The Last Empire (21 page)

But now there appeared to be dissension at the very top of the plotters' pyramid. Yanaev, the acting Soviet president and formal leader of the plot, was hedging his bets so as to avoid responsibility for the coming assault. If anything went wrong—and many things could go wrong—he would be safe from reproach, a responsible leader who refused to condone violence against his own people. Once the second-tier officials invited to the Emergency Committee meeting were released and the plotters were left alone in the room, Yanaev's demeanor suddenly changed. He no longer tried to play the liberal. Like everyone else, he voted for Yeltsin's arrest. The assault on the White House would go forward as planned, but the conduct of the meeting left serious doubts in Yazov's mind. Were the others trying to use the army to do their dirty work, which would make him a scapegoat? If so, it would not be the first time that the army had been used and then blamed for decisions made by politicians.
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The military thought that had been the case in Vilnius in January 1991. Troops were sent in against protesters and then blamed for the violence once millions of Soviet citizens saw the television footage and Gorbachev ordered a stop to the operation. Gorbachev had then told his aides that Kriuchkov and Yazov were good for nothing. The military brass was enraged. Liberals such as Yazov's deputy minister and Air Marshal Yevgenii Shaposhnikov were appalled by the very idea of using the army against the civil population. “After Vilnius, after the images seen on television of one of our soldiers beating a civilian with the butt of a machine gun, I understood that a decisive and final end had to be put to that,” he wrote a few years later. Officers never suspected of liberal sympathies, such as the paratroop commander General Pavel Grachev, were appalled by the duplicity
of the political leadership. On the evening of August 20, Grachev told Shaposhnikov with regard to the planned attack on the White House, “Let them just hint that I be the one to give the order, and I'll send them packing.”
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The thinking of the military commanders was very much informed by their earlier experiences of being used against civilians. In Tbilisi in April 1989 and in Vilnius in January 1991, the government had ordered them to crush pro-independence demonstrations but refused to take any responsibility when things went wrong and people were injured or even killed. In both cases, the government had blamed the military. Now the same could happen in Moscow. Besides, the situation in Moscow presented the generals with a new challenge. In the Baltics and the Caucasus, largely Russian and Slavic elite units had been unleashed against non-Russian protesters. In Moscow, they would have to be used against Russians. Under such circumstances, would the troops follow orders? Yeltsin's supporters not only plied the troops with attention but also overwhelmed them with lectures on the nature of democracy and patriotism. They told the young boys not to shoot at their compatriots.

The issue of Soviet versus Russian identity now came to the fore. When paratroopers commanded by General Aleksandr Lebed, who were the first to arrive at the White House on August 19, declared themselves Soviets, one of the defenders responded, “What the hell is Soviet?” Iain Elliott, a reporter for the US-funded Radio Liberty, later described a scene that he witnessed on the streets of Moscow. A drunken man, “ripping open his shirt and thrusting his naked chest against the muzzle of a Kalashnikov in the hands of a nervous teenager . . . shouted: ‘You won't shoot us, will you? After all, we're Russian and you're Russian.'” Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, who stayed in the cordon around the White House on the night of August 20, later remembered that those who declared themselves “for Russia” were considered “ours” and allowed to pass. On the same evening, General Grachev, who was still vacillating between the two sides, had told Yeltsin's messenger to convey to the president of Russia that “he was a Russian and would never allow the army to spill the blood of its own people.”
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Yet blood would indeed soon be spilled. The first shots were fired at midnight. On the square in front of the White House, Michael Hetzer,
the editor of the
Guardian,
a Moscow weekly produced for the benefit of the foreign community and expatriates, noted the time: it was 12:00 a.m. on August 21. News spread immediately among the White House defenders that tanks were circling to attack the parliament from the embankment of the Moskva River. “At 12:10 a.m. more shots could be heard over the hill on the Ring Road,” wrote Hetzer a few days later in his newspaper. “This time the sound, fast and regular, was unmistakably automatic gunfire. ‘They're coming!' one woman cried. ‘The bastards are coming.' Later there was another burst of gunfire and then several terrific explosions.”
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General Valentin Varennikov, who had confronted Gorbachev in Foros on the evening of August 18, was now back in Moscow after a short stopover in Ukraine and was prepared to confront Yeltsin. He dispatched troop carriers toward the White House and was busily arranging the landing of commandos on the roof of the Russian parliament building. The first shots were fired by soldiers of the Taman division, who were passing the White House on Varennikov's orders to take up positions near the Soviet Foreign Ministry in preparation for the assault. As the armored troop carriers entered the underpass beneath Kalinin Avenue, they were suddenly ambushed by defenders of the White House, who thought that the assault had already begun. The exit from the underpass was blocked by trolley buses. Although the lead carrier made it through the barricade, the others were trapped in the narrow tunnel.

The defenders of the White House, some of them veterans of Afghanistan, knew what had to be done to incapacitate the armored vehicles. They threw pieces of fabric onto the narrow observation openings, blocking the drivers' view. The young and inexperienced soldiers, feeling trapped, began to rotate their gun turrets in an effort to dislodge the attackers. The soldiers were soon assaulted with Molotov cocktails that set the vehicles ablaze. Soldiers from the burning troop carriers jumped out, shooting into the air. Their bullets hit armor plate and the walls of the underpass, ricocheting into the crowd. One soldier burned his hands as he tried to put out the flames on his uniform, but the others escaped unharmed. They left three lifeless bodies on the pavement: an Afghan veteran, his skull crushed by a troop carrier, and two more defenders killed by bullets. Many others were wounded.
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Marshal Yazov learned of the first casualties after his return from the meeting of the Emergency Committee, where he suspected that Gennadii Yanaev and others were hedging their bets. Now it seemed that everyone was free and clear but Yazov. It was his people, the military, not KGB or police units, who had opened fire on ordinary Russian citizens. After grimly listening to the report on developments at the White House, Yazov ordered his deputy, “Give the command to stop!” The news that the army would take no part in the planned assault on the White House was met with disbelief by Kriuchkov. Those gathered in his office in the early hours of the morning of August 21 accused the military of cowardice. But some were actually relieved: these included senior officers charged with carrying out the attack, who might have ended up bearing personal responsibility for casualties. The commander of the Interior Ministry forces declared that if the army was not participating, neither would his troops.
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The KGB commandos were also refusing to storm the White House. The all-powerful espionage organization was crumbling under Kriuchkov's feet. If one trusts claims made later by Vladimir Putin, the future president of Russia, that day the KGB chief received an unexpected call from St. Petersburg. Mayor Anatolii Sobchak, who supported Yeltsin, asked what had happened to the letter of resignation submitted a year earlier by his deputy, the thirty-eight-year-old KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin. That day Putin allegedly submitted his second letter of resignation. His allegiance was to Sobchak, not to the coup leaders. As Putin recalled later, he respected Kriuchkov, but “when I saw the criminals on the screen, I understood immediately that it was all over: they were done for.”

Some of Putin's biographers question his claim to have submitted the letter during the coup, suggesting that he did so later, once the coup had collapsed. During the decisive days of August, his critics say, Putin was playing a wait-and-see game, trying to figure out which way the pendulum would swing. Even if Putin's critics are right, his behavior during the coup was not exactly what Kriuchkov expected of his subordinates. Too many KGB officers were sitting on the proverbial fence, waiting to see whether the coup would succeed. Putin shared the plotters' goal of saving the country but not their outdated methods. “In the days of the putsch all the ideals and goals
that I had on going to work in the KGB collapsed,” confided the future president of Russia in an interview that he gave eight years later.
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Faced with defections on all fronts, Kriuchkov had no choice but to call off the assault. “Well, the operation has to be canceled,” he told his subordinates. By that time a heavy rain prevented a helicopter landing on the roof of the White House, and the last-ditch attempt to send commandos in plainclothes to the White House had been foiled by the vigilance of the defenders of the Russian parliament. Kriuchkov finally ordered that telephone lines to the building be cut: a prolonged siege of the White House was now on the agenda.

But around 8:00 a.m., Yazov called his commanders and ordered a complete withdrawal of troops from Moscow. This came as a major surprise to Kriuchkov and the other members of the Emergency Committee. The plotters descended on the Ministry of Defense, trying to convince Yazov to change his order. He was accused of cowardice and treason, but his answer remained the same: shooting people was no solution. If the army stayed in Moscow, said Yazov, there would be new clashes, and if even one tank was set on fire, with forty shells inside it, there would be a major disaster. Yazov told his co-conspirators that he was not about to become another Pinochet—the Chilean dictator known in the Soviet Union as a symbol of martial law and tyranny.
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NEWS OF THE WITHDRAWAL OF TROOPS
from Moscow soon reached the exhausted defenders of the White House, causing jubilation in their ranks. Earlier that night, on hearing the first shots, Yeltsin's chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, had rushed to the doctor's office to awaken the Russian president, who was asleep in his clothes. It did not take him long to get up and follow Korzhakov into an elevator and then into the garage. Yeltsin's first thought was, “That's it. The storming had begun.” The aides put a bulletproof vest on him and seated him in the back of the presidential limousine.

Korzhakov ordered that the gate be opened. They were going to the American embassy across the square. By that time the Americans had been warned and were keeping their embassy gates open. Korzhakov's people made a gap in the barricades to let the limousine through. A few short minutes, and Yeltsin would be in the safety of the American embassy. But before the car could start, the president came fully awake. “Where are we heading?” he asked his bodyguard.

“What do you mean, where?” answered the surprised Korzhakov. “To the American embassy. Two hundred meters, and we're there.”

“What embassy?” responded the no less surprised Yeltsin. “No, we don't need any embassy; let's turn back.”

Korzhakov ordered the driver to wait. Yeltsin's “fine,” which he had given Korzhakov a few hours earlier, was now reversed—and, as was often the case with Yeltsin, reversed in the most dramatic way and at the last possible moment.

Yeltsin's political instinct took primacy over the instinct for survival. Whatever the risk of arrest or death during the assault on the White House, he wanted to survive politically. That could not be achieved by hiding in the American embassy. “It would mean I had gotten myself to a safe place but had left them under the gun,” remembered Yeltsin later. He was also sensitive to Russian national pride, which he had mobilized so skillfully in the months leading up to the coup. “Despite our respect for the Americans, people in our country don't like it when foreigners take too active a hand in our affairs,” wrote Yeltsin in his memoirs. That was certainly an understatement. Many of his voters still thought in Cold War terms, seeing the United States as their country's main adversary. The years of Gorbachev's perestroika had done relatively little to dispel such sentiments, while the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe and economic troubles at home only added to resentment of the rich West in general and the United States in particular.

Yeltsin would spend the night in the basement of the White House, listening to occasional automatic gunfire outside and waiting for the assault to begin. He was joined in the White House basement by the democratic leaders of Moscow. There was the mayor, Gavriil Popov, and his deputy, Yurii Luzhkov. The deputy mayor came along with his pregnant young wife, who brought home-cooked food and a sense of calm that was in short supply in the besieged building.
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At 5:00 a.m., when the curfew was lifted by the military authorities in Moscow, the American chargé d'affaires, Jim Collins, got a chance to survey the previous night's battlefield. “The half-dozen BMP's which had become trapped in the Kalinin [[Avenue]] underpass after midnight had surrendered to the RSFSR forces,” wrote the diplomat to Washington. An unidentified source inside Yeltsin's White House (the name is blacked out in the text of the embassy report released
by the US archives) called the embassy after 6:00 a.m. to report that paratroopers heading for the White House had stopped after Russian officials approached their commander.