the White House, Yeltsin was in his element. Projecting a sense of strength and a belief in ultimate victory, he provided the kind of leadership that the plotters could only dream of. A charismatic politician who could sense the mood of the masses, Yeltsin was willing to take risks that his competitors, including Mikhail Gorbachev, were not prepared to run. Like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, Yeltsin was at his best in times of crisis. Once the crisis passed, he often felt lost and depressed. That had been the case after his removal as Moscow party boss in the fall of 1987, when he tried to commit suicide by slashing his stomach with office scissors. He would treat his depressions with alcohol, surprising both supporters and opponents with erratic behavior. But Yeltsin was at his best in a crisis, and this time, too, he rose to the occasion.
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Apart from climbing on top of a tank, the Russian president had spent August 19 issuing decrees that declared the coup unconstitutional and established his authority over institutions and troops on the territory of the Russian Federation. The Soviet KGB, Interior Ministry troops, and the army were to follow the orders of the Russian president alone, declared the decrees and appeals. But privately he was preparing for the worst. The reports received that day by the members of the Emergency Committee did not lie: not only was there no general political strike, but no individual strikes were in evidence either. By the end of the day a few mines went on strike in the faraway Kemerovo region, but that did nothing to help the defenders of the White House.

Yeltsin's forty-four-year-old vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, was placed in charge of the White House defenses. Rutskoi was a former military pilot who had been shot down twice in Afghanistan. On one occasion he was captured by agents of Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and allegedly given an offer of immigration to Canada in return for cooperation with the CIA, but he remained loyal to his country. Rutskoi was released from captivity, awarded the star of Hero of the Soviet Union, and elected to the Russian parliament before being chosen by Yeltsin as his running mate in the presidential election of 1991. A maverick by nature and a trained military officer, Rutskoi
was an ideal candidate to organize the White House defenses, which relied heavily on the expertise of former Afghan veterans. But neither Rutskoi's poorly armed men nor the makeshift barricades constructed by the Muscovites in imitation of the barricades built by Lithuanians around their parliament in January 1991 were capable of repelling an attack by Kriuchkov's commandos with the support of Yazov's tanks. Yeltsin, Rutskoi, and the rest of the Russian leadership were well aware of that. Their only hope was that the plotters would not dare to attack or, if they did, that the troops would not obey orders to shoot.
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Throughout the day, Yeltsin worked hard to win over the troops brought to Moscow by the plotters. The Russian president appealed to individual commanders, trying to bring them over to his side. One of his first calls from Arkhangelskoe had been to General Pavel Grachev, a forty-three-year-old Afghan veteran and commander in chief of Yazov's paratroop units. Yeltsin had met him during his presidential campaign a few months earlier. Back then, the young general had assured Yeltsin that he was prepared to defend the Russian government against any challenge to the constitution. Now the time had come to test the general's resolve to defend the constitution. Even if Grachev did not actually mean what he had said in the heat of the political campaign, Yeltsin had nothing to lose by trying. No coup was possible without the paratroopers, one of the few battle-ready units in the Soviet army, and at worst Yeltsin would learn what was going on among them. His contacts with real or potential adversaries went on throughout the coup.
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The main battle for the loyalty of the army was waged on the streets of Moscow. Muscovites, initially shocked by the appearance of tanks in their city, soon adopted a strategy that proved devastating for the coup: they simply charmed “the boys.” Casual discussions with army veterans, pretty girls, and kindly grandmothers who shared whatever they had with the soldiers made them psychologically unfit for the task of crushing civilian unrest. The new class of Russian businessmen who supported Yeltsin and feared the loss of their enterprises at the hands of a new hard-line communist regime brought enough food and alcohol to the White House to keep up the spirits not only of its defenders but also of the troops stationed around Yeltsin's stronghold. Yazov was appalled. To eliminate the danger of fraternization, the army commanders began rotating their units around Moscow.
Nevertheless, Yeltsin made it as difficult as possible for Yazov and the people around him to command the loyalty of the troops. His first victory was achieved largely through the efforts of the Muscovites, whom Yeltsin was counting on to turn things around when he summoned them to a rally in front of the White House at midday on August 20.

Moscow Echo, an independent radio station whose journalists refused to be intimidated by the plotters, called incessantly on Muscovites to show up at the White House. The television reports of the previous evening had shown citizens where to gather. Still, it was a gamble. If people ignored the call for a meeting as they had ignored the call for a general strike, no barricade or reluctance on the part of the troops would save Yeltsin and the nascent Russian democracy from an imminent crackdown. As things turned out, people heard the call and showed up in staggering numbers. Yeltsin spoke from the balcony to close to one hundred thousand Muscovites who came to manifest their support for him and his struggle. They brought a huge Russian tricolor flag. Smaller flags decorated the balcony from which Yeltsin addressed the city and the nation. He spoke from behind the cover of bulletproof shields, and his aides soon whisked him inside, as they were afraid of possible snipers on the roofs of nearby buildings.

There was no shortage of speakers that day. For three hours one followed another, addressing the crowd that chanted, “Yeltsin, we support you,” “Russia is alive!” and “Put the junta on trial!” The speakers included Gorbachev's former foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, and Russia's best-known living poet, Yevgenii Yevtushenko, who read a poem featuring references to Pushkin and Tolstoy and describing the White House as “a wounded marble swan of freedom defended by the people” and swimming into immortality. Also in attendance was the world-renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who had heard the news of the coup in Paris and taken the first flight to Moscow. At the White House he first performed for its defenders and then grabbed a Kalashnikov assault rifle himself. Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and longtime political dissident, made a splash with a personal anecdote from her life with Sakharov in exile. She had asked a KGB officer why the regime was writing lies about her husband. “It is written not for us but for the rabble,” came the reply. “The junta is the same,” argued Bonner.
“Everything they have said and written is for the ‘rabble.' They think we are ‘rabble.'” Bonner's listeners believed they were rabble no more. The organizers of the meeting appealed to its participants to stay and help defend the White House. Thousands responded to the call.
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AS THE RALLY AT THE WALLS
of the Russian White House neared its end, Yeltsin suddenly got the boost he had been waiting for. On the city phone line, which had not been cut off by the KGB, he heard the voice of George H. W. Bush. It was a call that had been long in the making. On the afternoon of August 19, a few minutes before Bush made his first very cautious public assessment of the coup at his Kennebunkport compound, Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin's forty-year-old minister of foreign affairs, had summoned Jim Collins, the American chargé d'affaires in Moscow, to the Russian White House. He wanted to give Collins Yeltsin's letter to President Bush. “I appeal to you, Mr. President,” wrote Yeltsin, “to call the attention of the entire world community, and primarily the United Nations, to the events which are occurring in the USSR and demand the restoration of the legally elected organs of power and the reaffirmation of the post of USSR President M. S. Gorbachev.”
¹³

By midmorning the text of Yeltsin's letter had already been received in Washington, and Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates dictated it over the phone to Brent Scowcroft, who was flying with the president from Maine to Washington. After a brief discussion, Bush and Scowcroft decided that the letter was sufficient reason to harden the administration's public stand on the coup. It fell to the ever cautious Scowcroft to provide this new emphasis. The general went to the back of the aircraft to talk to the press. In front of the cameras, he declared that all of the plotters were conservatives, the coup was intended to derail reforms, and the US administration had a negative attitude toward what he still called an “extra-constitutional” act. Although this fell short of Yeltsin's expectations, the administration was inching toward a tougher position on the coup and its perpetrators. Yeltsin's letter was the first official message to reach Washington from Moscow, but the Russian president was not the only Soviet leader knocking on Bush's door that morning.
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