فصل 28

PART IV

“FIRST AS TRAGEDY, THEN AS FARCE”

Evil has great momentum, but the forces of good are inert. The masses … have no fight in them, and will acquiesce in whatever happens.

—NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, 1970

Boris Yeltsin was twelve when he had his first run-in with the Communist Party. He’d had a mean childhood. His father was a construction worker who beat him with a belt. The family lived in a hut near a building site in the Urals, and the six of them, and their goat, lived in one room. Everyone slept on the floor. Once, when Yeltsin was six, he woke in the middle of the night to see his father being led out of the hut by strange men. The family was lucky that the arrest did not lead to a long jail term or the camps.

As a boy, Yeltsin was a good student and a troublemaker. “I’ve always been a bit of a hooligan,” he told me. In the fifth grade, he encouraged the entire class to jump out the first-floor window while the teacher was out of the room. He took part in gang fights and got his nose broken when one of his friends took a swing at him with a club. When he was eleven and the war was on, Yeltsin and a few of his friends broke into an arms depot in a local church. They climbed through three layers of barbed wire and stole a couple of hand grenades: “We just wanted to see what they were made of.” Yeltsin, of course, decided that he would take charge. Without removing the fuses, he tried to open the grenades with a hammer. The explosion mangled the thumb and forefinger on his left hand, and when gangrene set in, the fingers had to be removed. “Wouldn’t you say that was brilliant?” Yeltsin’s troubles with the Communist Party began at his graduation ceremonies from primary school. As one of the best students in the school, he had the honor of being allowed to sit on the stage. When it came his turn to give a short speech, Yeltsin grabbed the microphone and turned his ceremonial moment into an outrageous harangue. He launched into an attack on a certain homeroom teacher, a hated shrew who cursed the children, smacked them with a thick ruler, and made them clean her house. “She was a horror and I had to say what I had to say,” Yeltsin said. The parents and the staff in the audience listened for a while in shock. The principal finally jumped out of his chair and snatched away the microphone and sent Yeltsin back to his seat. The day was ruined. And what was more, instead of a diploma, Yeltsin received a “wolf’s ticket,” a certificate forbidding him from getting a high school education. At home, Yeltsin’s father came at him with the strap. It was the usual punishment. But this time, Yeltsin grabbed his old man’s arm and fended him off. No more, he said, and then went looking for retribution at the local headquarters of the Communist Party. For weeks, Yeltsin heard nothing from the local bureaucrats but rebuke. Finally, he got one official to listen to his complaints against the teacher, how she had humiliated her students. A board of inquiry was established. The teacher was fired and Yeltsin was reinstated as a student in good standing. He had won his first battle inside the “horror house” of the Soviet system.

By the middle of 1991, Yeltsin was hoping to transform himself from an executioner of the sacred cow, a political figure who made his name by attacking Ligachev, the Party, Gorbachev and all the rest, into a statesman of the “new Russia.” As Russia’s first elected president, he hoped to rebuild the bridge to Gorbachev and move into a new era in which the sovereignty of the republics would allow for greater wealth and liberty. Yeltsin knew that real power still lay elsewhere: with the army, the KGB, the police. He, like Gorbachev, had heard rumors of a coup, and while the two men negotiated a new Treaty of the Union that would give far greater powers to the republics, Yeltsin warned Gorbachev that he was surrounded by reactionaries who could eventually betray him. Yeltsin had seen what had happened in Lithuania in January and then in the Supreme Soviet when Pavlov and his sponsors made their grab for power. He had no reason to expect that these men would go quietly.

It must have been the first coup d’état in world history to have been announced in advance, and in the national press.

The first to plow the rhetorical earth were the military ideologists, the men of the lunatic fringe who saw the army as the sainted institution of the Russian empire, the bulwark of a great world power. With Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov’s blessing, Major General Viktor Filatov edited the monthly Military-Historical Journal, which featured excerpts from Mein Kampf, attacks on Sakharov, and, most prominently of all, the collected works of Karem Rush, a full-throated booster of the Soviet imperial idea. “The military,” Rush wrote, “should consider itself the backbone and sacred institution of a thousand years of statehood.” By publishing such stuff, Filatov boosted circulation from 27,000 in 1988 to 377,000 in 1990. He was a lovely man, Filatov was. He published the famous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and told The New York Times that he regarded the document “as a normal piece of literature, like the Bible or the Koran.” He was an ardent supporter of Saddam Hussein and wrote pro-Iraqi propaganda during the Gulf War. Perhaps his favorite target was the liberal press. Once, Filatov wrote, “It’s a pity we have no Beria now; if he had read today’s Ogonyok, he would have shot half [the staff] and sent the remaining rubbish to rot in a camp.” Nash Sovremenik, another journal of the nationalist right wing, seconded that emotion, declaring the army “not only has the right, but also the duty, to become extremely involved in internal affairs.” For a long time, the country’s most important reactionaries, ministers like Yazov, Kryuchkov, and Pugo, hid behind figures like Filatov, Rush, and the editors of Nash Sovremenik. They did not risk the appearance of outright treason. But, eventually, such niceties faded. On May 9, 1991, Aleksandr Prokhanov’s paper, Dyen (“The Day”), published a roundtable discussion with some of the most hard-line figures in the military: Valentin Varennikov, the general in charge of all ground forces and the leader of the charge on Vilnius; Igor Rodionov, the general most responsible for the 1989 massacre in Tbilisi; and Oleg Baklanov, the head of the country’s military-industrial complex. Only the naive could have read what these men had to say and not come to the conclusion that they wanted nothing less than a coup d’état. Baklanov spoke with touching modesty about the military’s ability to rule the country. But rule they could, and would: “The defense industry has much greater organizational experience than, say, the newly appointed politicians who are incapable even of ensuring garbage collection on the streets of Moscow.” If Gorbachev needed greater proof that the rhetoric of the hard-liners matched their real intentions, he got it at the end of June.

On June 20, the foreign ministers of the United States and the Soviet Union were holding talks in Berlin in preparation for a Bush-Gorbachev summit a month later in Moscow. Secretary of State James Baker and Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh had already spent a long day with each other in meetings on a wide range of issues. But when Bessmertnykh returned to his embassy in the late afternoon, Baker was on the phone saying they had to meet again.

“Jim, what’s the matter? What’s happened?” said Bessmertnykh, who spoke English fluently.

“It’s something very urgent,” Baker said. “I’d like to meet you very much.” Bessmertnykh said that he had a meeting. Couldn’t it wait?

Baker tried to find the words to convey the gravity of the matter and yet not give away any detail on a phone line that was probably not secure.

“It’s a somewhat delicate matter,” he said. “If I go, a lot of cars will follow with guards, and there will be a lot of commotion in town. The press will be on to us. If you can, I’ll wait for you at the hotel room where I’m staying, but please let everything be quiet!” “Is it really that urgent?” Bessmertnykh said. “I have a scheduled meeting.” “If I were you, I would, perhaps, put off all my affairs and come over.” In an unmarked car, Bessmertnykh rode cross town to Baker. He brought with him one of his policy advisers, a specialist from the USA-Canada Institute, but Baker said he would prefer to meet alone with Bessmertnykh.

When they were alone, Baker said, “I’ve just received a report from Washington. I understand it may come from intelligence sources. It seems that there may be an attempt to depose Gorbachev. It’s a highly delicate matter and we need to convey this information somehow. According to our information, Pavlov, Yazov, and Kryuchkov will take part in the ouster.… It’s urgent. It must be brought to Gorbachev’s attention.” The initial report had come from Moscow’s Mayor, Gavriil Popov, who told the American ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock, that the KGB and the military were preparing a coup.

Baker asked if it was possible to call Gorbachev on a direct line from the Soviet embassy in Berlin. Bessmertnykh said that such lines were under KGB control and, therefore, useless. Baker suggested instead that they set up a direct, private meeting between Gorbachev and the American ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock. Bessmertnykh agreed.

On June 22, Gorbachev, Kryuchkov, Yazov, and the rest of the Soviet leadership took part in an annual ceremony in Moscow—laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin gates. In retrospect, it was a tableau out of a Shakespearean tragedy: the monarch surrounded by his men, his deferential advisers, his betrayers.

After the ceremony, Gorbachev held a short private meeting with Bessmertnykh.

How had the session gone with the American ambassador? the minister asked.

It had gone well, Gorbachev said. Once he had the information, he said, he had had a “tough talk” with those concerned. And that was all.

In a document dated June 20, 1991, the same day as Baker’s secret meeting with Bessmertnykh, the KGB quoted a source in Gorbachev’s “inner circle” coolly analyzing how to push Gorbachev out of power or, at least, into an increasingly conservative position. The document, uncovered later by the Russian prosecutors, said that the Bush administration held Yeltsin in disdain and considered the possibility of his ascension to supreme power as “catastrophic” for U.S.-Soviet relations. It also said that the Bush circle was beginning to wonder if Lukyanov was positioning himself as a successor to Gorbachev. The document said that the “most logical and sensible” course would be to force Gorbachev to abandon a radical course in the same way he was “persuaded” to abandon the 500 Days program. The source of the analysis was not named.

It was a season of deception. Little by little, the conspirators were undermining the authority of the president. The attempt to grab Gorbachev’s powers in parliament in June had failed, but they were still chipping away, humiliating the president in a hundred different ways.

Despite promises to the contrary, the military carried out nuclear tests in Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya without consent of the republics or national authorities. The Ministry of Defense and the general staff came close to scotching the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty that they despised so much by playing games with the rules on the counting of weapons. While Gorbachev was in Oslo to collect the Nobel Prize in June, the General Prosecutor’s Office released a report exonerating troops involved in the Vilnius violence; on the same day, troops in Lithuania set up fifteen checkpoints and made two arrests. All this assured that Gorbachev would have to answer some embarrassing questions at what would have otherwise been a triumphant press conference. While Gorbachev was trying to get himself invited to the summit of industrialized nations in London, the commander of Soviet forces in East Germany sent a letter to the German Foreign Ministry threatening to slow down troop withdrawals if Bonn did not move faster to build apartments in the Soviet Union for the returning soldiers.

With every new incident, the leading officials denied any political meaning, and each time they tugged a little on the trigger.

It was easy to look away. Despite all the ominous signals to the contrary, most of the talk in Moscow in the early summer of 1991 was reasonably optimistic. Gorbachev seemed to have shifted course once more, this time making his peace with Yeltsin and the other republican leaders. Negotiations on the Treaty of the Union appeared to be moving along without the usual disasters.

But three days after Yeltsin issued a decree barring Party cells in government institutions, and just one week before George Bush landed in town for a summit with Gorbachev, the leading paper of the reactionaries, Sovetskaya Rossiya, published a stunning appeal called “A Word to the People.” Signed by leading right-wing generals, politicians, and writers, the appeal, dated July 23, declared that Russia was in the midst of an “unprecedented tragedy”: “Our Motherland, this country, this great state which history, Nature, and our predecessors willed us to save, is dying, breaking apart and plunging into darkness and nothingness.… What has become of us, brothers?” The language was apocalyptic, the imagery of a ship of state “sinking into nonexistence,” evil forces selling out a great power. “Our home is already burning to the ground … the bones of the people are being ground up and the backbone of Russia is snapped in two.” It even condemned the Communist Party for giving power to “frivolous and clumsy parliamentarians who have set us against each other and brought into force thousands of stillborn laws, of which only those function that enslave the people and divide the tormented body of the country into portions.… How is it that we have let people come to power who do not love their country, who kowtow to foreign patrons and seek advice and blessings abroad?” The key signatories were General Boris Gromov, the last Soviet commander in Afghanistan and now Pugo’s deputy in the Interior Ministry; General Varennikov, again; Vasily Starodubtsev, the head of the conservative agricultural lobby; and Aleksandr Tizyakov, the head of an association of military plants. For months, Tizyakov had been carrying around documents in his briefcase outlining the shape a military coup could take. But the main author of the appeal was Aleksandr Prokhanov, the editor and novelist whose ode to Soviet empire in A Tree in the Center of Kabul led him to adopt the sobriquet “the Soviet Kipling.” He waited for the coup as if it were Christmas. “Get ready for the next wave, my friend,” he once told me. “Get ready.” Prokhanov, with likely help from two other writers and signatories, Yuri Bondarev and Valentin Rasputin, managed to capture the tone of apocalypse in every reactionary’s heart. As the critic Natalya Ivanova pointed out in a stunning essay in the monthly journal Znamya, the July 23 appeal, with its vulgar nationalism and self-pity, matched almost perfectly the language of the doomsday declarations issued on the first morning of the August coup. The conspirators envisioned a new vanguard, not of Communists, but of soldiers, priests, workers, peasants, and, of course, writers. “I also can’t help but be reminded,” she wrote, “that on the eve of the coup, the military state publishing house issued in the millions a brochure called ‘The Black Hundreds and the Red Hundreds’ which laid out in detail the program of the national party in 1906.” The nationalists of 1906, like the putschists of 1991, wanted to dissolve parliament, declare military, emergency rule, and ban all left-wing newspapers and journals. “A Word to the People” was a blatant call for a coup d’état.

“We were making no secret of what we wanted,” Prokhanov told me. “Why keep secrets? We live in a democracy, don’t we?” Even if Gorbachev was not paying much attention to the smell of a storm, Yeltsin was. On July 29, Yeltsin went out to Gorbachev’s dacha to finish negotiations for a new Treaty of the Union. Gorbachev had already agreed to language that would give the republics far more power and make it possible for the Baltic states to become independent very quickly. Yeltsin wanted more. He wanted the power of the purse, and he made it his goal at this meeting to convince Gorbachev that the republics, and not Moscow, should have the ability to levy taxes and distribute the funds as they saw fit.

The talks went on for hours. Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Kazakh president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, went back and forth over the taxation issue so long that they had to break for dinner and then come back at it.

At one point, the two republican leaders could not hold back. Yeltsin told Gorbachev that the right-wingers in the Union leadership were doing everything they could to undercut a transition to genuine democracy and a market economy. Kryuchkov and Yazov were clearly against the Treaty of the Union, he said. Nazarbayev agreed with Yeltsin, and added two more names to the list of “resistere”: Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, and Gorbachev’s great friend of forty years, Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly Lukyanov.

These people realized that the treaty would rob them of power, Yeltsin said. In a Union led mainly by the republican leaders, Yazov and Kryuchkov must be fired and sixty or seventy Union ministries would have to be liquidated.

Gorbachev said, well, yes, of course. He was not blind, after all. “Everything will have to be reorganized, including the army and the KGB,” he said. But let’s wait until after the treaty is signed, he said. And, you know, he added, Lukyanov, Kryuchkov, and the rest are “not as bad as you think.” At this point, Yeltsin got out of his chair and stepped out onto the balcony.

Nazarbayev and Gorbachev were dumbfounded. What was Yeltsin looking for?

“To see if anyone is eavesdropping,” he said.

Nazarbayev and Gorbachev laughed. What a card Yeltsin was. Imagine. Bugging the president and general secretary of the party. How absurd!

After all, how could a man like Anatoly Lukyanov, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, betray a friend he had known since university days? The man was a lawyer, just like Gorbachev, an amateur poet, just like Andropov, and his friendship was a matter of immortal verse.

Safeguard your conscience for your friends.

A friend seeks neither gain nor flattery.

A friend and conscience are as one

In tempest, cold, and thunder,

Safeguard your conscience for your friends!

“I love him,” Lukyanov would say of Gorbachev. “I love him, I can’t change him, though, speaking openly, I know his weaknesses, his shortcomings.… Of all the people who made perestroika, I alone stayed next to Gorbachev, the rest left, from the left and right.…” But that was later, when Lukyanov was in jail charged with treason.

As Bush was arriving in the Soviet Union for the summit in the last few days of July, Moscow News had asked me to write a short article about the U.S. reaction to what was going on in the Soviet Union. I used the opportunity to say that as long as Gorbachev was surrounded by anti-Western reactionaries, there would be no end to Washington’s caution about providing aid and investment. “It’s a mystery to the West why Gorbachev’s circle is still stocked with so many aides and professionals so seemingly at odds with reform,” I wrote. “For every Aleksandr Yakovlev—a figure who has transformed his own vision of the world—there are, it seems, at least a dozen Pavlovs.” I was only repeating what I had heard a thousand times, but who was listening in the Kremlin? I went around with Michael Dobbs and a couple of visiting editors to see some of Gorbachev’s closest advisers: the apparatchik-liberals like Andrei Grachev, Yevgeny Primakov, and Georgi Shakhnazarov. We asked about “A Word to the People” and other dark signs, and they explained them away. “Such is the atmosphere,” Grachev said, but he didn’t seem particularly worried, and neither did the others. In contrast, Yeltsin’s top adviser, Gennadi Burbulis, told us that Moscow resembled a “political minefield.” “We tread through it very lightly,” he said with a waxen smile.

And, as if to underscore his point and my own, some of Pugo’s men slaughtered eight Lithuanian border police during the Bush visit. Pugo denied any knowledge of the incident. He just had no idea.

Gorbachev was humiliated. “It’s hard to say what has happened,” he told the press, with the American president sitting next to him.

In the meantime, Kryuchkov had tapped Gorbachev’s phones and everyone with even the remotest access to the president—even Raisa Gorbacheva’s hairdresser. The eavesdropping logs had Gorbachev as “110,” Raisa as “111,” and dozens of other codes. Kryuchkov could tolerate the president no longer. “Gorbachev is not reacting adequately to events,” the KGB chief said repeatedly to his fellow conspirators.

Maybe it was the weather that confused everyone, the bright sun and cool wind that duped one into thinking that soon all was going to be just fine. Or maybe it was the news that Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s last surviving lieutenant, had dropped dead.

For nearly four years I had been trying to meet Kaganovich, all to no avail. “I see no one,” he said over the phone in a voice like worn leather. He had been duped once. A Soviet pensioner, pretending friendship, had come by to talk, and the old and lonely man had let him in, answered his questions. He never suspected his remarks would be published in Sovetskaya Kultura. In that conversation, Kaganovich made no apologies for his life, and described the reform of the Stalinist state in a tone of wan disgust. He thought it incredible that people could still blame Stalin for the rotten state of the country.

“Stalin died thirty-five years ago!” he said. And besides, how could they attack a man who “saved the country from fascism”?

Kaganovich complained about his health, his heart attacks, his sleepless nights. But one thing, he said, kept him going: “Socialism will be victorious. Of this I am sure.” It was outrageous, he said, that we were letting Hungary and Poland and the rest “return to a bourgeois line.” Here, in the Soviet Union, such a reversal was impossible.

“I believe in the strength of our party,” Kaganovich said. “And socialism will be victorious. This is for sure.” Even in death, Lazar Moiseyevich managed to insult his country’s dignity. In the 1930s, the secret police used to bring the bodies for cremation to the Donskoi Monastery. At the height of the purges, as many as one thousand victims were cremated there every day. And now Kaganovich, who oversaw much of this industry, was going to be cremated at Donskoi.

While I was off doing summit business, my friend Masha Lipman managed to sneak into Kaganovich’s apartment and had a long talk with the old man’s nurse. The poor women smelled as if she’d downed at least a bottle of vodka. The apartment was like the library of a ghost, shelves packed with dusty volumes of Communist Party proceedings from long ago.

At Donskoi, Kaganovich’s mourners did not seem much interested in the man’s victims. They crowded around a dilapidated bus as it pulled onto the grounds, the long, ribbon-covered coffin laid out in the rear end. Kaganovich’s daughter, Maya, an old woman herself, led the relatives into the chapel. Before the eulogy, someone opened the coffin lid to reveal the face of Stalin’s loyal henchman: black suit, flabby neck, long nose, a fine gray mustache, a huge and withered corpse. The mourners listened as they heard the brief eulogy lauding the great man’s construction of the Moscow subway. No one mentioned that he had played a leading role in collectivization. When the eulogy was over, the coffin somehow sank below floor level and automatic doors closed over it. The furnace, I was told, was downstairs. Soon Kaganovich would be a handful of ash.

Outside, afterward, Kaganovich’s nephew Leonid told me, “History is still being debated. But what is evil? You must understand the times he lived in.” Besides the family, there were about a hundred Stalinists there to bury their last great hero. People were weeping. “He was a man who never changed his mind,” said Kira Korniyenkova, one of the Stalinists in town I knew best. “He was a great Marxist-Leninist.” Another mourner told me, through his tears, that this was a great man, but “if it were Gorbachev laid out dead here today, I wouldn’t lay down a single flower, I can tell you that.” As we left the monastery, Masha and I saw Ales Adamovich. A few years before, Adamovich had been sued by the Stalinist lawyer Ivan Shekhovtsov for slander. It was Adamovich who had warned Gorbachev in the Congress of the generals who would one day commit bloodshed and wipe the evidence on his suit. He could not resist going to the funeral of Lazar Kaganovich. “Stalin and Hitler and Nero: I think Kaganovich fits into the list,” he told me. “This represents the fall of Stalinism. So who will be next to die? The Communist Party itself?” I’d never met a man at a funeral in a better mood.

Maybe what made the men of the regime seem so vulnerable that summer was that they had long ago lost the Mystery.

The Mystery—the theological notion that the acts and purposes of the deity are unknowable—was always a critical part of the pseudo-theology of the atheist state. Stalin must have gotten the idea during his failed career in the seminary. One of the keys to his own mystery was to stay out of sight; hence, a pockmarked mediocrity becomes a god. For decades, the Thursday-morning meetings of the Politburo were more mysterious than sessions of the College of Cardinals; transfers of power were more difficult to decipher in the Kremlin than in the Vatican. The catechism language of Vremya, the iconic posters of the great leaders, all added to the Mystery. And now it was all but gone. Now we learned from the press the details of the Lenin Mausoleum; it turned out that there were other floors beneath the holy of holies, and on one of them there was the gymnasium for the guards and a bathroom and buffet for visiting luminaries; beneath that there was a “control room” which carefully monitored the temperature and deterioration of Vladimir Ilyich. Yeltsin’s memoir, Against the Grain, became an underground best-seller precisely because it hacked away at the Mystery. He revealed what the mighty talked about in private, their petty greed, their weakness. He described for all Gorbachev’s taste for luxury, his marble bathrooms and swimming pools.

One morning, Komsomolskaya Pravda ran a story about a woman who had worked for many years as a seamstress in the secret tailor shop the KGB maintained for the use of the country’s highest leaders. Klava Lyubeshkina stitched suits for everyone, from the entombed corpse of Lenin (“every eighteen months the cloth begins to lose its original splendor”) to Gorbachev. “The tailor dummies of the Politburo members were kept in special closets which nobody except us, the cutters and tailors, dared ever to touch,” she told the paper. “We always worked behind closed doors and surrounded by armed guards.… Two or three times a year a KGB specialist would go abroad, usually to Scotland or Austria, to buy material for the suits.” The secret police had opened the shop in 1938, the height of the purges. Klava saw her customers only on Vremya and referred to them, mysteriously, as “units.” She was devoted. She would watch the leaders on television expressly “to see if their suits fit them well or if there were wrinkles.” She remembered how she worked night and day for three days to get ready the gold-embroidered laurel leaves and stars in heavy gold thread for the new defense minister, Marshal Ustinov. She remembered Andrei Gromyko’s stinginess (“He always sent in for repairs, never a new suit”) and Mikhail Suslov’s temper tantrums when the fit was not quite right.

Klava’s sense of the Mystery ended one day when three men in white smocks attacked her, twisted her arms behind her back, and dragged her off to a psychiatric clinic. The KGB had mistaken her for a dissident. Klava asked to be released, saying that she was making a suit for Yuri Andropov which had been left “unattended” at the studio. The agents let her use the phone and she was able to tell her colleagues where she was. Soon the KGB released her. For the “moral damage” committed, the state awarded Klava a Japanese watch. Just before she retired in 1987, she had the pleasure of making a suit for Gorbachev. The new Soviet leader rewarded her with a box of chocolates.

In her old age, Klava received a poverty-level pension of 100 rubles a month. She wrote the Kremlin for more but got nothing. The Bolsheviks, however, could not be counted as unfeeling men. In 1991, Kryuchkov mailed all the seamstresses cards wishing them well on International Women’s Day. Klava, for her part, took her pleasure in revealing her trove of secrets from the Kremlin sweatshop to the twenty-five million readers of Komsomolskaya Pravda. “We worked there for so long in silence,” she said, “and all along we wanted to reveal the mystery.” Most of the apparatchiks who still came to work at the Central Committee that summer were tired and old and deeply worried. They were hanging on, hoping to get another year on the gravy train. The smart ones had all become businessmen.

Arkady Volsky had been a loyal servant to the Party. He was an aide to Andropov, a captain of socialist industry, an adviser to Gorbachev. And he knew what was coming. So Volsky and some of his semiliberal and ultra-clever friends started to take a look around at the new world. They saw how the Young Communist League, once the incubator of rising ideologues, had become the Harvard Business School of the new culture, turning out entrepreneurs who moved quickly into everything from video-game concessions to computer sales to publishing. With access to government connections, extraordinary tax breaks, and hundreds of millions of rubles in Party funds, Komsomol leaders set up huge commercial banks that began to dominate the Soviet financial scene. Some of the older liberals in the Party were cashing in, too. Svyatoslav Fyodorov, an internationally known ophthalmologist and member of the Central Committee until 1990, set up a modern, independent clinic and made a fortune. When Prime Minister Pavlov visited Fyodorov’s clinic and demanded 80 percent of the clinic’s hard currency earnings, Fyodorov told him, “Fuck off.” “The political fight for power now is the fight for property,” Fyodorov told Komsomolskaya Pravda. “If people get property, they will have power. If not, they will forever remain hired hands.” Volsky and an experienced factory manager named Aleksandr Vladislavlev started the Scientific Industrial Union. The idea was that they would act as fixers between potential foreign investors and the existing enterprises in the Soviet Union. As if to make sure that everyone understood the kind of connections he had within the Party and the world of Soviet industry, Volsky rented office space for 750,000 rubles a year in a building adjacent to the Central Committee. “We’re here for the same reason a bank in New York wants to be on Fifth Avenue,” Vladislavlev told me. It was brilliant. The union was the place to go for high-powered access. “We link our resources and cheap labor with your brains and technology,” Vladislavlev said. “You come to us because we know where the best deals in privatization are.” Thirty-nine Soviet industrial associations, such as the Association of Military Factories, paid 10,000 rubles annually to be members. Another two thousand individual enterprises paid a percentage of their profits as dues.

It was a sweet deal, and I wrote an article for the Post about the emerging class of Communists-turned-capitalists in the spring. When a couple of my editors came for the Bush summit, I had to find places for them to go, people for them to see. They mentioned they might like to see Arkady Volsky. Why not?

We arrived, three of us, at Volsky’s office for what we thought would be an interview about the economy.

“Pleased to meet you,” Volsky greeted one editor.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said to the next.

And then to me, “Less pleased to meet you.”

He glared and flared his nostrils like a bull. This was not going to be easy, I thought. I had no idea why.

For a few minutes, Volsky complained that my article had been unfair, that it made fun of a “normal” process of creating a market economy. But then his complaints took an ugly turn. Volsky noted that I had written that one of his main “konsooltants” was Rodimir Bogdanov, a well-known KGB officer. Through the late stagnation and early glasnost years, Bogdanov was one of the few people visiting foreigners could come to for an interview. What’s more, Volsky pointed out, I had written that Seagram’s chairman Edgar Bronfman and the real estate and publishing magnate Mortimer Zuckerman had met with Bogdanov and other people at the union in hopes of completing possible business deals.

“You are the worst kind of anti-Semite!” Volsky barked. Why had I besmirched the reputation of such a good man as Bogdanov, why had I mentioned two such obviously Jewish names as Bronfman and Zuckerman. “Don’t you realize what people will do with this?” I could not quite tell yet whether Volsky, in his fury, knew that I was Jewish. To be frank, a Malawi tribesman could take one look at me and say, “This man is a Jew.” But Volsky was off on a flight.

“This is ridiculous,” I said finally. “Don’t you realize I’m no different from Zuckerman or Bronfman? Just poorer. Where do you get off lecturing me on anti-Semitism?” I did not understand what it was all about until Volsky finally said, “Don’t you realize what those people up the hill can do with this?” “Up the hill” from us was Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB.

Volsky, for all his financial cleverness, for all his guile and connections to the military industrialists, was one of the moderates in the upper echelons of the apparat. He helped found in August, with Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, Popov, and Sobchak, the new Movement for Democratic Reforms. And like the others, he had a sixth sense for what was brewing in the minds of the men who would make the coup. Volsky was a nervous wreck, and he had taken a little bit of it out on me.

The liberals who still had some access to Gorbachev were hopeful about the new alliance with Yeltsin, but they saw ominous signs that summer. They had always known, despite their public assurances, that an open counterrevolution was a possibility. The truth was, Shevardnadze told me, “We have always had difficulties since the very first days of the April plenum in 1985 and the beginning of perestroika. If someone thinks that Pavlov, Kryuchkov, and Yazov’s predecessors were more progressive, they are mistaken. There were also very strong conservatives back then. It’s important to have at least a general idea of the sort of struggle there was in the political leadership for the ‘general line’ and for perestroika.” Shevardnadze said that after his resignation as foreign minister in December 1990, he still got calls from his conservative rivals in the leadership on matters of practical politics: how to deal with the Afghans, who was who in the various Western governments. But he said he noticed by about June 1991 that he was no longer being consulted as he had been. He got the sense that a vacuum was growing around him and that his phone was bugged. “A shadow power was forming,” Shevardnadze said.

Yakovlev, too, said he watched helplessly as Lukyanov, Kryuchkov, and the rest surrounded Gorbachev with deceptive advice. “These are toadies,” Yakovlev told me. “They will look at you with these honest blue eyes and say, ‘We’re with the people, we’re your only saviors, the only ones who love and respect you. And these democrats, they criticize and insult you.’ Gradually, it affects a person. Lukyanov would pretend to be a democratic cohort, and then at Politburo sessions he would be a bigger hawk than anyone. Lukyanov would say, ‘Suppress them totally! Mercilessly!’ He would say, ‘You know, Mikhail Sergeyevich, they are aiming at you, they are trying to get you, to overthrow you.’ ” In July, just before he left Gorbachev’s staff for good, Yakovlev told Gorbachev, “The people around you are rotten. Please, finally, understand this.” “You exaggerate,” Gorbachev said.

Shevardnadze and Yakovlev, the two men who had been closest to Gorbachev at the peak of perestroika, now watched helplessly as the storm clouds gathered. “Gorbachev is a man of character. A person with no character could not have started perestroika himself,” Shevardnadze wrote in his memoir. “Gorbachev will enter history as a great reformer, a great revolutionary. It was not so easy to begin. But he enjoyed maneuvering too much.… Of course, a major politician has to know how to maneuver, but there must be limits. There comes a moment when one has to say that tactical considerations are not the most important thing, that this is my strategy, my stake is with democracy and the democratic forces. And in this, he was too late, my dear friend.” The hints of betrayal were everywhere that summer. Gorbachev’s press secretary, Vitaly Ignatenko, picked up little clues of impertinence and over-confidence among the conservatives that worried him. He saw how on August 2, before there was any order from Gorbachev, someone cut off Yakovlev’s Kremlin phone lines and government communications systems. Meanwhile, the darling of the apparatchiks, Yegor Ligachev, who had been retired for a year, still had Kremlin phone lines … in his apartment.

Ignatenko also said that while he was on vacation in Sochi in the days before the coup, he noticed that Politburo member Oleg Shenin moved into dacha No. 4 on the special compound, a separate personal residence. “He was vacationing not according to his rank,” Ignatenko said, “but in a huge dacha which had not been occupied in six years or more.… Only the president had the right to his own dacha there, or maybe the prime minister.” For those in the know, the clues were unending. Aleksandr Prokhanov told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the time had come for the “patriotic forces” to seize power “by the throat.” Prokhanov said that the movement allying “Marxist-Leninists, Marxist-Stalinists, Russian Communists, social democratic liberals, extremist pro-fascist organizations, writers, artists, the military industrialists, monarchists, and pagans” was forming fast to prevent the disintegration of the country. “Our nation should have a real leader,” he said. “People cannot be left to the mercy of fate at a time like this.” In June, Kryuchkov flew to Havana at the personal invitation of Fidel Castro. According to a report in Izvestia months later, Kryuchkov concluded several secret agreements with Castro in which they assured each other that Cuba would remain Communist and in the Soviet sphere of influence—despite the conflicts between the two countries during the Gorbachev era. A few weeks later, Kryuchkov’s ally Vice President Gennadi Yanayev sent Castro a letter saying that he should not worry about the situation in Moscow: “Soon there will be a change for the better.” On August 6, after Gorbachev and his family had flown to the Crimea for their summer vacation, Kryuchkov called two of his top aides and told them to write a detailed memorandum analyzing the situation in the country in terms of instituting an immediate state of emergency. The two KGB officials were joined by General Pavel Grachev of the Ministry of Defense. After two days at the KGB’s posh recreation and work complex in the village of Mashkino, the working group told Kryuchkov that a state of emergency would be an extremely complicated affair politically and might even cause further disorder in the country.

“But after the Union Treaty is signed it will be too late to institute a state of emergency,” Kryuchkov told them.

On August 14, Kryuchkov called the working group together once more and told them to work out documents for a state of emergency. They had no time to lose. By the 16th, a draft of the first declaration of the State Committee for the State of Emergency was on Kryuchkov’s desk. At two o’clock that afternoon, Kryuchkov called in his deputy Genii Ageyev and told him to form a group to go to Foros in the Crimea to plan the disconnection of Gorbachev’s communication system with the outside world.

In mid-August, Esther and I were preparing to leave Moscow after three and a half years. We were going to miss our friends, our life in Moscow, but there was a vacation to take and a year-old son, Alex, who had not gotten to know his grandparents and countless cousins. It was time. In those first weeks of August, we said good-bye to friends, and during the day I tried to finish up some pieces and interviews that I wanted to do before going home. Aleksandr Yakovlev, for one, agreed to see me a few days before I left, and I went with Michael Dobbs and Masha Lipman to meet him at his new office at the Moscow City Hall. We talked about many things, especially some of the main events of the previous six years, and at one point we asked if there would be a military coup. He said the reactionary forces were still dangerous, but as for a military coup, well, there was no tradition of it, and besides, the military “can’t run anything on its own—including the military.” It was strange, then, that two days later, on the 16th, in his resignation from the Communist Party, Yakovlev issued a statement via the Interfax news wire, saying, “The truth is that the Party leadership, in contradiction to its own declarations, is ridding itself of the democratic wing of the Party and is preparing for social revenge and for a Party and state coup.” In view of what was to come, it seemed that Yakovlev had found something out, something specific, on the 15th or 16th. But months later, in a second interview, Yakovlev told me that he knew nothing about the actual planning for the coup. “It’s just that there was a certain logic at work, a feeling I had,” he said. “It made sense that they would struggle for their power. Without it, they had no future.” On August 17, Shevardnadze told me later, Yakovlev and the other twenty-one leaders of the Movement for Democratic Reforms had met in a closed session and agreed unanimously that a right-wing coup was an imminent threat. “This should have been more than enough warning,” Shevardnadze said. “I reprove the president because he could have come to the same conclusion and the coup would have been prevented.” The U.S. government was concerned as well. Intelligence reports only grew more anxious after Baker’s meeting with Bessmertnykh in Berlin. In fact, it turned out, according to documents recovered later, that Kryuchkov began holding meetings and drawing up plans for a coup as early as November 1990.

On the 17th, Esther and I went on a picnic in the country with a bunch of our friends and everyone’s babies. The kids splashed around at the river’s edge and smeared themselves with lunch. We watched the Russians sunbathe, marveling at how you could actually see their winter-pale flesh flame up as quickly as a sheet of paper.

After a while, Masha, Seriozha, and I took a long walk along the river and through the woods, past the dilapidated dachas and the old men in dirty T-shirts working on cars that would never run again, past kids chasing their dogs in the dust.

A few weeks before, the three of us had gone to a meeting of Moscow Tribune and heard Andrei Nuikin, a popular journalist and activist, say that a coup d’état was “not only possible, but inevitable.” Nuikin had been saying this for years, and we left the meeting that day thinking he was slightly off his rocker, like someone who has been poring over the Kennedy assassination just a little too long.

Now, as we walked, I asked Seriozha and Masha what they thought. The most important thing, they said, was that they had decided they would never leave, no matter what happened.

“We have this ‘last boat out’ policy,” Masha said. “And that is that if things go really bad, if there are tanks in the streets and people are starving, if the worst happens, then we’ll leave to save the kids. But not before that.” “Besides, a coup would never hold,” Seriozha said. “I’d be shocked if they were stupid enough to try it, more shocked if it lasted.” That same afternoon, at a KGB compound outside Moscow known as ABC, Vladimir Kryuchkov convened a meeting of conspirators. It was another of the KGB’s sanatoria, with a swimming pool, saunas, a movie theater, and masseuses. Kryuchkov could feel sure that the meeting would be confidential here. The compound was surrounded by guards and high walls. Gorbachev and his more liberal aides, Anatoly Chernyayev and Georgi Shakhnazarov, were all on vacation in the Crimea. And who listened to Shevardnadze or Yakovlev anymore?

Kryuchkov convened the session outdoors, at a picnic table. Present there were Defense Minister Yazov, Prime Minister Pavlov, Politburo chief Oleg Shenin, military industries chief Oleg Baklanov, and presidential chief of staff Valery Boldin. There were assorted snacks on the table, and everyone drank either Russian vodka or imported whiskey.

“The situation is catastrophic,” Pavlov said. “The country is facing famine. It is in total chaos. Nobody wants to carry out orders. The harvest is disorganized. Machines are idle because they have no spare parts, no fuel. The only hope is a state of emergency.” Kryuchkov and the others agreed. “I regularly brief Gorbachev on the difficult situation,” Kryuchkov said. “But he is not reacting adequately. He cuts me short and changes the subject. He does not trust my information.” This was not the first such meeting of the hard-liners, and these were the familiar complaints. But now the situation had changed, grown more urgent. Gorbachev was planning to return to Moscow to sign the new Union Treaty with Yeltsin and the other republican leaders on August 20. With Kryuchkov as their leader, the conspirators decided they could not wait. They would notify their other allies: Vice President Gennady Yanayev, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, and Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly Lukyanov. Months later Lukyanov ruefully told The Washington Post that Gorbachev had surely adopted “antisocialist positions” and that a state of emergency was required to “save the existing order.” But, he admitted, the opportunity to succeed had been “hopelessly missed.” Yeltsin and the other republican leaders were now too strong, too popular.

Still, the conspirators pressed on. They decided to send a delegation to the Crimea to confront Gorbachev. They would give him an ultimatum: support the state of emergency or step down. Someone suggested that one member of the delegation ought to be Boldin, Gorbachev’s chief of staff, his liegeman for more than a decade.

Yazov turned to Boldin and said, “Et tu, Brute?”

On his trip home, Yazov recalled later, he felt a fleeting sense of pity for Gorbachev.

“If he had signed the treaty and then gone on vacation,” the marshal thought, “everything would have been fine.”