فصل 29

AUGUST 18, 1991

The morning after he’d been arrested, Marshal Dmitri Yazov sat in full-dress uniform and answered the first questions of the Russian prosecutor. Yazov said he felt like “an old idiot.” He would spend the rest of his life wondering how he could have been so stupid, how he could do something that would bring such dishonor on him and the armed forces that he had served for a half century. The plot was slipshod from the first, he admitted, the product of occasional emotional discussions and then the sudden impulse to head off Gorbachev and the republican leaders before it was too late.

“We were already meeting earlier at various places. We talked about the situation in the country,” Yazov said in his slow, slightly doltish voice. “It was unavoidable that we came to the conclusion that the president was to blame. He had distanced himself from the Party.… Gorbachev in recent years had been going abroad and often we had no idea in general what he was discussing there.… We were just not ready to become greatly dependent on the U.S.A., politically, economically or militarily.…” QUESTION: In what form did you make a decision?

YAZOV: There was no real plan for a plot. We met on Saturday [August 17].

QUESTION: At whose invitation?

YAZOV: Kryuchkov’s.

QUESTION: Where did you meet?

YAZOV: At a point in Moscow at the end of Leninski Prospekt—a left turn near the police post, there is a road there.… At the end of the working day, Kryuchkov called and said we had to talk. I came. Then Shenin came, then Baklanov. And then it was said: maybe we should go to Gorbachev and speak with him.

QUESTION: Why was there such a hurry? Was it because the Union Treaty was to be signed [on the 20th]?

YAZOV: Of course. We were not happy with this draft and we knew the state would fall apart.… QUESTION: What brought up the idea of an Emergency Committee?

YAZOV: We were in Pavlov’s office. Yanayev was there, and at about nine Lukyanov came. He came by plane. He’d been on vacation. Lukyanov said: “I can’t be a member of such a committee, I’m chairman of the Supreme Soviet, a legal organ which is ruled by this and that. Naturally, I can do something—I put out an announcement saying that the result of the Union Treaty would be the destruction of the constitution.” After that, he left. Yanayev was already rather drunk.… The last good coup operation had been in Poland, in December 1981. On a freezing night between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., the military and the secret police rounded up thousands of Solidarity activists and sympathizers and locked them up in “internment camps.” The military regime secured the borders and then invaded its own country with tanks and troops, cutting up Warsaw and other key areas into carefully patrolled zones. They took over the radio and television stations. Over and over, they broadcast martial music, the national anthem, and the words of the Leader, the declaration of a “state of war.” In case anyone missed the point, the newscasters wore army uniforms. All demonstrations, all unions and student organizations were banned, all mail and telephone traffic censored. There was a curfew from 10:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. The Military Council told the population that they were acting to prevent a “reactionary coup.” They were acting in the name of “national salvation.” It was a perfect operation.

Perfect, but nothing new. In a letter dated September 26–27, 1917, Lenin wrote a letter that later became a widely distributed pamphlet called “Marxism and Rebellion.” Just a few months from grabbing power, he was clearly obsessed with the need for absolute ruthlessness and efficiency: “To approach a rebellion in a Marxist way,” he wrote, “that is, as one would an art, it is necessary not to lose a minute moving loyal battalions to the most important objects, to arrest the government … seize the telegraph and telephone. … One cannot at this critical moment remain true to Marxism and not treat rebellion as an art.” The successors to Lenin and Jaruzelski made feeble attempts to ape the old efficiency. From a factory in Pskov, they ordered a quarter million pairs of handcuffs; they ordered the printing of 300,000 arrest forms. Kryuchkov issued secret orders doubling the pay of all KGB men and called them back from vacation to go on alert. He cleared out two floors of Lefortovo Prison and prepared a secret bunker in Lubyanka in case the leaders of the coup needed to find safe refuge. And to keep pace with the times, they would carry out the coup under legal pretenses: a nation in crisis, a president taken ill. They would fill the stores for a few months, drawing on military stockpiles kept in case of war. The people would acquiesce. Hadn’t they always?

Gorbachev was resting in splendor. When he came to power in 1985, he built himself a magnificent place to rest, a compound in the Crimean town of Foros that cost the Soviet government an estimated $20 million. He and his family lived in the main house, a three-story structure with a central hall done up in marble and gilt. It was the sort of opulence you see sometimes when a sheik moves into Beverley Hills. There was a hotel for the staff and security guards, a guest house for thirty people, fruit trees, an olive grove, an indoor swimming pool, a movie theater, an elaborate security system, and an escalator to the Black Sea.

It was a wonder that Gorbachev went on his vacation at all. At the worst moments, it was never really safe for him to leave Moscow. The Nina Andreyeva letter in 1988 was published as he was leaving for Yugoslavia. The planning for the Tbilisi massacre of 1989 came when he was in England. The conservatives in the Politburo often made right-wing speeches when Gorbachev was in the Crimea. And now, despite all the warnings and omens, he left Moscow again. He took long walks on the beach with Raisa. He swam, watched movies, read volumes on Russian and Soviet history. His doctors did what they could for his bad back. Gorbachev also took time to write a speech for the Union Treaty signing ceremonies and a long article on the future—an article that even pondered the possibility of a right-wing coup.

Gorbachev has said that he was not naive, he knew well what the conservatives were capable of; but he has also insisted that he had no prior knowledge that there would be a coup, or even a concerted demand for the declaration of a state of emergency. According to phone logs obtained by Cable News Network, Gorbachev talked four times with Kryuchkov on August 18; he also talked with Yanayev, Shenin, Pavlov, and the deputy prime minister, Vladimir Shcherbakov. Sometime after 2:00 P.M., Yanayev called Gorbachev and asked about meeting him at the airport in Moscow when he returned from vacation the next day. They agreed to see each other then.

Yanayev, who was probably making sure the mark was still in place, was the worst sort of Party nonentity. He was a vain man of small intelligence, a womanizer, and a drunk. I’m not sure it is possible to describe just how hard it is to acquire a reputation as a drunk in Russia. And Yanayev was not merely a drunk, he was a buffoon. On the day he went before the Congress for confirmation as vice president, one of the deputies asked him if he was a healthy man. “My wife has no complaints,” Yanayev said and snickered.

At around 4.00 P.M., Georgi Shakhnazarov, one of Gorbachev’s last remaining liberal advisers, called to check on details for the trip to Moscow. Then, almost as an afterthought, Shakhnazarov asked Gorbachev about his health. Gorbachev said he was fine except for his chronic back pain.

Gorbachev had worked hard on his speech for the treaty signing, and now he wanted to spend some time with Raisa and their daughter, Irina, son-in-law, Anatoly, and granddaughter, Oksana. But at 4:50, the chief of Gorbachev’s security detail told him that they had unexpected visitors, including Yuri Plekhanov, the head of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, the division charged with the security of the leadership.

Gorbachev picked up a phone to find out what this was all about. He had called no meetings and he was not accustomed to unannounced visitors. The line was dead. Then he picked up another, also dead. Gorbachev was stunned. Raisa came in to see what was going on. “Mikhail Sergeyevich has eight or ten telephone operators and all the phones were silent,” she said later. “I picked up the receiver and checked it out and all the phones were silent, even that of the commander in chief. We have this phone everywhere—in our country house, in our flat—everywhere. It’s under a kind of lid and we do not even remove dust from this phone because we are not supposed to remove the lid. He picked up the receiver on that phone and there was silence there. We knew that was it. There was nothing else we could do.” Before the visitors got inside the house, Gorbachev knew perfectly well something was very wrong. He called his family around him and told them “that anything could follow this.” They, in turn, said they were ready to see it through with him “to the end.” Later, when she described the scene, Raisa seemed to refer to the murder of the Romanov family after the Bolshevik coup to describe the depths of her own worst fears: “We know our history and its tragic aspects.” “I paced the room and thought,” Gorbachev recalled. “Not about myself, but about my family, my granddaughters. I decided: in this situation, it is impossible to value my own skin.” The delegation arrived: Plekhanov, Shenin from the Politburo, Baklanov of the military-industrial complex, Gorbachev’s personal assistant, Boldin, and, representing the army, General Varennikov, the head of ground forces. Gorbachev led them to his study.

“Who sent you?” he said.

“The committee,” one of them said. “The committee appointed in connection with the emergency.” “Who appointed such a committee? I didn’t appoint such a committee, and neither did the Supreme Soviet.” Varennikov told Gorbachev he had little choice. Either go along or resign.

“You are nothing but adventurers and traitors, and you will pay for this. I don’t care what happens to you, but you will destroy the country. Only those who want to commit suicide can now suggest a totalitarian regime in the country. You are pushing it to a civil war!” Gorbachev reminded the delegation that there was to be a signing ceremony of the Union Treaty in Moscow on August 20.

“There will be no signing,” Baklanov said, according to Gorbachev. Then Baklanov said, “Yeltsin’s been arrested. He’ll be arrested.… Mikhail Sergeyevich, we demand nothing from you. You’ll be here. We’ll do all the dirty work for you.” Gorbachev said he would play no part in their “adventure.” The delegation continued to press. They gave Gorbachev a list of the members of the State Committee for the State of Emergency (the GKChP). Gorbachev was especially stunned to see the names of Yazov and Kryuchkov. He had plucked Yazov out of obscurity to make him defense minister precisely for the sake of having his own man. And besides, he was not bright enough to be disloyal. Yazov, Aleksandr Yakovlev would say, “is no Spinoza.” Kryuchkov, who was perhaps the most forceful and determined of all the plotters, surprised Gorbachev because he had come through the recommendation of their mutual mentor, Yuri Andropov. Gorbachev thought of Kryuchkov as a cultured man, someone who had been abroad, seen something more than the inside of Lubyanka. But as the prosecutor’s report on the putsch said, “For Kryuchkov, Gorbachev was a madman. Gorbachev destroyed the system that had given him everything—servile aides, the respect of his foes, and a comfortable, even splendid life-style. Could a person in his right mind get rid of all that?” Time and again, Kryuchkov urged Gorbachev to break up demonstrations, to “show, at last, our strength.” And when Gorbachev would refuse, Kryuchkov would tell his friends, “The president is not responding to events.” Boldin was a terrible betrayal, too. He had started working for Gorbachev in 1978 and had his absolute trust. Boldin was the chief of staff. He vetted every appointment, controlled absolutely the flow of paper to the president’s desk. Along with Kryuchkov and Boldin, the other chief plotter was Oleg Baklanov, a figure little known to the public, but one with tremendous power. Baklanov’s chief interest in a coup was clear: he wanted to prevent any deterioration of military spending or might. In one speech prepared for the April 1991 plenum of the Central Committee, he wrote that current policy had caused the Soviet Union to “fall practically under the dictate of the United States.” According to one of the country’s leading weapons scientists, Pyotr Korotkevich, Baklanov “froze” a major plan worked out by specialists in the hierarchy to create a smaller, but professional, army, demilitarize the economy, and reduce military spending by half.

The rest of the list was less surprising. Pavlov and Yanayev were obvious enemies of radical reform, though they were too bumptious, too drunk, to have acted alone. The rest were symbols of the conservative interests. Aleksandr Tizyakov, the president of the Association of State Enterprises, had given Gorbachev an ultimatum the previous December to end strikes and impose economic discipline. “You want to frighten me,” Gorbachev had said then. “Well, it won’t work.” And there was Vasily Starodubtsev, the head of the Union of Collective Farm Chairmen, an ardent opponent of private farming and private property.

Gorbachev tried now to persuade the delegation to take up the question of a state of emergency in the parliament. There could be a full debate. Let the Supreme Soviet decide. “If you go to a state of emergency, what are you going to do the next day?” Gorbachev told them. Varennikov said they were carrying out this mission because the “committee” would not allow “separatists” and “extremists” to dictate the future of the country.

“I’ve heard all this,” Gorbachev said. “Do you think the people are so fatigued that they will just follow any dictator?” But it was no use. “It was a conversation with deaf mutes,” Gorbachev said later. “Their cycle was in motion.” As the delegation was preparing to leave at about 7:30 P.M., Baklanov stuck out his hand to shake hands with Raisa Maksimovna. She looked at him, said nothing, and walked away. The delegation rode back to the Belbek airport. In the front seat, Plekhanov spoke on the radiophone to Foros, giving further instructions on the isolation of the president. In the back, the others spoke in short, disgruntled phrases. They had thought Gorbachev would give in to their demands, and he hadn’t On the trip back to Moscow, they began to drink.

Raisa, the Gorbachevs’ daughter, Irina, and Gorbachev’s aide, Anatoly Chernyayev, had waited outside the study until the meeting was over. After the plotters left, Gorbachev looked at Chernyayev and said, “Well, have you guessed?” “Yes.”

Gorbachev described the demands and his replies “in terms I cannot repeat with ladies present.” He showed Raisa a list of the conspirators he had copied down, and added at the bottom “Lukyanov …?” He still could not see that his great and loyal friend from college days had turned on him, too.

Gorbachev said he would not go along with a state of emergency or a return to dictatorial rule. “I was always an opponent of such measures,” he said later, “not only for moral and political reasons, but because in the history of our country they have always led to the deaths of hundreds, thousands, and millions.… And we need to get away from that forever.” Raisa said that it would be best now, if there was anything to discuss, to talk out on the balconies and on the beach, the better to avoid the listening devices that were obviously in place and working.

When they arrived at the Kremlin that evening, Vice President Yanayev and Prime Minister Pavlov (the twin fools of this low comedy) saw Kryuchkov, Boldin, Shenin, Pugo, Yazov, and the rest sitting at a long conference table. Lukyanov called from his car and said he was on the way. No one sat at the head of the table, the president’s chair.

“A catastrophe is taking place,” Kryuchkov said. There would soon be an armed uprising against the leadership. They were going to take over key points, the television tower at Ostankino, the rail stations, two hotels. They had heavy arms, missile launchers, everything. They must be stopped and there were only a few hours in which to do it. Then Plekhanov chimed in. He and Boldin had just come back from Foros. Gorbachev was ill. “It’s either a heart attack or a stroke or something,” Boldin said.

Yanayev hesitated. He said he could not sign the document creating the Emergency Committee and making him the new president. Kryuchkov pressed him. “Can’t you see?” he said. “If we don’t save the harvest, there will be hunger and in a few months the people will be on the streets. There will be a civil war.” Yanayev was smoking one cigarette after another. He said he wanted to wait to meet with Gorbachev before taking action, and besides, he did not feel morally prepared or otherwise qualified to be the president. But the men around the table kept after him, stressing that Gorbachev was sick, that the situation would be temporary.

INVESTIGATOR: Why did it fall apart?

VALENTIN PAVLOV: Most of those present [at the Kremlin on the 18th] did not understand what the whole thing was about. Emergency measures had been discussed before. They’d been discussed in the spring. So there was nothing unusual about it. But when it came to Gorbachev being sick and no one knowing what was wrong, when it was unclear whether or not he could fulfill his duties, then we hesitated and decided to transfer it to the Supreme Soviet. Yanayev did not want to sign it. He kept saying, “Guys, I do not know what to write. Is he sick or not? It’s all hearsay.” The rest said, “Take the decision.” Whose word did he take? Hard to tell.

Lukyanov arrived late to the meeting carrying a copy of the draft Union Treaty and the Soviet Constitution under his arm. Eventually, after listening to Lukyanov describe how the Supreme Soviet would eventually “legitimize” the state of emergency, Yanayev began to waver.

“Sign, Gennadi Ivanovich,” Kryuchkov said.

And finally he did. In his trembling hand, Yanayev signed the documents grabbing power from his president. Then he passed the document around the table. One after the other, Yazov, Pugo, Kryuchkov, Pavlov, and Baklanov put their names to the decree declaring the state of emergency.

Now Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, Shevardnadze’s successor as foreign minister, arrived. He had been on vacation and had flown to the meeting having no idea what was going on. Kryuchkov took him into an anteroom.

“Listen, the situation in the country is terrible,” Kryuchkov said. “A chaotic situation has emerged. It’s a crisis. It’s dangerous. People are disappointed. Something should be done, and we decided to do something through emergency measures. We have established a committee, an Emergency Committee, and I would like you to be part of it.” “Is the committee arranged by the instructions of the president?” Bessmertnykh asked.

“No,” Kryuchkov said. “He’s incapable of functioning now. He’s flat on his back at his dacha.” Bessmertnykh asked for a medical report, but Kryuchkov refused. Something was obviously very strange about this, though Bessmertnykh’s instincts either were not sharp enough or he saw danger and tried to negotiate a safe course for himself. In the days to come he called in sick and refused to come out publicly against the coup. But at least he turned down Kryuchkov.

“I am not going to be part of this committee and I categorically reject any participation in that,” he said.

As they went back to the meeting, Kryuchkov told the others that the foreign minister had refused. Bessmertnykh told the group that their idea would isolate the country, it would bring on sanctions from the West, maybe a grain embargo. The committee seemed glum. They so wanted the appearance of consensus, of legality, before the world and the people.

“We still need a liberal,” Kryuchkov said.

“Then the so-called committee began to fall apart and to split,” Pavlov told the prosecutors months later. “The whole situation was odd. Bessmertnykh fell sick. I was sort of carried out of the room. I did not think it would end this way. If someone had not decided out of foolishness to bring in the military hardware, nothing at all would have happened.” At one point at the Kremlin meeting, Lukyanov asked what sort of plan had been worked out, what the details of the state of emergency were. In fact, was there a plan?

“Why do you say that?” Yazov said. “We have a plan.” But as he told the prosecutors later, Yazov knew there was nothing. “I knew we had nothing except the sketch that we had been absorbed in that Saturday at ABC. This was no plan and I knew very clearly that, in any case, we had no real aim at all.”