فصل 25

CHAPTER 25

THE TOWER

On the December morning in 1990 that Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister, I was in Riga to learn more about a strange series of dirty tricks aimed at the Baltic independence movements. There had been explosions near monuments and war memorials, the sort of incidents the army and the KGB could blame on the “radicals” and present as reasons to take “emergency measures” to “reassert an atmosphere of stability.” They already had the language down pat. And why not? All they had to do was reach up to the shelf and bring down the handbook and look under “putsch, cf. Prague ‘68, Budapest ‘56, et al.” The scenario was all there. All they needed now was the dossier, the pretext.

Shevardnadze, of all people, knew perfectly well what was going on. For months he saw how the military were trying to deceive him, how they tried to embarrass him before the West with their games in the Baltic states and ruin his arms negotiations by moving their tanks and missiles in just such a way that the Americans would catch it on their satellites and blame Moscow for bad faith. He and Yakovlev both saw how the Supreme Soviet chairman, Lukyanov, and the KGB chief, Kryuchkov—those gray Siamese twins—would sit in Politburo meetings and try to unscrew Gorbachev’s head, try to convince him that the “so-called” democrats and Baltic independence people were going to take over with armed insurrections Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Tbilisi, and even the Kremlin. And Gorbachev would listen to every word, nodding sagely. These were the men he trusted, the Party men, the men he’d known since the early days. Sure, they were a little more conservative, but they spoke the same language, the language of the Party, and they knew what discipline was.

I spent the morning of Shevardnadze’s resignation at the editorial offices of Diena (“The Day”), the main pro-independence paper in Riga. The right-ward swing had already started, and so the reporters had no shortage of anecdotes about provocations and intimidation. It was an anxious newsroom. The place had the nasty edge of the family waiting room in intensive care. Something awful was going to happen, they said. It had to.

Then it did. One of the typists, who’d tuned in to the Congress broadcasts on the radio, slowly took off his headphones. He opened his mouth and nothing came out. He was ashen.

“Maybe I got it wrong,” he said in a whisper. “Let me listen again.”

Then he closed his eyes and listened.

“Shevardnadze,” he said. “He’s resigned. He said dictatorship is coming. He is sure of it.” Shevardnadze had warned that “dictatorship is coming” and that the democrats had scattered “to the bushes.” Shevardnadze had not told anyone that he would make his speech except his family and a couple of his closest aides. As he spoke, his Georgian accent made thicker by the anger in him, the sense of moment, Gorbachev sat at the Presidium as shocked as anyone else in the hall. It was one thing for Moscow intellectuals at the kitchen table to talk about a nascent dictatorship, quite another for Shevardnadze, the second-most-recognized face in the leadership, to put an end to his career. What did this man, who was in a position to know so much, really know?

Everyone in the newsroom at Diena was shattered. Ever since the three Baltic states declared their independence a half year before, they had tried to sustain the conceit that they were already independent. They did not need to ask permission or hold a referendum or in any way pay much attention to the politics of Moscow, because Moscow was elsewhere, a foreign power. Now that conceit was finished, untenable. The Baltic leaders could always trust Shevardnadze (or at least as much as they trusted anyone in Moscow), and now he was telling them that their worst midnight fears were true. Dictatorship was coming, and a conceit of attitude and language, no matter how inventive or assured, would do nothing to stop the brutal charge.

I flew back to Moscow the next morning and went straight to the Kremlin. At the Palace of Congresses, military officers strutted in packs, back and forth across the main foyer. Before, the generals and admirals had always seemed to caucus down near the coatroom, away from the cameras and the reporters. They’d linger by the door in little crowds of olive green and navy blue. They seemed to laugh more than other deputies. After all, they were comrades. They had known each other for years. This democracy stuff, well, it was a lark, a sideshow. But now they were all over the main lobby, dumping one-liners off to the press, confident stuff about how they respected Eduard Amvrosievich, but, my dear American friend, not to fear, everything is under control, don’t go worrying about coups and turns to the right. Everything is fine. Gorbachev’s military adviser, Sergei Akhromeyev—a marshal much beloved by Admiral William Crowe at the Pentagon—chuckled through his teeth when I asked him about a military coup.

“How many times do we have to tell you people?” he said. “Relax! Stop inventing fantasies!” Upstairs at the buffet tables, Communist Party hacks were stuffing themselves sick with state-subsidized caviar, smoked salmon, sturgeon, cream cakes, and tea. When they thought no one was looking, they bought ten sandwiches more and stuffed them in their briefcases, the better not to be hungry later on.

Meanwhile, the radicals did the death march, up and down the halls. Vitaly Korotich, with that ate-the-canary smile of his suddenly gone, said his friends and he had started making plans “for the trip to Siberia.” He was only half kidding. Afanasyev was more bleary-eyed than usual. The Balts, those who hadn’t left for home already, smoked furiously near the lavatories. Shevardnadze had said in his speech that “democracy would prevail,” but he warned that the democrats, the radicals, were disorganized and dyspeptic, divided, egocentric, petty. They were risking everything. His language was cryptic, but he made it clear that they could no longer depend on the moral authority of Sakharov—he was gone—or the political strength of Gorbachev—that was in doubt.

Finally, toward the very end of the Congress, one of the democrats had a moment of eloquence that helped make sense of Shevardnadze’s great gesture. Ales Adamovich, a war veteran, the best-known writer in Byelorussia, and a founder of Memorial, got up from his first-row seat, walked up the stairs to the stage, and took hold of the lectern, as if for balance. Gorbachev, Adamovich said, “is the only leader in Soviet history who has not stained his hands with blood, and we would all like to remember him as such.” Then he turned for an instant behind him, as if to address Gorbachev directly: “But a moment will come when the military will instigate a bloodbath, and later they will wipe their bloodstained hands against your suit. And you will be to blame for everything. In the West, you are known as a political genius. I would like you to exercise your wisdom again. Otherwise, you will lose perestroika.” The truth was, it looked lost already. Day by day, the hard-liners made their moves, and there was nothing secret, nothing tricky, about them. Gennadi Yanayev, a witless apparatchik, philanderer, and drunk, was now vice president. Shevardnadze was replaced as foreign minister with Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, a liberal, but without any of the strength or authority of his predecessor. The KGB and the Interior Ministry gave themselves the right to patrol the streets of all major cities. Yazov went on the air complaining about provocations and warned that he would strike back whenever and however he deemed necessary. Kryuchkov announced that he might have to spill a little blood to keep the peace in the republics. And Anatoly Lukyanov, “Lucky Luke,” the creepy chairman of the Supreme Soviet, was always eager to give the floor of the standing parliament to the colonels and crazies from Soyuz (“Union”), the right-wing faction that called, on a daily basis, for Gorbachev’s neck and a state of emergency.

It was an ugly time, and everyone expected it to get uglier. Yakovlev said that the right wing was off on a “vengeful and merciless” counterrevolution, an echo from Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. But Yakovlev, instead of resigning, quietly moved out of Gorbachev’s orbit. Gorbachev would no longer listen to him anymore. What could he do? When I asked Yakovlev what he thought of Gorbachev’s appointment of Yanayev, Yakovlev smiled wearily and said, “The president is a wise man, so I am sure it is a wise decision.” But much later, when he could afford to be less cryptic, Yakovlev told me he saw an “eerie quiet” developing around Gorbachev that winter, as if all his ministers were merely pretending to obey the president, but then went off and did as they pleased. Slowly, they were making a hostage of Gorbachev, and they were counting on the man’s powerful desire to stay in office to keep themselves in control.

Sobchak, the liberal mayor of Leningrad, was the coolest head among the democrats, and when I saw him at the Mariinsky Palace, the headquarters of the city government, he made perfect sense of what was going on. “We are living now through a transition from a totalitarian system to a democratic one, and the forces of dictatorship and democracy live side by side,” he said. “Under these conditions, the danger of a new dictatorship, of military coups or the use of military force against the people, is absolutely real.” It was all so ominous. And nothing had really happened yet.

By the winter of 1990–91, Moscow had become a newspaper fanatic’s dream. Len Karpinsky’s columns and Moscow News were only a part of the morning haul. Having started from nothing, from the wet wash of the Communist Party press, Moscow became the most exciting newspaper city since New York after the war. The Khrushchev “thaw” was a liberalization from which emerged a few works of real literature, but glasnost was a period of journalism, of investigation, sensation, commentary, and scoop.

At first, the most obvious mainstays of glasnost were Moscow News and the weekly magazine Ogonyok. But as glasnost evolved into more genuine freedom of the press, the democratic vista widened. There were breathless papers that rushed to the aid of the radical cause, especially Komsomolskaya Pravda with its circulation of twenty-five million. Literaturnaya Gazeta printed a blend of high-minded cultural criticism, political analysis, and Yuri Shchekochikhin’s startling investigative work on the KGB. Argumenti i Fakti, with a circulation of thirty million, was a kind of bulletin board of two-hundred-word articles and factoids. Izvestia was solid, and for tabloid sensation there were Top Secret’s true crime stories (“Murder on Kutuzovsky Street!”) and Megapolis-Express’s local muckraking. The puckish Kommersant, edited by Yegor Yakovlev’s son Vladimir, covered the emerging business world, letting young entrepreneurs know which mafia clan ruled which district and how to find cheap computers on the black market. In the train stations and street corners, hawkers did a brisk business in Baltic sex papers, neo-Bolshevik mimeograph sheets, and copies of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

For the hard-liners there was Sovetskaya Rossiya, which published the Nina Andreyeva letter in 1988 and the key manifestos leading up to the coup still to come, and Dyen (“The Newspaper of the Spiritual Opposition”), edited by Aleksandr Prokhanov, a theocratic-militarist wacko known affectionately as “the Nightingale of the General Staff.” Among the wire services, the old Big Brother of the ticker, Tass, was as much a fossil as the evening news program Vremya or Pravda, while Interfax and a few others in some of the republics developed the manic intensity of the Associated Press on a good day. Interfax’s leading reporter, Vyacheslav Terekhov, was a breeder reactor in a brown suit, badgering politicians and filing dispatches from breakfast till midnight.

Until 1988 or 1989 at the latest, Moscow News remained the iconoclast, always smashing idols just before the reformers in the leadership did. Ligachev called Moscow News an “ersatz” paper, and small wonder. Moscow News was clearly the voice of the liberals in the Politburo. But it was this lack of real independence at Moscow News, its obvious link to Gorbachev himself, that began to work against it in 1990 and 1991. As the country grew more diverse, as the liberal intelligentsia’s ideas about the future of society and politics grew far more radical than Gorbachev’s own, Moscow News under Yegor Yakovlev began to look a bit timid and almost comically protective of its original patron.

“Without realizing it, Yegor was turning Moscow News into Pravda,” said Vitaly Tretyakov, who was Yakovlev’s deputy at the time. “Just as Pravda was the tribune of the old powers, he wanted Moscow News to be the tribune of the new power, the left-of-center position, the Gorbachev position in the Politburo. When I became Yegor’s deputy, I began to see how many visitors and calls there were from the Central Committee and it was obvious the paper was not operating independently. Len Karpinsky was much more radical than Yegor, but Moscow News could only be as radical as Yegor would allow it to be. Yegor has the personality of a dictator, which may be necessary, but he always wanted to be in possession of ultimate truth, he claimed to know all the answers. None of us could take a step at Moscow News without Yegor’s say-so. You couldn’t mention Lenin, for instance, because Yegor thought he knew all there was to know. And then there was Gorbachev: we could not criticize him directly. And what could someone like Len Karpinsky do? After all, it was Yegor who pulled Len out of obscurity and got him a job.” By the summer of 1990, millions of people were quitting the Communist Party. The Party that called itself the “initiator of perestroika”—an appalling bit of self-congratulation considering the blood on its hands—had lost the power to convince many of its own members that it supported radical change. At Moscow News, Tretyakov proposed that the paper’s Party committee all quit as one. But Yakovlev said no, they should “stay the course.” As usual, Yakovlev had the votes—Karpinsky’s included.

Vitaly Tretyakov was feeling more alienated from his colleagues at the paper by the day. At thirty-nine, he was not a man of the Gorbachev generation and he had none of the Old Bolshevik background and Party connections of so many of the shestidesyatniki. His parents were laborers. Tretyakov had worked for years on the sort of glossy propaganda magazines that the government printing organs ground out like sausage meat: Soviet Life, Etudes Sovietique, Soviet Woman, and the rest. His time at Moscow News was “a gift,” but the time had come to quit, he decided. “My idea,” he said, “was to start something new, a better Moscow News.” Tretyakov had very little idea of what he wanted when he began his first planning sessions in the summer of 1990. He knew only that he did not want to tie the fate and tone of his paper to the fate of Mikhail Gorbachev or any other political personality. At first, he tried to lure some of the best-known writers in Moscow to join him, but they all turned him down. No one with a family and an established position was prepared to risk it all on an experiment, a notion. Tretyakov’s one essential break came with the election of liberal democrats to the Moscow City Hall. The new mayor, Gavriil Popov, and his deputy, Sergei Stankevich, were intrigued by Tretyakov’s idea and gave him a start-up grant of 300,000 rubles. No strings attached, Popov said. Remarkably, the city officials kept their word. They have never considered the paper their own and have not interfered in editorial or business policy. “It was just a small investment in the transition to a free press,” Stankevich said.

I had heard about the paper a half year before its first issue appeared. One summer afternoon, I drove to the country town of Peredelkino to visit Andrei Karaulov, a young theater critic, and his wife, Natasha, the daughter of the playwright Mikhail Shatrov. Karaulov was a journalist-hustler the likes of whom I never had seen before or have since—at least not in Moscow. Even in the early days of perestroika he managed to get interviews with one Politburo member and spymaster after another. He somehow made patently evil and slimy men feel comfortable, then tortured them with his combination of unctuous charm and barbed questions. Andrei’s knack was so uncanny that some of his rivals moaned that he must have “dark connections.” At the Peredelkino dacha that afternoon, one of the other guests was a man in his early forties named Igor Zakharov. Zakharov, it turned out, was an extreme cynic who despised himself most of all. He worked for years at the Novosti press agency editing its propaganda sheets. “I am a born functionary,” he said. “I never believed in anything official: not in Communism and not in the possibility of perestroika. I may have published all that shit, but I never believed it. You know that expression ‘Life is elsewhere’?” Somehow this willingness to work with odious bureaucrats while believing “otherwise” seemed to wear less well on him than on an older idealist like Karpinsky. It was touching that Karpinsky actually did believe in something when he was young and then believed in something else later on. Zakharov believed in nothing but the hopelessness of just about everything, and the sudden advent of radical changes in the country made his cynicism seem worthless. There were times when Karaulov and Zakharov both made my skin crawl. So when they began telling me about their work with Vitaly Tretyakov on a new newspaper to be called Nezavisimaya Gazeta—“The Independent Newspaper”—not only did I think it would fail, I hoped it would.

I forgot about that discussion and Nezavisimaya Gazeta until six months later when I was flying back from Riga to Moscow on the morning after Shevardnadze’s resignation. On the plane I borrowed two copies of an unfamiliar broadsheet—the first and second issues of Nezavisimaya Gazeta—and I was startled. The front page of the first issue featured little mug shots of the country’s leading ministers—a loutish bunch who looked like the comic thugs in “Dick Tracy,” Flattop, Mumbles, and the rest. Above the pictures was a triple-stack headline: “They Rule Us: But What Do We Know About Them, the Most Powerful People in the Country? Almost Nothing.…” On page five, Yuri Afanasyev published what was surely the most incisive and prescient piece of political commentary of the year: “We Are Moving to the Side of Dictatorship.” In details that proved absolutely accurate, Afanasyev described Gorbachev’s “tragedy,” how his own internal and political limitations left him open to the pressures of the hard-line Communists in the regime. It was just the sort of pointed political critique of Gorbachev that Moscow News could not bring itself to publish. Then on page eight of the first issue—the back page—Tretyakov printed a manifesto declaring that there had never been “in the history of the Soviet Union” a paper independent of political interests. He promised Nezavisimaya Gazeta would be such a paper. The second issue led with the headline “Eduard Shevardnadze Leaves. The Military-Industrial Complex Stays. What Choice Will Gorbachev Make?” A few pages later, Karaulov weighed in with a fascinating interview with the number-two ranking man in the KGB, Filipp Bobkov—the same man who interrogated Len Karpinsky two decades before.

One day during those first weeks of Nezavisimaya Gazeta’s life, I went to the paper’s offices with Karaulov. As we walked along the muddy streets near the KGB buildings on Lubyanka Square, he was trying to sell me—literally—some crackpot spy-story documents involving the Bolshoi Theater. Information was constantly for sale now in Moscow. When asked for interviews, some Kremlin officials had no shame. “How much?” they would say. When I refused Karaulov’s “tip” on the Bolshoi and explained the rules about not paying for information, he seemed alternately bemused and hurt. “Besides, you’d never find the place without me,” he said. “You owe me for that, at least.” Nezavisimaya Gazeta’s offices were tucked away in an obscure courtyard building not far from Lubyanka Square. At the time, the paper shared the building with the Voskhod (Sunrise) printing company. Expansion eventually eased the printers out. The paper originally had twenty staffers and appeared three days a week, then built up to two hundred employees and five issues a week. When I first visited the office, the place was a sea of paper and ironic memorabilia—faded portraits of old Politburo members a specialty. No one looked as if he had slept, showered, or shaved in days.

Tretyakov wanted nothing more than to mimic the traditional model of a Western newspaper. His staff looked Village Voice, but he yearned for the style and substance of The New York Times. “It may seem boring to you,” Tretyakov told me during one of our talks, “but I want to create the first Western-style, respectable, objective paper of the Soviet era.” Turned down by the older stars, Tretyakov got his journalists wherever he could find them. Most of them had worked at second- and third-tier publications, at movie and theatrical quarterlies, Baltic underground sheets, Komsomol dailies. Some had no experience at all. They were biologists, secretaries, workers, students, diplomats, anything. Whatever skills they did or did not have, they had a unanimous contempt for all things sovok—the slang term for “Soviet.” (The staff’s favorite early fan letter read, “Congratulations: You are neither pro-Soviet nor anti-Soviet. You are simply non-Soviet.”) All were young, and they did not bother to struggle with the questions of their elders. The ideological ruminations of a man like Len Karpinsky were for these kids irrelevant and just a little bit sad.

Mikhail Leontyev, the paper’s economics editor, was a typical hire. He had studied economics at the Plekhanov Institute in Moscow, but to avoid doing “idiot work for the regime,” he quit the academic world and worked for years restoring old Russian furniture. He hardly ever wrote, he told me: “Why bother?” He did publish one prescient essay for the Latvian paper Atmoda in 1989 titled “The New Consensus,” about the growing front of fascists, nationalists, and military leaders. “That was about all I could do,” Leontyev said. “I just couldn’t work for any of the old papers. Coming here, discovering Nezavisimaya Gazeta, was the revelation we were all waiting for. The coverage of economics in our paper starts from the principle that we don’t need to tear our hair out about whether Marxism-Leninism or capitalism is the right way to go. That debate is dead as can be. Do we really have to go crazy over whether it is good to find a healthy balance between efficiency and social welfare? About whether the rules of the market are ultimately correct? I don’t think so. I don’t cover Communism or any other religions in these pages. That’s not my business.” The darkening political mood that winter, the ominous sense that the army, the KGB, and the Communist Party now formed an open alliance against a radical reform of the country, had given Nezavisimaya Gazeta an immediate sense of purpose. Muscovites reading Nezavisimaya Gazeta in that first month or so had a sense of understanding and foreboding about the political earthquake to come. Not so with Moscow News, which still kept its reports within certain bounds. Moscow News was no longer responding to government censors—they had been either removed or rendered completely benign—but, rather, to an internal sense of propriety and caution, a lingering reverence for Gorbachev and the old hopes of the thaw generation.

Week after week, Nezavisimaya Gazeta was reinventing the newspaper in Moscow, and a twenty-seven-year-old reporter named Sergei Parkhomenko was consistently the paper’s most incisive political commentator. The son and grandson of journalists, Parkhomenko first won a name for himself at the quarterly Teatr when he covered the first session of the Congress of People’s Deputies in May 1989, a job he called the “ultimate in theater criticism.” Gorbachev played the Great Reformer, Sakharov was the Conquering Saint, and the Communist Party hacks were the Evil Chorus. “Imagine if you in America had held the Constitutional Convention live on television,” he said. “The old order died a little every day. No play ever changed an audience more thoroughly.” One night, I went with Sergei to the presses at Izvestia where Nezavisimaya Gazeta was printed. He was the duty editor, acting as a liaison between the printers and the editors back at the office, who were constantly trying to shove late items into the paper. He had already written a column in the morning and had called in a few items for his after-hours job as a stringer for other publications. Like many good young reporters in Moscow, Parkhomenko discovered he could make some hard currency on the side by working for a foreign news organization—in his case, Agence France Presse, the official French wire service. As it turned out, the experience expanded his sense of journalism. “With the French, I got a taste of real reporting,” he said. “It was a new sort of game. Who can be the first to get the information? Who can get sources? Before it was all ‘I think this,’ ‘I think that.’ Now the game had changed and I loved it and the skills were just what I needed. You see, I somehow always knew I would work at a place like Nezavisimaya Gazeta. I knew it instinctively. I wanted a place that was born without any complexes. There are more radical publications, but I’m not interested in the contest for who can be the most radical or liberal. I can’t stand unity and consensus.” Parkhomenko was best known in Moscow for his commentaries—mainly because he refused to shill for any one politician or party line—but he was also an instinctive investigative reporter. He caused a terrific scandal when he discovered that the Central Committee had been running for years a huge fourteen-room workshop for manufacturing fake Western passports. He reported that there were fake stamps, blank passport forms for dozens of foreign countries, and even false mustaches and beards and hats for the passport photos.

Investigative work was a signature of the front page at Nezavisimaya Gazeta. A married couple in their twenties at the paper, Anya Ostapchuk and Zhenya Krasnikov, enraged the Party when they scooped everyone by printing a copy of the Communist Party’s proposed new platform endorsing a “democratic, humane socialism.” Anya’s methods were “quite simple and un-Soviet.” She went to the apartment of a Central Committee member, Vasily Lipitsky, and asked about the platform. He gave her the twenty-three-page document written by Gorbachev’s aide, Giorgi Shakhnazarov, and said she could read it, “but no notes and no tape recorders.” “Then something odd happened,” Anya said. “Lipitsky said he had to take a phone call in the next room. As soon as he left, I got out my tape recorder and read the thing as fast as I could. He didn’t come back in time to stop me. I finished. But I’m sure he wanted me to do just that. It was terrific fun.” Presented with the scoop, Tretyakov was stunned. At Moscow News, his bosses would never have permitted such a thing. Too dangerous, a distinct lack of respect. But Tretyakov immediately published the piece. In a wry note to the readers, he wrote that ordinarily Nezavisimaya Gazeta did not print party manifestos and platforms “because that would be a form of advertising,” and added, “but from such a party we would rather not take any money.” The next day, as every newspaper in Moscow scurried to catch up with the platform story, Parkhomenko got a swift lesson in the sensibilities of the powerful. At a small late-night press conference in the Moscow suburb of Novo-Ogarevo, Gorbachev looked at the reporters and said, “Okay, so who here is from Nezavisimaya Gazeta?” The reporter from state television, a whinnying time-server, blanched and panicked.

“No, no, it’s him,” he said, pointing at Parkhomenko.

“Where did you steal it from?” Gorbachev said.

“I can’t say,” Parkhomenko said.

“And why not?”

“Because that’s the way we work.”

After the press conference, two of Gorbachev’s aides tried to weasel the information out of Parkhomenko. “Oh, come on,” one of them said. “You can tell me. I won’t tell another soul!” Shakhnazarov, for his part, told me he was shocked to see his work in the paper. “Woodward and Bernstein—that is not exactly something we’re used to,” he said.

Sometimes Tretyakov and Zakharov, the village elders at the paper, were scared by their own reporters, their relentlessness, their giddy fearlessness. They were well aware of just how inexperienced the reporters were, how little they knew about degrees of reliability and balance. Often, reporters turned in stories that were merely rumors that seemed a bit too good to check. But while the top editors often demanded more reporting and numerous rewrites, they seldom killed any stories. The only story that Tretyakov refused to run without further question was the rubbish about the KGB and the Bolshoi Theater that Karaulov had tried to peddle to me.

“The reason these kids do things like investigative work is that they not only don’t fear the system, they don’t even respect it,” Zakharov said. “These kids are arrogant, silly, uneducated, undisciplined; they live only in the present. They don’t care about yesterday and have no idea that there is nothing new under the sun. But they have no prejudices. They don’t think ahead and wonder if someone at the Kremlin will think this or that. They just go ahead and do it.” The young reporters also changed the language of newspapers. They dispensed with the wooden bureaucratese and fanatic sloganeering of the Soviet period. “We don’t talk Pravda language,” Parkhomenko said. The change was incredible. Before I left for Russia, I took a course at George Washington University in something called “Newspaper Russian.” For weeks, we memorized endless lists of political clichés: “The talks were held in a warm and friendly atmosphere”; “The peace-loving comrade-nations of the world will face the imperialists in a round of negotiations next week”; and so on. It was the language of Novoyaz, or Newspeak, and nowhere had it reached such a level of absurdity as in the Soviet Union. But Nezavisimaya Gazeta’s younger reporters had never had to write that way—or at least not for long. While someone like Len Karpinsky still had trouble clearing the Novoyaz from his prose—“I try, but I can’t always get it clear”—the Nezavisimaya Gazeta crowd had no such handicap.

“Right away, we tried to imitate Western language,” Parkhomenko said at the print shop. “In Russian, there had never been political language of a civilized country.” It took a while, but I was getting a better sense now of who was leading the right-wing counterrevolution. One night I went to the Red Army Theater for what the right-wing press promised would be an evening of “patriotic celebration.” It was a full house, and nearly everyone was in uniform: army drab, priests’ black, and, here and there, a writer in a pilled chocolate-brown suit. Onstage, one Father Fyodor, his robes festooned with military decorations, droned on about the greatness of Russia’s warriors, “her Aleksandr Nevsky, her Dmitri Donskoi, her proud knights.” “God is our greatest general!” he cried out, and God’s seconds, the teenage recruits who’d been bused in for the show, applauded dutifully.

“But what about Yazov?” one of these teenagers whispered to me. “Isn’t he our general?” Valentin Rasputin, a Siberian novelist well known for his moral indignation and attacks on the ecological ruin of Lake Baikal, sat off to the side of the stage, nodding solemnly at all the speeches. Rasputin was a writer of real talent. His stories about the degradation of the countryside and Communism’s damage to the spirit were respected even by those critics who despised his right-wing politics. But he was not merely conservative. Rasputin was a hater, a brooding anti-Semite who blamed the Jews for the crimes of the Bolsheviks. And that was when he was giving an interview to The New York Times. He was less discreet at gatherings of the Russian Writers’ Union.

For years the right-wingers lived in comfort. They controlled the unions, lived decently. But now, with the barbarians at the gate, they were ready to form even the strangest of coalitions. Rasputin’s literary nationalists and the official priests of the Russian Orthodox Church aligned themselves with men like Akhromeyev and Yazov of the Red Army and Kryuchkov of the KGB, avowed Communists and party leaders. It was a confusing picture. But as I sat there that night in the Red Army Theater, I could see that they had forged a common language, one that had nothing to do with Communist ideology or theocracy. The unifying banner of this alliance of “patriots” was the imagery of empire, vast and powerful, unique and holy. Democracy, rock and roll, stock markets, foreign businesses, independence movements, uppity Jews, Balts, and Asians all undermined the empire.

After the priest blessed the military, and Rasputin blessed Mother Russia, Lieutenant General Gennadi Stepanovsky, one of the leaders of the army’s Communist Party organization, gave the final benediction. The democrats, he said, were “auctioning off our tanks, destroying our monuments, destroying our ability to fight for freedom in the Baltics. But they will not win. They cannot wipe out our great history.” Like Stalin during the war, Stepankovsky hoped a mystical stew of great-power nationalism would form the common bond. This time the enemy was not the Nazis, but the greater world itself, and its vanguard, the democratic infidels.

After the ceremonies that night I glanced through the latest issue of Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), one of the exemplars of the new ideology. It was filled with the usual claims: “[Yeltsin’s] Russia is a marionette of Western Zionism without a single shot being fired. One clearly sees a plan to draw the world into yet another world war in which Russians and other Slavs will be the cheap cannon fodder. A new spiral of historical genocide is being plotted against us.” Another article warned against “strangers bearing gifts” and “cancer-causing shampoos” from Poland, “contaminated bread boxes and shopping bags” from Vietnam, and, of course, the American Big Mac (“too fast and very unhealthy”).

The most powerful of the hard-liners—Kryuchkov, Pugo, Yazov, Lukyanov—knew better than to announce their leadership of the creeping, militarized coup d’état that Shevardnadze had warned of. They made threatening gestures and issued chilling proclamations, but, in general, they let others do the dirtiest work. In those winter months, the man who gave a face to the coup was an army colonel from Latvia, Viktor Alksnis. With his high black pompadour and black leather jacket, Alksnis was known in the liberal press as the “black colonel,” the Darth Vader of the hard-line set. He loved his role and fairly chewed the scenery every time he appeared on the public stage.

“Before you stands a reactionary scum!” he once told the Congress. (Who would doubt him?) Then he pushed up his lower lip and affected the glare of Mussolini. Caricature, the picture of outsized badness, was just what the part required, and Alksnis played it beautifully. By comparison, men like Supreme Soviet Chairman Lukyanov and Kryuchkov thought they would look like the soul of sweet reason.

As a deputy, Alksnis represented the Soviet military bases in Latvia. He was not much liked. His own aunt went door to door campaigning against him. But Alksnis won, promising to restore the “honor of the military” after the “humiliations” of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, the arms reduction treaties with the West, and the cuts in the defense budget. As Party elders like Geidar Aliyev and Yegor Ligachev faded from view, Alksnis, and his counterpart from Kazakhstan, Colonel Nikolai Petrushenko, organized the Soyuz faction under Lukyanov’s subtle patronage. Soyuz was a remarkably effective weapon for the right. It was Soyuz that pressured Gorbachev to fire his liberal interior minister, Vadim Bakatin, and replace him with a hard-liner, Boris Pugo. And it was Soyuz that constantly denounced Shevardnadze’s foreign policy as treasonous. When he resigned, Shevarnadze angrily wondered why no one had defended him against the “boys in colonel’s epaulets.” Alksnis’s grandfather, Yakov, was head of the air force in the 1930s. In May 1937, at the height of the purges, Yakov Alksnis was a member of the three-man military tribunal that ordered the conviction and execution of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the most brilliant military man of his time, on trumped-up charges of espionage. Alksnis then fell to the logic of the era. Eight months after Tukhachevsky’s trial, he was arrested and shot.

“Those were complicated times,” the grandson said blandly.

I met “the black colonel” at his suite at the Moskva Hotel, the vast home to out-of-town deputies in the Supreme Soviet. After looking me up and down, Alksnis said, “If you want to call me a reactionary, go ahead.” A strange greeting, but then he was not an ordinary man. Even in his overheated room, Alksnis never took off his black leather jacket. He was like a teenager who could feel the length of his hair and the cut of his jeans at every moment like a second being. His look was his statement. He affected at all times an expression of bored disgust and quickly pronounced himself disgusted to meet me, a representative of the “lying bourgeois press.” But, at the same time, he was eager to convey the greater disgust he felt with the way the Kremlin had gone all fuzzy and pusillanimous on him. “We are like Cupid: armed, naked, and we impose love on everyone,” he said. “Sad as it may be, the reality of today’s ‘new thinking,’ the priority on ‘common human values,’ well, the reality of it is that the Soviet Union has lost its status as a superpower. It is treated as if it should know its place. We are bullied now!” And this weakness, I asked, was all the fault of Shevardnadze?

“The last myth of perestroika is collapsing: the myth of our wonderful foreign policy,” he said, and then launched into an account of grievances, of being “sold out” by a government willing to debase itself before its rival, to grant every concession, to withdraw from every “interest”—all to get economic help that never came. It was humiliating! And now, he said, Washington was backing a Baltic independence movement that would tear apart the union and lead it to civil war. “Look at the technical equipment of the popular front of Latvia, the number of fax machines, computers, video machines. That kind of stuff can only be bought for foreign currency, and they had none of their own. It was all received from the West under the cover of various charities. I am acquainted with documents gathered by Soviet intelligence, and it is clear what measures the West has taken to support the separatists in the Baltic states. These are government organizations. They actively support them.

“The West,” he went on, “has an official plan to break apart the Soviet state. Doesn’t Bush’s statement indicate that when he says he supports separatist movements in the Baltics? Doesn’t the pressure indicate this? I think it does. This is called arm-twisting, and it’s a policy.… The West wants to remove the Soviet Union from the political arena as a superpower. They have already managed to remove the Soviet Union as an ideological enemy. Now they want to remove them from the world arena. It is all being achieved without the use of force, just through exploiting the processes going on inside the Soviet Union. The West now thinks it can talk down to us. They used to think of the Soviet Union as Upper Volta with missiles. Now they just think of us as Upper Volta. No one fears us.” More than anything else, Alksnis wanted to be feared. This was his role, to give a face to intimidation. He wanted the democrats and the independence movements to fear the possibility of violence; he wanted the West to fear its own attempts at intervention. Fear, which had been so undercut by five years of reforms, was still the only weapon left to the hard-liners. Everything else—ideology, the promise of a shining future—was lost, forgotten.

Alksnis even had a prescription for the near future, and it went like this: disband the democratically elected parliaments, arrest all resisters (“Landsbergis, Yeltsin, whatever it takes”), take control of the press, and install in power a “national salvation front.” I said that sounded a lot like the scenarios for Prague in 1968 or, even more, the martial law in Poland.

“Yes,” he said, “and you should not forget that martial law in Poland prevented a civil war there. It preserved the internal political stability in Poland and allowed a peaceful transition to reforms.” Gorbachev, he said, could play the role of General Jaruzelski. “And then everything will be okay. There will be stabilization of the economic situation, the internal political situation. Gorbachev may not want it, but he is not in a position to dictate the situation. Events have gone too far, and Gorbachev is hostage to his own policy. It’s gone beyond his control. It’s a grass-roots policy. These processes will splash out into the streets in the next few months. It will be very hard to take any specific actions then. The situation is such that it will all happen in the next few months.” The tanks rolled in Lithuania on January 13, 1991.

For more than a year, the KGB and the army had been running operations in Lithuania designed to terrify the popularly elected government and the people. They arrested and beat draft dodgers; they seized various public buildings, institutes, and printing presses; they embarked on a propaganda campaign designed to convince the Russians, Poles, and Jews living there that the Lithuanians would turn them into third-class citizens; they ran military “exercises,” including sending dozens of tanks rumbling past the parliament building in the middle of the night; they established a National Salvation Committee led by the few Communist Party officials in Lithuania still loyal to Moscow.

For more than a year, they hinted at an all-out offensive to unseat the Lithuanian government. On January 13, at around 2:00 A.M., the operation began. The National Salvation Committee declared itself in power and tried to take over all means of communication. With the KGB and ground forces commander General Valentin Varennikov in charge, soldiers fired on demonstrators at the Vilnius television tower. At least fourteen people were killed and hundreds injured: they were shot, beaten, or crushed under the tank treads.

But it was a botched job. Even as thugs, the organizers of the coup were miserable failures. The violence did nothing but intensify hatred toward Moscow. The attempts to control the media were halfhearted. The newspaper Respublika continued publishing daily eyewitness reports. The television station in Kaunas, a city two hours from Vilnius, jacked up its signal and broadcast the same footage that was going out on CNN, the BBC, and other foreign stations. The men who planned the operation had figured that the Western media would be too preoccupied with the war in the Persian Gulf to care much for Lithuania. They figured that the Bush administration would be too grateful for Moscow’s support of the allied coalition against Saddam Hussein to show much public outrage. There was some truth in this. Americans were spending hours “watching the war” on CNN. The Lithuanians despaired that the West would overlook a series of events that could well mean the end of the revolutionary attempt to transform the Soviet Union.

“Of course, it depends on where you are sitting, but I am convinced that in the long run, what you are seeing now in the Soviet Union will prove more important historically than the war in the Persian Gulf,” Algimantis Cekoulis, a leader of the Sajudis front in Lithuania, told me. “I don’t think anyone doubts that the allied coalition will win in Iraq, but who will prevail in the Soviet Union? How much blood will be shed? This is not some isolated issue for the tiny Baltic states, or even for the Soviet Union. The course of events in this country will have a dramatic effect on the fate of Europe and even of the United States.” My colleague Michael Dobbs finished dictating his first eyewitness account to me from Vilnius at around four-thirty in the morning. I got a couple hours’ sleep and went to Manezh Square. If there was going to be any demonstration at all, it would be outside the Manezh, an exhibition hall near the Kremlin gates. A few hundred people had gathered in the cold. Those with radios kept them tuned to the BBC or Radio Liberty. The main Moscow television and radio stations were broadcasting no news about what had happened in Lithuania except to say that there had been some sort of “incident,” and it was all the fault of the sitting government, of course. But Radio Liberty and the BBC were reading back essentially what the Western reporters in Vilnius had put into the Sunday-morning papers.

The reaction was furious: “Gorbachev Is the Saddam Hussein of the Baltics!” one sign said. “Down with the Executioner!” I ran into Sergei Stankevich, a charming baby-faced politician, and now the deputy mayor of Moscow. I’d first met him when he was campaigning for the Congress of People’s Deputies wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He was furious. He had joined the Party because of the promise of Gorbachev and spent one night after another in political argument trying to defend the general secretary to his friends. “Now, that’s over. No more,” he said. “I’m finished with Gorbachev. There are just so many times you can let yourself be deceived.” Yuri Afanasyev climbed a platform and told the crowd that they would march toward the Central Committee buildings, the Party headquarters in Old Square. “The killings in Vilnius are the work of a dictatorship of reactionary circles—the generals, the KGB, the military-industrial complex, and the Communist Party chiefs,” he told the small crowd. “And at the head of that Party dictatorship stands the initiator of perestroika, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.” We marched up Marx Street toward the Central Committee, a series of dreary and imposing buildings around the corner from the KGB. A line of police had already cordoned off the area with sawhorses and a row of parked buses. But the crowd was in no mood to behave, and the people simply walked around the barriers and headed toward the entrances to the headquarters of the Communist Party. One man rushed by the cops and planted a six-foot crucifix at the front door. For a while, the people shouted up at the windows of the building and at the occasional apparatchik coming in to work. Then the police regrouped and cut off the marchers once more. Another charge could have led to blood. Stankevich and the other Democratic Russia leaders stepped in and said it was best to disperse, “to go home and figure things out.” The failed coup attempt in Lithuania changed everything for the middle-aged intellectuals who had remained loyal to the idea of a reformed Communist Party. They were the Gorbachev generation, the Moscow News generation, and they had lost a dream that many of them had held since the end of the war and the Twentieth Party Congress. While the young staff at Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported the story of the Lithuanian coup attempt as if it were the logical extension of the events of the months before, the writers and editors at Moscow News suddenly went through an ideological conversion. With the bloodshed in Vilnius, they lost all faith in Gorbachev. Len Karpinsky, Yegor Yakovlev, and a long list of shestidesyatniki including Vyacheslav Shostokovsky from the Higher Party School and Tengiz Abuladze, the director of the movie Repentance, signed a front-page editorial in Moscow News saying the regime, now in its “death throes,” had executed a “criminal act” in Lithuania: “After the bloody Sunday in Vilnius, what is left of our president’s favorite topics of ‘humane socialism,’ ‘new thinking,’ and a ‘common European home’? Virtually nothing.” For so long, most of these men and women had hoped for a socialism made humane. They felt comfortable with the idea of the traditional power structure—the Party—leading the way. After all, weren’t they all members? The idea of other parties was something foreign, bourgeois. The impudence of such people as Boris Yeltsin and Vytautas Landsbergis made them uncomfortable. Yegor Yakovlev, especially, had never liked Yeltsin, never liked the way he attacked Gorbachev or conducted himself. Now the men of Moscow News and their generation had nowhere to go but to the people Gorbachev had called, so venomously, the “so-called democrats.” “The Lithuanian tragedy must not fill our hearts with despair,” the editorial continued. “While opposing the onslaught of dictatorship and totalitarianism, we are pinning our hopes on the leadership of other Union republics.” The crowd at Nezavisimaya Gazeta viewed the conversion of Moscow News with pity and condescension. “The truth is, I could never understand why those people only decided to make their split when the tanks rolled into Vilnius,” Igor Zakharov said. “It’s like trying to figure out why a woman who hates her husband for twenty years finally decides one day, after one little incident, to get up, walk out the door, and never come back.” Maybe the young could never understand. The editors at Moscow News sat a long and painful wake for their own dreams and delusions. Not long after the attack in Lithuania, Yegor Yakovlev invited Karpinsky and a few other friends to his apartment for a sixtieth birthday party. “It was a meeting of people who didn’t know what to say to one another,” said Yakovlev’s son Vladimir, the editor of the business paper Kommersant. “The energy they used to have was gone, and the world around them was no longer their world. And, most important, they didn’t know how to relate to this new world. It was the feeling you see at the gatherings in Russia forty days after someone dies. No one is crying anymore, but no one knows quite what to say. These birthday gatherings had always been such celebrations. Now it was just silence, a complete breakdown.” While the newspapers played out their generational drama, the most brutal struggle was the war for television. It was fitting that the scene of violence in Vilnius was the concrete television tower on the edge of the city, for this revolution was a battle for the minds of every person in the Soviet Union. “The television image is everything,” Aleksandr Yakovlev had said, and now both sides knew it. For the reactionaries to recapture television would be far more than a symbolic defeat for democracy. It would be the beginning of the end.

When I got to Vilnius a week after the killings, young Red Army soldiers were still camped around the tower, guarding it as if it were the most precious property in all of Lithuania. And it may have been. The soldiers had AK-47s slung over their shoulders and wore tight, frightened expressions. These were kids, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, many of them unaware of what had happened. The crack troops who had carried out the assault had already been evacuated.

Outside the chain-link fence, on an incline leading away from the tower, a Lithuanian sculptor had carved out of wood a weeping, haggard Christ, a figure out of the paintings of Goya. People had made a shrine of the Christ, surrounding it with candles and flowers. Teenagers came and sat on the muddy hill and played tapes of Lithuanian folk songs and stared off into the pale winter sky.

Down the road a couple of miles, thousands of pro-independence Lithuanians had surrounded the parliament building with makeshift barricades, the better to guard against the next assault. They used huge blocks of poured concrete, steel scrap, sandbags, buses, trams. Outside the building, people sat in the cold, some of them around oil-drum campfires. One man made a fire for himself out of a dozen copies of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Along the barbed wire that cut off access to the front entrances to the parliament building, people had thrown the symbols of their fury: plastic machine guns, water pistols, watercolors of the tanks painted by schoolchildren; there were portraits of Gorbachev as a killer, Gorbachev kissing Stalin on the lips, Gorbachev shoving Lithuanians into a meat grinder; some had spiked their red Party membership cards along the top of the razor wire, giving the fence a leafy, autumnal look. Inside the parliament building, everyone was waiting for the next move. Why would they stop at the TV tower? Landsbergis stayed in his office and slept a few hours a night on his couch. He refused to go home for fear of kidnapping, or worse. Kids who had run away from the Red Army acted as a makeshift guard. They carried ancient hunting rifles, rusty knives, and the sort of clunky revolvers you saw in Hollywood westerns. In the press room upstairs, young volunteers sent out faxes and telexes to news bureaus around the world: bulletins, appeals for help, official pronouncements of the president. Always, the televisions played. We watched the British Sky Channel and CNN to see what the world was seeing and Vremya in the evening to get a fix on the Moscow propaganda line. The Lithuanians despaired when the Gulf War news completely overwhelmed their own crisis on the Western stations. Rumors inside the building gave everyone a bad case of the jumps: “Tonight’s the night.” “They’re going into Latvia tomorrow morning.” “The roof’s been rigged up so they can’t land the helicopters.” Lithuania was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but there was no retreat.

“Why should we not win?” Landsbergis said.

At first, there were some heroic attempts in Moscow to bypass the censors and deliver the news. The cheeky late-night program Television News Service (TSN) broadcast footage of soldiers beating Lithuanians near the tower. The Leningrad magazine show The Fifth Wheel also showed tape of the beatings and shootings.

But the Kremlin’s new television czar, a fearsome hack named Leonid Kravchenko, quickly clamped down on all information broadcast about Lithuania. As the head of Gosteleradio, the huge bureaucracy that ran central television and radio, Kravchenko wiped out nearly all the major programs that had dared to report the news independently. In short order, Kravchenko banned Vzglyad (“View”), the most heroic of the glasnost magazine shows; he censored the reports on TSN; he darkened whatever glimmer of independence Vremya was beginning to show and returned it to the glory days of the Brezhnev era.

In the halls of the Supreme Soviet one afternoon, a reporter asked Kravchenko what he wanted in his broadcasts.

“Objectivity,” Kravchenko said.

“And who decides what is objective?”

“I decide,” he said.

Kravchenko said plainly that central television should reflect the view of the president and not attack him. “State television does not have the right to engage in criticism of the leadership of the country,” he told Nezavisimaya Gazeta. What replaced much of the censored shows was even more insidious and cynical. Just as the Party had used the faith healer Anatoly Kashpirovsky to soothe a hurting country, they now filled the airwaves with other diverting junk. Field of Miracles, a rip-off of the low-rent American show Wheel of Fortune, was the new sensation. Contestants lined up to win such wonders as a rhinestone ring and a box of Tide. Kravchenko put on professional wrestling, Geraldo Rivera’s interviews with dwarf transvestites, the Death of Elvis miniseries, schmaltzy World War II documentaries, and a Czech soap opera, Hospital on the Edge of Town. Kravchenko was willing to try whatever opiate on the masses that seemed to work. On the day after the bloodshed in Vilnius, while there were solemn marches in cities across the country honoring the dead, Kravchenko aired the Aleksandr Show, a variety hour so sleazy that Wayne Newton would have cringed.

In their front-page editorial, the Moscow News editors and their supporters echoed Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not by Lies” and put out the call to their colleagues: “We appeal to reporters and journalists: If you lack courage or opportunity to tell the truth, at least abstain from telling lies! Lies will fool no one anymore. They are evident today.” But because state controls were still relatively tight, television journalists had a much harder time following their consciences than print reporters. On TSN, Tatyana Mitkova ran a tape of Interior Minister Boris Pugo’s fantastical testimony about Lithuania in the Supreme Soviet. Pugo’s defense of the operation in Vilnius was a transparent lie. When Mitkova came back on the screen, she said, “Unfortunately this is all the information TSN has found it possible to provide.” That was the best she could do.

In Kaunas, the Lithuanian television producers set up a relay system so that their broadcast could go to all the Baltics, southern Finland, and eastern Poland. When the Kaunas Party chief went on the air to defend the attack, the host stared him down and said, “After what’s happened in Vilnius, how do you even look people in the eye?” The Kaunas station director, Raimondas Sestakauskas, told me, “Look, we don’t have tanks, we don’t have much at all to win our war for independence. But we’re going to resist, and the resistance now is a matter of strength of character … and television.” No matter what the Moscow News appeal said, the Communist Party still thought it could lie to the people and get away with it. Their designated con man was Aleksandr Nevzorov, the right wing’s video warrior. A former movie stuntman, he hosted 600 Seconds, an immensely popular program on Leningrad television that featured gruesome true-crime stories and propaganda in the service of the Motherland. Like his friend Colonel Alksnis, Nevzorov was into leather. He always wore a black leather jacket and a matching sneer. As a journalist, he was equal parts Geraldo Rivera and propaganda minister, a master of the basest instincts of schlock and vengeance. For a couple of years, 600 Seconds had been a semi-harmless distraction for hard times, the Soviet equivalent of a few minutes with the New York Post or one of the “real cops” shows on American television. Nevzorov won huge popularity by exposing his audience of around eighty million people to the world of corruption and vice. His was the scream in the agitprop cathedral, and the people loved it. Night after night, as the clock ticked away frantically in the corner of the screen (600 … 599 … 598 …), Nevzorov showed police dragging bullet-riddled corpses from the Neva River, cajoled rapists and murderers into “live on tape” confessions, and exposed the dalliances and secret luxuries of the Communist Party elite. Nevzorov was constantly sticking his camera in the snoot of some greedy apparatchik who’d just been caught getting a deal on a car or a house. “I’m probably responsible for the heart attacks of about forty apparatchiks,” Nevzorov boasted when I went to see him at his studios in Leningrad.

Despite Nevzorov’s attacks on the Party, few people ever had any illusions that he was a knight of liberal reform. He described himself as a monarchist and occasionally wore a czarist-era military uniform, thoughtfully sewn for him by his girlfriend. He bragged about his extraordinary rapport with the police and, especially, the KGB. “I have good relations with the KGB,” Nevzorov said. “This is natural. They give us a lot of help and I highly value that organization.… They are incorruptable and not for sale.” As the counterrevolution began to show its head, first in the Baltic states and then everywhere else, Nevzorov quickly became the televised face of Gorbachev’s allies in the defense of the empire: the army and the KGB. As the semioticians might have said, he was the sign of the times.

One night when I was in Leningrad, 600 Seconds showed a tape of a city council liberal frantically combing his bald spot. “So this is the last hope of the city?” Nevzorov growled in the voice-over. Then, armed with a minicam, Nevzorov and his crew stormed the headquarters of the Movement of Civil Resistance, one of the council’s more radical factions, as if they had uncovered Hitler’s bunker. “The place is a pigsty,” Nevzorov said. Next, in a move that would have earned him an immediate libel suit in the West, he showed file footage of a pile of guns and said, “It’s difficult to imagine how many arms these people have.” There was never any proof that the guns belonged to the movement. But too late. It was time for the next item. On other nights, Nevzorov accused Leningrad city council deputies of welshing on their alimony payments, wandering drunk through the streets, and conducting shady business deals. And as for Sobchak, Nevzorov said, “His sole policy is survival at any cost. If the Germans attacked Leningrad again, he’d start learning German just to stay in power.” After years of grain harvest assessments, intermediate Polish lessons, and “Boy Meets Harvester Combine” movies, Soviet television may have needed Nevzorov badly. He was pugnacious, malicious, and wonderfully crude. He provided a thrill-hungry country with a nightly video frisson and his libels were somehow easy, or convenient, to overlook. Even Sobchak tried hard not to mind too much. “Nevzorov is a journalistic cowboy from the Wild West who does what he can to stay in the saddle” was about the worst thing the mayor would say.

But what was once a sordid amusement now became a centerpiece of the Kremlin’s turn toward authoritarian politics. At times it seemed as if Nevzorov’s role in the shift to the right ranked just below the ministerial level. Vremya, of course, tried to do what it could to stanch the propaganda wound of the Lithuanian assault with some bogus account of how the independence movement had itself caused the tragedy. Gorbachev waffled, and said the first he had heard of the assault was when he was wakened by his aides the next morning. Was he lying? It was hard to know which was worse: that he was telling the truth, and therefore not in control of the army and the KGB; or that he was lying, and at the head of a coup attempt against the Lithuanians. Later, when I asked Gorbachev’s former economic adviser, Nikolai Petrakov, whether Gorbachev truly “slept through” the Vilnius events in ignorance, he said, simply, “Don’t be naive.” The Kremlin and Kravchenko knew they needed a new form of public relations. Enter Nevzorov. If Vremya was Lawrence Welk, Nevzorov was Ice-T, the hip-hop artist of Soviet television. He didn’t wear those mouse-gray suits like the announcers on Vremya. He was cool. When he lied, he did not sweat. His lip did not even twitch. And he had fantastic ratings. Boris Gidaspov, the conservative head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, told the city that “our Sasha Nevzorov” would soon deliver the “objective truth” on the situation in Lithuania.

The day after the shootings, Nevzorov and his crew piled into one of those tuna-can-sized Ladas and raced from Leningrad to Vilnius, where they quickly shot a ten-minute piece. Nevzorov called his film Nashi—“Ours,” or “Our People,” meaning … Russians. The idea was that the military was the defender of “Ours” and the Lithuanians an unruly—no, treasonous!—mob. Nevzorov called Landsbergis’s pro-independence government “fascists” who had “declared war” on the state. In other words, the message was the same as Gorbachev’s, the same as Vremya’s. But it was the imagery that did it. With a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and snippets of Das Rheingold booming on the soundtrack, Nevzorov inspected the fierce and sturdy faces of the troops inside the television center. They were defenders of the faith, defenders of the holy airwaves. They would save us all against the hordes of ungrateful Lithuanian college professors. Didn’t they understand what an empire was? And as for the dead, Nevzorov had an answer for that, too. They had not died from the soldier’s bullets; no one was crushed under the treads of the tanks or beaten to death with the butt-end of a rifle. No, they died in “car accidents” and of “heart attacks.” The funny thing about Nashi was that Nevzorov never interviewed a single Lithuanian. I asked him about that later in Leningrad. “I could have shown sweet Lithuanian flags waving in the air,” he said, “but I didn’t.” Why should he? This was the army’s show—with production credits to the KGB and the CPSU.

Nevzorov’s broadcast and the endorsement it won from the Kremlin leadership were almost as chilling as the violence in Vilnius itself. The omen was nasty. The Supreme Soviet, with a push from Lukyanov, ordered Nevzorov’s film shown three times on national television. The Communist Party daily, Pravda, which for years had suffered the scorn of 600 Seconds, now praised Nevzorov as a “brilliant professional … an intrepid man.” The paper said that Nevzorov’s film was convincing proof that “the responsibility for the deaths of innocent people lies with the chief Lithuanian ‘democrat’—Vytautas Landsbergis.” The broadcast cut into Nevzorov’s ratings a little. Some of the democratically inclined said it made them just sick to watch him now. But that was all right with Nevzorov. His cubicle office at the Leningrad studios had turned into a political headquarters for local reactionaries. Every day, right-wing members of the city council, retired cops, and leaders of groups like Motherland and the United Workers’ Front piled into the room to get a glimpse of him, to ask him to get their grievances (the Jews! the co-ops! Yeltsin!) on the air. To make everyone feel at home, Nevzorov decorated the place with some czarist memorabilia, a bulletproof vest, and a classic Bolshevik recruiting poster from the Civil War period that he’d doctored to read: “Have You Killed Any Democrats Today?” In the weeks after the Vilnius affair, Nevzorov intensified his nationalist campaign in other films. In Riga, he hailed the decision of the shadowy Black Berets to storm the local police station, an incident that left at least five dead. He tirelessly promoted the career of Colonel Alksnis, who was now busy egging on Gorbachev to “finish the job he started” in Lithuania.

In all his reports, Nevzorov’s methods were simple. He meant to scare the hell out of his viewers—all in the service of the Motherland. If the Baltics became independent, he warned, Leningrad would suddenly be overrun with hundreds of thousands of refugees: “There will be tent cities, hunger, fights, deaths, and with all those weapons we have!” Those who were with him were “ours.” Those who were not were “radical scum.” Nevzorov insisted he was his own man, but at the same time he was quick to sing the praises of the KGB and the army—“the only institutions holding the country together.” The local paper Chas Pik (“Rush Hour”) reported that the “Public Committee for the Support and Protection of the TV Program 600 Seconds” included eight directors of huge defense plants and leaders of the local military-industrial complex. Nevzorov made it a point to brag about a hunting rifle that the defense minister, Dmitri Yazov, had given him, and he went on and on about his grandfather who had been a KGB officer—in Lithuania. “They say I am the spitting image of my grandfather. He was a hero, wounded many times in the line of duty. This is a source of great pride for me,” Nevzorov said. “The KGB is a great group of guys.” Nevzorov said his alliance with Gorbachev was probably only a temporary “coincidence of positions.” He felt more at one with the men who carried the hardware, the soldiers who “bore the ideals of Peter the Great and Aleksandr Nevsky. These are our great Russian defenders. Look, there is chaos in the country. It’s better to bring in the tanks now when we are not talking about hundreds and thousands of deaths.… A military coup, a military dictatorship, will be around for a while. It’s only logical. If there are no healthy forces in society and everything is headed for chaos, then it is only natural that power should be seized by a structure that can maintain authority and order.” Nevzorov said he found my questions about television “whiny and pathetic.” He was a pragmatist, he said. “Television and newspapers are nothing more than weapons,” he said. “They brainwash the people. A journalist is always serving someone. I am serving my Fatherland, my Motherland. The Fifth Wheel is sophisticated propaganda against the state and order. I have no problems with censorship. If the head of Leningrad TV calls me up and tells me to do this or that, you just say, ‘Fuck off.’ ” And with that he stormed off to do battle for the Motherland. On the way out, I stopped off at the offices of The Fifth Wheel, where everyone was trying to figure out ways to beat the censors and undermine Nevzorov’s broadcasts. Nothing was working and they were desperate. Viktor Pravdiuk, one of the lead reporters, told me, “They haven’t strangled us yet, but their fingers are tightening around our throats.”