The Last Empire (25 page)

Then came a question about the ownership of all-Union property on the territory of the Russian Federation and the decree on Russia's economic sovereignty signed by Yeltsin. “You today said that you would sign a decree confirming all my decrees signed during that period,” said Yeltsin, referring to the measures he had signed during the coup.

Gorbachev knew he was in trouble. “I do not think you have tried to put me in a trap by bringing me here,” he responded. Gorbachev went on to say that he would sign a decree confirming all Yeltsin's decrees of the coup period except the one dealing with all-Union property. “I will issue such a decree after signing the [[union]] treaty,” he said to Yeltsin. This was not merely a delaying tactic. Gorbachev was trying to keep Yeltsin on the hook: signature on the union treaty first, property second.

The Russian president did not like what he heard. His ruse of backdating the decree had failed, but he had a trump card in hand and knew how to use it against Gorbachev. “And now, on a lighter note,” declared Yeltsin in front of the cameras, “shall we now sign a decree suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party?” Yeltsin used the pronoun “we” to refer to himself. Gorbachev was stunned. All party organizations in Russia were suddenly on the chopping block. Without them, his already dwindling powers would be reduced to almost nothing. After realizing what was going on, he asked his “ally,” “What are you doing? . . . I . . . haven't we . . . I haven't read this.”
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The Russian president took his time signing the decree temporarily banning Communist Party activity on Russian territory. When Gorbachev told him that he could not ban the party, Yeltsin responded that he was only suspending its activities. Welcoming the decree with applause and chants of approval, the Russian deputies went on with their interrogation of the trapped Soviet president. Gorbachev found it hard to recover from Yeltsin's blow. “At that encounter,” he remembered later, “Yeltsin was gloating with sadistic pleasure.” This was a side of Yeltsin's personality that the public had not previously seen—not the popular leader who picked up on the mood of the masses, nor the calculating politician who valued personal loyalty, nor yet the sensitive man who cared about those around him, but Yeltsin the predator. One of Yeltsin's principal advisers later recalled his impression of his boss's sudden attack on the Soviet president: “a cruel, malicious, wicked scene.”
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Yeltsin had scored another major victory in his contest with Gorbachev to control the levers of power. With the reversal of the appointments of security ministers and suspension of the activities of the Communist Party, Gorbachev all but lost his influence in the country and his power base.

Once the decree was signed, Yeltsin tried to charm his victim. At the end of the meeting the victorious Yeltsin publicly took Gorbachev under his protection, assuring the deputies that the Soviet president was committed to the prosecution of those complicit in the coup. Once the meeting was over, Yeltsin told Gorbachev, “Mikhail Sergeevich! We have been through so much—such events, such turmoil! You had a hard time of it in Foros, and we didn't know how that putsch of the Extraordinary Committee would turn out, and our family members, and Raisa Maksimovna . . . Let's have a family get-together. Naina Iosifovna, Raisa Maksimovna . . .”

Gorbachev looked at Yeltsin in bewilderment, probably not knowing whether to take him seriously. “No, not now,” he told Yeltsin. “We shouldn't do that.”
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ON THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY
, August 23, George Bush and Brent Scowcroft were watching a televised relay of Gorbachev's meeting with the Russian deputies and Yeltsin's humiliation of his rival. “It's all over,” was Scowcroft's comment. Gorbachev, he told the president, was “not an independent actor anymore. Yeltsin is telling him what to do. I do not think Gorbachev understands what's happened.” George Bush agreed: “I am afraid he may have had it.” The banning of the Communist Party was an important milestone in the ideological competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and seasoned cold warriors such as Bush and Scowcroft had every reason to celebrate. But more important for the moment was its significance for Gorbachev's political survival.
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Bush had seen it coming. The first signs of the new political situation in Moscow had become apparent on August 21, with the jubilant Yeltsin calling from the Russian White House for the first time since the coup. He sounded like a man completely in charge, as in fact he was. “As we agreed, I'm reporting on the latest events,” began Yeltsin after a brief greeting.

“Please do,” responded Bush.

“Russian Prime Minister Silaev and Vice President Rutskoi,” began Yeltsin, “have brought President Gorbachev back to Moscow unharmed and in good health. I am also reporting to you that Defense Minister Yazov, Prime Minister Pavlov, and KGB Chairman Kriuchkov have been taken into custody.” Silaev, who had spent the decisive night of the
White House siege at home, returned to his president the next day and was now back at the center of the action. Bush encouraged Yeltsin with occasional remarks indicating his interest. Yeltsin went on: “And, upon my order, with sanction, the prosecuting Attorney General of the Soviet Union has begun a case against all conspirators.”

A country in which the all-Union attorney general was acting on the orders of the president of Russia was obviously not the old Soviet Union. But for now it was all about celebrating the defeat of the coup. “My friend, your stock is sky-high over here,” said Bush to Yeltsin. “You displayed respect for law and stood for democratic principles. Congratulations. You were the ones on the front line, who stood on the barricades—all we did was support you. You brought Gorbachev back intact. You restored him to power. You have won a lot of friends around the world. We support and congratulate you on your courage and what you've done. If you will now accept some advice from a friend—get some rest, get some sleep.”
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Sleep was the last thing on Yeltsin's mind. It was 9:20 p.m. EST on August 21 in Kennebunkport and early in the morning of August 22 in Moscow. Yeltsin had just declared the coup defeated and thanked the defenders of the Russian White House. He had a brand-new day ahead of him, one he was eager to use to consolidate his power, no longer in confrontation with the coup leaders but in competition with Gorbachev. The battlefield was not limited to Moscow, Russia, or the Soviet Union. It also included the Western capitals and platforms provided by international organizations. Yeltsin supporters there presented a striking dilemma not only to the Russian and Soviet public but also to Western leaders: either support Yeltsin as a democratically elected politician devoted to radical reform or remain loyal to Gorbachev and bid farewell not only to democracy but also to reform.

On that day Yeltsin's young foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, arrived in Strasbourg at the invitation of the Council of Europe. His main message to the European leaders was, “The time has come to separate the sheep from the goats in Soviet politics.” This was a major change from a few days earlier. To begin with, the new message included no gesture to Gorbachev. On the contrary, according to an American diplomatic report, Kozyrev “repeatedly criticized ‘some people' in positions of authority who are not committed to democratic ideals and lack legitimacy because they have never been
elected.” The reference was clearly to Gorbachev, who had been elected president of the USSR by parliament, not by popular vote, as was the case with Yeltsin. Kozyrev was also skeptical that Gorbachev had “the psychological resources to initiate truly radical reforms.” Kozyrev, went the report, “commented that Gorbachev was in the grip of a ‘syndrome of fear.'” Gorbachev would do anything for reform, said Kozyrev, but only within the system. “He is afraid that he and his family would become nobodies—cease to exist—if the system that now supports them collapses.”
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THE SOVIET PRESIDENT
'
S DOWNFALL
became complete on Saturday, August 24. On the morning of that day, he and Yeltsin attended the funeral of three young men who had died defending the White House on the night of August 20. Gorbachev tried to use the occasion—his first appearance before Muscovites since his return from the Crimea—to express his gratitude to those who had defended democracy. He was also eager to show the all-Union flag, awarding the title of Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously to the three men. The crowd was moved, but Yeltsin, the real hero of resistance to the coup, managed to steal Gorbachev's thunder. The Russian Federation had no awards of its own, and he had no authority to grant them. Yeltsin simply asked the mothers of the three young men to forgive him for not being able to save their sons. Once again, he won the day.
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After the funeral, Gorbachev went to the Kremlin to sign a number of decrees. With one of them he dissolved the cabinet and replaced it with a committee chaired by Yeltsin's prime minister, Ivan Silaev. With another decree, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the party, citing the attitude of its leadership during the coup. He also advised his former party colleagues to dissolve the Central Committee and asked local party organizations to decide their own fate. As president of the USSR, Gorbachev signed a decree placing Communist Party property under the control and protection of local soviets. Gorbachev was no longer prepared to lead a banned party that constituted no threat to him, as he believed it had earlier, and which represented no asset in the political struggle he had begun to wage immediately after the coup. He would devote pages of his memoirs to an attempt to prove that it was the party apparatus that had betrayed him in August 1991, not the other way around.
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The party apparatchiks were foot soldiers but hardly the driving force behind the coup—by the summer of 1991 they were too demoralized and disorganized to become its true leaders—and the Emergency Committee's appeal to the people made no mention whatever of the party or its policies and ideals. It was the KGB and military officers who had led the coup. As a group, however, the apparatchiks had stood to benefit most from a successful coup, which was supposed to reverse Yeltsin's decree banning party cells at state enterprises. At a meeting of the Central Committee secretariat on August 13, 1991, five days before the coup, the party bosses had discussed ways to deal with the decree.

The coup had seemed the only way to restore the party's monopoly of political power. But with the coup a failure and Gorbachev resigning from the highest party post, the political force that had ruled the country with an iron fist, and often with a blood-smeared club in its hands, was going down to defeat without bloodshed. Some blood was spilled, to be sure, but it was that of party establishment figures who decided to end their lives rather than stand trial.
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The first to depart was Boris Pugo, the minister of the interior, whose police formations and troops had been directly involved in the coup. On the morning of August 22, Russian officials reached him on the phone at home and asked for a meeting. When a four-man group including Gorbachev's economic adviser Grigorii Yavlinsky showed up at Pugo's home, an old man with obvious signs of dementia opened the door and let them in. It was Pugo's father-in-law. One of the visitors saw a pool of blood on the floor. They then entered the bedroom, where the fifty-four-year-old Boris Pugo lay on the bed, killed by a gunshot. Instead of waiting to be arrested, he had committed suicide. Next to him, near the bed, sat his mortally wounded wife. She reacted to questions but could not say anything. Valentina Pugo would die soon in a Moscow hospital. In a suicide note written earlier that morning, Boris Pugo asked forgiveness of the members of his family: “This is all a mistake. I lived honestly all my life.”

Another supporter of the coup, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, committed suicide in his Kremlin office a few days later. He had been one of the Soviet negotiators of arms reduction treaties with the United States. On August 19, the first day of the coup, the sixty-eight-year-old
Akhromeev, then Gorbachev's adviser on military affairs, interrupted his summer vacation in Sochi to return to Moscow and report to his new boss, the acting president of the USSR, Gennadii Yanaev. He told Yanaev that he shared the Emergency Committee's agenda and was prepared to help in its realization. Akhromeev was entrusted with the task of collecting and analyzing information on the situation in the regions. Yanaev also asked him to prepare a draft of his address to the Soviet parliament. Akhromeev worked on both tasks with enthusiasm.

In a letter he wrote to Mikhail Gorbachev before committing suicide, the marshal explained his reasons for supporting the coup: “Beginning in 1990 I was convinced, as I am convinced today, that our country is headed for perdition. Soon it will be dismembered. I looked for a way to say that aloud. . . . I understand that as a marshal of the Soviet Union I have violated my military oath and committed a military crime. . . . Nothing remains for me but to take responsibility for what I have done.” To his suicide note Akhromeev attached a fifty-ruble banknote—money he owed the Kremlin cafeteria for lunches there.
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Vadim Medvedev, a Gorbachev aide who had known both Pugo and Akhromeev well, later commented on their suicides: “I understand their tragedy: I knew Boris Karlovich [[Pugo]] well as a man of integrity in his own way, devoted to a particular idea, foreign to political intrigue or careerism. Nor do I have any doubt about the honesty of Sergei Fedorovich.” Both Pugo and Akhromeev believed in communist ideals and the indivisibility of the Soviet state. Akhromeev had fought for it in the Second World War. Pugo, the son of a “Latvian sharpshooter”—one of Lenin's crack troops fanatically devoted to the revolution—had spent a good part of his life at the helm of the Latvian KGB and then of its Communist Party, stamping out nationalist dissent. The coup had given them hope of saving the world that had brought them up and given them career opportunities, high positions, and, last but not least, identity. For people such as Pugo and Akhromeev, its failure meant both personal fiasco and the collapse of their universe. Suicide released them from a world that regarded them not as heroes and saviors but as criminals who had acted against their own people and betrayed their president.
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