فصل 30

AUGUST 19, 1991

Ol’var Kakuchaya, the director of Vremya, was dead asleep when the phone rang at 1:30 A.M. It was his boss on the line, the head of state television and radio, Leonid Kravchenko.

“Ol’var, what’s your address?” Kravchenko said urgently.

“Are you sending someone to me?”

“I want to send a car.”

“What for?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

Can’t this wait? Kakuchaya asked.

No, it can’t, Kravchenko said. We have an emergency.

The morning show had to be changed—changed drastically. He’d explain when they got to the studios at Ostankino. Kravchenko told Kakuchaya that they needed two newscasters to get ready, one man and one women—or whoever could get to the studios fastest.

The car came for Kakuchaya in no time and brought him to work. Kravchenko called again, this time from his car on the special “Kremlin line.” “We’re on the way,” Kravchenko said. “Go outside and I’ll give you the scripts you need.” “How long will you be?”

“I’ll be there in seven minutes.”

Kravchenko’s car pulled up in the parking lot. He was usually a dapper man, an apparatchik for the television age, but now he seemed absolutely pale. He said that he had just gotten into bed when he was called and told to come immediately to the Central Committee. He was given a stack of documents—the appeals and pronouncements of the Emergency Committee that would begin going out over the air at six that morning. He was told to create an atmosphere on television similar to that on the day of a state funeral: somber, classical music, deadpan announcements.

Kakuchaya took a quick look at the documents. They seemed to have been typed in haste on an ordinary typewriter. And there was Yanayev’s signature, a hasty scrawl. Kravchenko told him that soon there would be tanks around the TV tower. No one should go outside. Use the underground tunnels connecting the various buildings to get around. And obey orders.

Gennadi Yanayev, still buzzed from drink, took power at 4:00 A.M. Thirty minutes later, Marshal Yazov dispatched Coded Telegram 8825 ordering heightened alert status for all military units. Soldiers were ordered back from furlough. The Taman Guards, the Dzerzhinsky and Kantemirovskaya mechanized divisions, and several units of the Ryazan Airborne Division would occupy the city of Moscow.

At the Ministry of Defense, Yazov repeated Kryuchkov’s elaborate conspiracy theory about an imminent anti-Soviet coup and the need to take the upper hand. “There will be people in the crowd who will throw themselves in front of tanks or throw Molotov cocktails,” Yazov warned his commanders. “I want no bloodshed or carnage.” It was a hellish morning for Prime Minister Pavlov. He had stayed up most of the night drinking with Yanayev, and now Kryuchkov was trying to reach him to organize planning sessions at the Kremlin.

At about 7:00 A.M., one of the Kremlin doctors, Dmitri Sakharov, was summoned to Pavlov’s dacha and told only that the prime minister was “very unwell.” “Pavlov was drunk,” Sakharov testified later. “But this was no ordinary, simple intoxication. He was at the point of hysteria. I proceeded to give him attention.” The barracks of the Kantemirovskaya Mechanized Division in the town of Naro-Fominsk outside Moscow were quiet, and Private Vitaly Chugunov, a young man with wheat-blond hair from the city of Ulyanovsk, was in the middle of a deep, untroubled sleep. These were the last sweet moments before Monday reveille and another week of training. Chugunov had thought he would be among the first generation of Soviet soldiers blessed by the rise of a peaceable kingdom, a country in which a policy of “new thinking” ensured against another Afghanistan, another occupation of Eastern Europe.

Suddenly, an officer burst into Chugunov’s barracks, shouting his charges out of bed. There were no complicated explanations, nothing about Gorbachev or a state of emergency. “We all thought it was one of those training alerts, and we quickly got everything ready to go,” Chugunov said. Soon he was inside his armored personnel carrier, part of a huge convoy headed for Moscow. Chugunov and his buddies were confused, not quite sure why they were taking the highway north into the city at such a fast clip and churning up the asphalt.

Along the way, Chugunov could see a few people waving at the tanks and the armored personnel carriers; people shouting at them to turn around and go home. Slowly, the young soldiers began to understand, Chugunov fastest of all. His father had been in a tank when the Soviet army invaded Prague in 1968. He’d always told his son how scared he was that day. The commanders had told them that the Czechs would give them boxes of chocolate and the chocolate would have poison inside them. Watch out for poisoned wine, they told them. And then, as his tank rumbled into the city, he heard the insults: “Occupiers!” “Pigs, go home!” Looking out at the road now, Chugunov thought that he was headed for something far worse than his father had ever known.

The coup went on the air at six. The announcers, so obviously nervous and confused, began to read the documents that had been delivered to Kravchenko at the Central Committee: “We are addressing you at a grave, critical hour for the future of the Motherland and our peoples. A mortal danger has come to loom large over our great Motherland.

“The policy of reforms, launched at Mikhail Gorbachev’s initiative and designed as means to ensure the country’s dynamic development and the democratization of social life, have entered for several reasons into a blind alley.

“… All democratic institutions created by the popular will are losing weight and effectiveness right in front of our eyes. This is a result of purposeful actions by those who, grossly violating the fundamental law of the USSR, are in fact staging an unconstitutional coup [!] and striving for unbridled personal dictatorial powers.… “The country is sinking into the quagmire of violence and lawlessness.

“Never before in national history has the propaganda of sex and violence assumed such a scale, threatening the health and lives of future generations. Millions of people are demanding measures against the octopus of crime and glaring immorality.” Yeltsin was eating breakfast at his dacha in the village of Usovo when the calls started coming in. Gennadi Burbulis, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and all the other Russian officials in the smaller dachas in the woods near Yeltsin’s quickly gathered round. Yeltsin had gotten some hints from agents in the Russian republican secret service that a coup was coming. With Gorbachev flirting to the end with his own worst enemies, Yeltsin knew that a coup was possible. But until now he hadn’t thought it would actually happen. And now he had to act without hesitation.

The Leningrad mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, heard about the coup by phone at his hotel room in Moscow. Tanks were on their way, he was told. Sobchak called his driver, and together they headed out of town at top speed for Yeltsin’s dacha. Along the way, they saw armored personnel carriers and tanks. One tank had fallen into a ditch and was burning. Sobchak, like Yeltsin and around seventy other reform politicians, including Aleksandr Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze, were on KGB arrest lists, but so far the secret police had made only a few arrests of some minor officials. Sobchak made it to Usovo untouched.

Sobchak saw that Yeltsin was already determined to do what he could to shore up resistance to the coup. Yeltsin had called the leaders of the biggest republics and was taken aback by their calm, their lack of resolve. They told him they did not have enough information to act. Yeltsin was on his own. As he strapped on a bulletproof vest and then his shirt and suit, Yeltsin said that he and his aides would head for “the White House,” the massive Russian parliament building on the Moscow River. Without saying so, they would follow almost precisely the tactics of the Lithuanians in January: use the parliament building as a barricade, an oasis and symbol of democratic resistance, communicate with the outside world by whatever means possible. Yeltsin told his aides to convene immediately a nonstop session of the Russian parliament.

As Yeltsin got into his car, his daughter said, “Papa, keep calm. Everything depends on you.” After following the convoy part of the way to the city to make sure Yeltsin got past the tanks, Sobchak and his driver peeled off for Sheremetyevo Airport to wait for the first flight home to Leningrad. When he got to the waiting lounge, Sobchak saw three bodyguards coming at him. For a moment, he thought he was finished. To the contrary. They were bodyguards from the Russian KGB there to make sure that the mayor caught his plane.

By 9:00 A.M., tanks surrounded Moscow City Hall. Soldiers had taken down the Russian tricolor and replaced it with the red Soviet flag. Tanks were taking positions in all the key points of the city: the TV and radio stations, newspaper offices, Lenin Hills, the White House. A journalist called General Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the commander of the air force. Shaposhnikov had listened to Yazov’s commands and explanations of the coup, but he made no secret to the reporter that he was revolted by what had happened. “Let the sons of bitches comment on what they are going to do with the country,” he said.

While Yazov worked at the Ministry of Defense and Kryuchkov at Lubyanka, Yanayev sat in his Kremlin office wondering what it was he was supposed to do.

Yuri Golik, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet committee on legislation, got through the gates of the Kremlin without any problem and went immediately to see Yanayev.

“Is it a putsch?” Golik asked.

“It’s a putsch,” said Yanayev.

Later, Vadim Bakatin, a member of Gorbachev’s Defense Council, also came to see Yanayev. Bakatin, like Golik, was loyal to Gorbachev, and he demanded an explanation. Before he could even work up his temper, Bakatin noticed what bad shape Yanayev was in.

“I’ve been here since four o’clock in the morning,” Yanayev said, pacing, smoking, excitable, bags under his eyes. “I don’t know myself what is going on. They came and tried to persuade me for two hours. I didn’t agree, but they finally persuaded me.” “Who came?”

“They came.”

The Kazakh leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, called Yanayev, who seemed to be in a daze, drunken or otherwise. “He didn’t seem to know what was going on,” Nazarbayev told reporters in Alma-Ata, the Kazakh capital, “or why I was calling or even who I was.” Yanayev’s desk was stacked with unread documents, many of them months old. Usually he let his aides do all his serious work for him; among those aides was Sergei Bobkov, the son of Filipp Bobkov, Kryuchkov’s trusted deputy at the KGB. But while Yanayev was foggy at times, obsessed with love affairs and the bottle, he kept on his desk one document that made it clear that the coup itself was more serious than he was, that the real powers behind it—Kryuchkov, Baklanov, Boldin, and Yazov—knew their history and the methods of the old regime.

REGARDING CERTAIN AXIOMS

OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SITUATION

1. We must not lose the initiative and enter into any kind of negotiations with the public. We have often ended up doing this in an attempt to preserve a democratic facade. As a result, society gradually becomes accustomed to the idea that they can argue with the authorities—and this is the first step toward the next battle.

2. One must not allow even the first manifestations of disloyalty: meetings, hunger strikes, petitions, and information about them. On the contrary, they become, as it were, a permitted form of opposition, after which even more active forms will follow. If you want to proceed with a minimal amount of bloodshed, suppress contradictions at the very beginning.

3. Do not be ashamed of resorting to clearly expressed populism. This is the law of winning support from the masses. Immediately introduce economic measures that are understandable to all—lowering of prices, easing up on alcohol laws, etc.—and the appearance of even a limited variety of products in popular demand. In this situation do not think of economic integrity, the inflation rate, or other consequences.

4. One must not delay in informing the populace about all the details of the crimes of one’s political opponent. At first they will avidly search for information. Exactly at this point one must bring down an information storm of exposure, the revelation of guilty groups and syndicates, corruption, and so forth. On other days the information about one’s opponent should be given in an ironically humorous key.… The information must be graphic and as simple as possible.

5. One must not crack the whip with direct threats; better to start rumors about the strictness of the regime and the control of discipline in production and life, as if there were systematic raids on stores, places of relaxation, and others.

6. One must not be slow in dealing with personnel decisions and reassignments. The population should know who is being punished and for what evident reasons; who is answering to whom for what; and to whom the population should turn with its problems.

Before going to the Washington Post bureau on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where she was working as a translator, Masha Lipman watched the bland declaration of a state of emergency. As she stared at the television her first thoughts were of her children, her six-year-old daughter, Anya, and her sixteen-year-old son, Grisha. She was terrified. Suddenly, these years of promise seemed betrayed. After years of thinking the problem through, Masha and Seriozha had decided against emigration. They’d cast their lot with Moscow. Now all she could think was “Will Anya be indoctrinated as we were? Is it all coming back? Will we emigrate? Should we? Can we?” Nadezhda Kudinova, a seamstress at a parachute factory on the edge of town, arrived at work. On the way, she had heard some vague rumors on the bus that the newscasters were announcing that Gorbachev had resigned for “health reasons” and that Yanayev and some unpronounceable committee—the “GKChP”—had taken power. It all seemed so vague and unreal. The factory director immediately gathered all the workers and insisted that they all stand by the Emergency Committee, that what the country needed now was stability and discipline in the workplace.

Kudinova looked out the window. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear. On the radio, the announcers repeated the decrees of the committee, over and over again. She and her friends began talking about what they could do, whom to support. At the factory, opinion was split down the middle. Half were outraged. Half thought that maybe life would be better now without Gorbachev. Maybe there would be food in the stores for a change.

Kudinova thought to herself that the workers who were taking sides with the committee were counting on a passive country. As the day went on and she heard that Yeltsin had begun organizing the resistance at the White House, Kudinova brightened. “Maybe I should start writing some leaflets,” she thought. On her way home, she saw the tanks, she saw how the tanks had chewed up the road, a violation. She saw the crowd beginning to gather at the White House, and she made a decision. She would protect the president she had voted for just two months before. She had no thought of Mikhail Gorbachev. She went to the White House for Yeltsin, for an independent Russia. It wasn’t about Gorbachev, she thought. Gorbachev had gotten what he deserved.

Yeltsin arrived at the White House at around 10:00 A.M. He and Ruslan Khasbulatov, the chairman of the parliament, and Ivan Silayev, the Russian prime minister, drafted an appeal, “To the Citizens of Russia,” denouncing the putsch as a “reactionary unconstitutional coup d’état” and calling for a nationwide strike. Khasbulatov and Vice President Aleksander Rutskoi, a war hero in Afghanistan, began broadcasts from a makeshift radio station inside the parliament building, the White House. Vladimir Bokser, a young pro-democracy politician, organized a phone network of activists to come to defend the White House. Yeltsin dispatched his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, to Paris to seek Western support and establish a Russian government abroad if the resistance was crushed.

“By eleven the depression in the city was beginning to lift just slightly,” said Masha Lipman’s husband, Seriozha Ivanov. “People riding in the trolleys were laughing at the tanks, mocking them.” Children climbed on the tanks and asked the young soldiers how to drive; pretty young women teased the recruits and said that maybe they should all go home and do something more interesting than sitting around on a tank.

Then, just after noon, Yeltsin walked down the front steps of the White House and clambered up on a T-72—Tank No. 110 of the Taman Guards. It was an indelible image that would set the tone for the next three days. As a small crowd of demonstrators and reporters listened, Yeltsin’s voice boomed out. “Citizens of Russia,” he began. “… The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power.… We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’état.… Accordingly, we proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee to be illegal.… We appeal to citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists and demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.” Then Konstantin Kobets, a retired general now appointed Russian defense minister by Yeltsin, climbed aboard and addressed not only the citizens, but the soldiers of Russia. “I am the defense minister of Russia,” he said, “and not a hand will be raised against the people or the duly elected president of Russia.” Kobets had led a battalion during the Prague invasion in 1968, and he said he was not about to repeat his mistakes. He would organize the military resistance and try to convince the officers and troops that they could not, as soldiers or citizens, follow the commands of a junta.

Yeltsin had been criticized in recent months for flirting too much with the military. He had spent much of his campaign in places like the Tula military bases and, over the objections of many radicals in the parliament, made Rutskoi his vice president. Now he was counting on that relationship to pay dividends. Rutskoi responded instantly and went on the radio: “Comrades! I, an officer of the Soviet armed forces, a colonel, a Hero of the Soviet Union who has walked the battle-torn roads of Afghanistan and knows the horrors of war, call on you, my brother officers, soldiers, and sailors, not to act against your own people, against your fathers, brothers, and sisters.” Outside the White House, the first demonstrators cheered as the gunners in ten tanks of the Taman Guards turned the barrels of their guns away from the parliament. The attackers were now ready to defend the White House.

Private Chugunov sat in his tank, parked in the Lenin Hills. At first there was real fear, he said. People shook their fists and shouted, “Don’t shoot your own people! Turn against your officers!” He saw women crying, people brought them food to eat, flowers to stick in their guns, leaflets from the White House, Yeltsin’s appeal to the military to obey their oath to the people.

The soldiers unloaded their AK-47s and kept them out of sight. “Why don’t we make a U-turn and go home?” they began to say to one another. Chugunov and his friends felt ashamed, and they told the crowds around them they would do nothing to disgrace the names of their fathers, they would not shoot at their own people.

At noon Yeltsin went on the radio: “Soldiers and officers of the army, the KGB, and the troops of the Interior Ministry! Countrymen! The country is faced with the threat of terror. At this difficult hour of decision remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against the people. You can erect a throne of bayonets but you cannot sit on it for long. The days of the conspirators are numbered.… Clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over Russia, but this night will not be eternal and our long-suffering people will find freedom once again, and for good. Soldiers, I believe at this tragic hour you will make the right decision. The honor of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people.” At the White House, a retired lieutenant from the Taman Guards—“Baskakov is my name, here is my tattoo”—took command of Civil Defense Unit No. 34. He was proud to see that it was his boys who were the first to come over to the side of the resistance. Baskakov had quit the Communist Party the year before and he felt that it was his duty “as a Christian” to come to the barricades. He never said a word to his family, just walked out the door and took the metro to the White House. Baskakov’s men, a ragtag outfit of Afghan vets, took command of entrance 22 of the parliament, where key figures, like Shevardnadze and Popov, were going in and out.

Baskakov’s men spotted snipers in the windows of the Hotel Mir across the street and near the American embassy. For years, American diplomats had assumed that the KGB used the hotel as a lookout point on the embassy. Baskakov’s troops were pathetically armed with black-market pistols, knives, billy clubs, an occasional machine gun. If there was an attack, they’d be cannon fodder, and they knew it. Everyone knew it. It was that combined sense of heroism and fatalism, especially among the kids who had joined the resistance units, that moved Baskakov. “I used to be critical of the young,” he said. “But there were bikers, the Rockers, going on reconnaissance missions on their motorcycles across the barricades, giving us news about the troop movements. The young girls that people call prostitutes, they were there giving us food and drink.” The defenders of the White House came slowly: first a few thousand, then ten thousand. By the end of the day there would be around twenty-five thousand. With advice from the military men, they began building barricades, gnarled heaps of scrap: construction rods, concrete blocks, rusted bathtubs, bricks, tree trunks, even cobblestones from a small bridge nearby that had been the site of an anti-czarist uprising in 1905. The strike leader, Anatoly Malikhin, showed up wearing a United Mine Workers Union T-shirt (“United We Stand, Divided We Fall”). He went inside and quickly strapped on a machine gun. Somehow, he said, he had had the feeling it would come to this when the first mines went out on strike two years before.

At the airport in Leningrad, Sobchak’s aides were there to meet him. They told him that the Leningrad regional military commander, Viktor Samsonov, had already been on television to announce that the Emergency Committee had taken power from Gorbachev and that a state of emergency had begun. So far, there were no troops into the city. Sobchak told his driver to take him straight to the city’s central military command at top speed. Once he was there, Sobchak left his guards downstairs.

“I saw that they were bewildered and confused, and right away I didn’t let them open their mouths,” Sobchak recounted. “I told them if they moved one finger they would be tried the way the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg. I scolded Samsonov: ‘General, remember Tbilisi? You were the only one there who acted as a reasonable man. You remained in the shadows. What are you doing now? You are involved in this gang. This committee is illegal.’ “Why is it illegal?” Samsonov said. “I have an order. I have this coded cable. I can’t show it to you. It’s a secret.” Sobchak pressed, telling Samsonov to remember how the generals in Tbilisi in April 1989 had also exceeded orders and turned a peaceful demonstration into a bloodbath.

“Why do you raise your voice?” Boris Gidaspov, the Leningrad Party chief, shouted.

“Shut up!” Sobchak said. “Don’t you realize that with your presence you are liquidating your own Party?” For the rest of the meeting, Gidaspov whimpered in his chair, a beaten dog.

Samsonov faced a choice. Yazov and Kryuchkov had appealed to his commitment to empire and discipline. Sobchak, who had the support of the city, appealed to his conscience, his commitment to history. The choice was what the past six years had been all about. And the general found it almost easy. He backed off and ordered his men to stay out of the city. Leningrad, now St. Petersburg again, was saved.

That evening, Sobchak went on the local television show Fakt and referred to the conspirators as “former” ministers and as “citizens,” the way a Russian prosecutor would refer to the accused.

Samsonov kept getting calls from the conspirators, but he held fast. Sobchak was pleased. “General,” he said, “can’t you see how these people are just nothing? They will not hold on to power long even if they are able to seize it!” The leaders of the junta had already failed miserably to follow the prescriptions of Lenin or Jaruzelski. Nearly everyone on their arrest lists was still free and working with the resistance. The editors of a group of liberal papers, including Moscow News, had already begun planning a joint underground paper to be called Obshchaya Gazeta—“The Common Newspaper”—and the editors at Nezavisimaya Gazeta were also putting together a samizdat edition. Opposition radio stations, particularly the Echo of Moscow, would go off the air for a few hours and then return. Telephone, fax, and telex lines at the bureaus of foreign news organizations worked flawlessly. CNN, the BBC, Radio Liberty, and the Voice of America pumped out continuous coverage. Reporters commandeered phone lines inside the White House and called out their reports without a hitch.

At the offices of the key Soviet newspapers, the situation was more complicated. The junta had ordered the shutdown of all the main liberal papers and used the high-circulation Party and government papers to do nothing more than publish their decrees and spurious reports on how normal the situation was, how calm. Sovetskaya Rossiya was enthusiastically cooperative, some of the others less so. At Izvestia, there was a war.

Izvestia was one of the most paradoxical institutions in the country. On the one hand, its editor, Nikolai Yefimov, was a shameless sycophant. His patron was the parliament’s chairman, Anatoly Lukyanov. Yefimov was only too happy to fulfill the demands of his betters: about half the paper’s staff of thirty foreign correspondents were KGB operatives. Although official government censors no longer sat in the editorial offices, Yefimov was more than able to handle the job himself. He was always quick to kill stories that he thought might damage or insult precisely the men now leading the coup d’état. On the other hand, the paper was brimming with talent. Mikhail Berger published some of the sharpest economic pieces in the country. Andrei Illesh wrote a series of articles on the shootdown of Korean Airlines 007 that was more revealing and critical of the Soviet leadership than anything published in the West. The better reporters and editors, the honest ones, despised Yefimov. They thought they had the talent and the resources to report the news far better than even the young renegades over at Nezavisimaya Gazeta. If they only could.

At around 1:00 P.M., a fight broke out in the composing room at the Izvestia plant on Pushkin Square. A few of the reporters had brought back a copy of Yeltsin’s appeal to the people for resistance to the coup, and, with the support of the printers, they had already set it in type for the evening edition. But Yefimov’s deputy, Dmitri Mamleyev, demanded that Yeltsin’s words not appear.

The printers were furious. Pavel Vichenkov, one of the foremen, shouted, “We voted for Yeltsin! You can publish the statements of the committee, but we insist on Yeltsin’s statement going into the paper as well.” “It’s not your job to decide what goes into the paper,” said Yevgeny Gemanov, one of Yefimov’s men. “That’s the job of the editors. Your job is to print what you are told to print.” “You can shoot us,” a worker, Pavel Bushkov, said, “but we’re not going to put this paper out without Yeltsin’s statement. We live the life of animals, in poverty, and we don’t want our children to live the same way.” Yefimov had missed the start of the battle because he was racing back to Moscow from his vacation house. As soon as he walked through the door, a small group of reporters surrounded him and demanded he publish Yeltsin’s statement. Yefimov said there was no way and yanked the metal type from the printing press.

Ordinarily, Yefimov would have had his way. But now the printers, like the Siberian miners or the factory hands of Minsk, said they would sooner quit than give in. They would sooner destroy the presses than publish Izvestia without the appeal of Boris Yeltsin.

Twenty hours late, Izvestia appeared on the streets of Moscow and in every city and village of the Soviet Union. The Emergency Committee’s proclamations blared out from page one. Yeltsin’s appeal to resist the coup was on page two.

It was time for the junta to face the press. An early-evening appearance at the Foreign Ministry press center was part of their strategy to put a face of normalcy on the situation, to create the impression somehow that this was not a putsch but a legal, constitutional transition. This was their chance to compete on the evening news broadcasts of the world, to counter the image of Yeltsin, like Lenin at the Finland Station, rallying the people from the top of a tank.

In the first hours of the coup, Kryuchkov, for one, felt euphoric. There were no strikes, no demonstrations. Radical republican presidents such as Zviad Gamsakhurdia in Georgia made no move to act against the coup. Yanayev, for his part, wandered around his office and the Kremlin hallways. Other men were making the decisions. But this was his moment. At the press conference, he had to convince the people beyond the camera that all was well, that he was in control.

The problem was that Yanayev could not control his own self. He sniffed like a smack addict in need of a fix, and his hands trembled like little wild animals quivering in front of him. He was lost from the start. His answers were transparent lies, his attempt at calm had the brittle ring of hysteria. The reporters, except some of the obvious reactionary plants, showed no fear or respect in their questions. They even laughed at him! Gorbachev had been stripped of his “nuclear football,” the case containing the codes. All the codes were now in the hands of the military and the KGB. A junta in control of a vast nuclear power, and they laughed!

About halfway through the disaster, Yanayev called on a twenty-four-year-old reporter from Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Tatyana Malkina. Just a year before, Malkina had worked as a low-level researcher at Moscow News, rummaging through the clips, doing scut work for the older reporters. Now she was a staffer on the hottest paper in Moscow. She got out of her seat, took the microphone, and fixed her eyes on the half-drunk pretender to power.

“Tell me, please,” she said, “do you realize you have carried out a state coup? And which comparison do you find more appropriate—1917 or 1964?” The Bolshevik coup or the overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev?

For an instant, the man who would be king looked at his own wretched hands; he seemed sad, as if he wondered if the shaking would ever stop.

At the Ministry of Defense, Dmitri Yazov watched the press conference with his wife, Emma. She wept as she watched the pathetic spectacle and begged her husband to call Gorbachev and call off the coup.

“Dima, what have you joined?” she said through her tears. “You always laughed at them! Call Gorbachev.…” But the marshal told his wife that was impossible now. The connections had all been severed.

Working out of a war room on the third floor, Yeltsin signed a decree creating a backup shadow government and dispatched a team of twenty-three civilian and military leaders in the Russian government to set it up in a secret headquarters thirty-five miles outside Yeltsin’s home city of Sverdlovsk in the Urals.

“The idea was to act in the name of the Russian government if the White House was captured,” said Aleksei Yablokov, Yeltsin’s environment minister and one of those who went to Sverdlovsk. Working in bunkers thirty feet underground that had been built during the cold war, the Russians began sending an unending series of faxes and telexes calling on local organizations and governments around the Soviet Union to resist the decrees of the junta.

The leader of the Urals Military District was one of the most reactionary generals in the country, Albert Makashov. It had been Makashov who had run against Yeltsin for the presidency on a purely Stalinist platform. Now Makashov was telling his charges to round up any suspicious people, including “cosmopolitans,” the old Stalinist code word for Jews. But his troops paid little attention. The passions of the city of Sverdlovsk were with Yeltsin. More than 100,000 people staged a demonstration defying the junta in the main city square. There were no arrests.

Valentin Pavlov convened a meeting of all the government’s ministers at 6:00 P.M. Environment Minister Nikolai Vorontsov, the only non-Communist in the group, took notes on the session and read some of them to Masha and me before they came out in the press days later.

“It was a chorus of agreement,” said Vorontsov. Every minister but three expressed absolute support for the coup. After Pavlov repeated the tale of the “counterrevolutionaries” with their Stinger missiles and evil intentions, one minister after another rose to say the committee was their last hope. They made little secret that what they wanted most of all was a chance to stay in power, to hold on to the last sweet scraps of privilege. Vladimir Gusev, the head of the state committee on chemistry and biotechnology, was a typical case, telling his fellow ministers, “If we step back even an iota, we will sacrifice our jobs, our lives. We will not have another chance.” When Pavlov finished the meeting, he spoke with Yazov on the phone. Yazov could tell immediately that the prime minister, whom everyone knew as “Mr. Porky,” was drunk again.

“Arrest them all,” Pavlov said at one point.

Yazov knew things were going badly. Where was the plan? He was beginning to think that the collapse of the plot would be better than its success. But he pressed on.

The junta, of course, had banned the Russian Republic’s new television station. The public would have no chance to see the puckish hosts of the news program Vesti. There would only be Central Television, and for news, there would be only Vremya. Just like the old days.

Even the best directors and reporters at Vremya knew they could not be heroes. They could not take to the airwaves with appeals for resistance. Their entire operation was riddled with informers, agents, and officers of the KGB. It was out of the question. Besides, all the really irreverent people had long ago gone to Vesti and the more liberal shows.

But a young Vremya reporter named Sergei Medvedev watched the CNN feeds and decided he had to do something. His editors gave him an assignment for the 9:00 P.M. broadcast: film a feature on “Moscow today.” The idea, he knew, was to show how calm everything was, how “life is going on as normal.” In fact, it was true. Much of Moscow, like nearly all of the rest of the country, did seem normal. People went to work. Some watched television and read the papers and tried to figure out what had happened. There were millions of people who thought the coup might even do some good; and there were millions who could not have cared less. But Medvedev also made sure to fill in the rest of the picture. He got some brief footage of the scenes around the White House: the barricades, the protesters. He even included a clip of Yeltsin on the tank. He handed it over to his editors and hoped for the best.

Yelena Pozdniak, a veteran director at Vremya, also decided she would do what she could to preserve, at the very least, a marginal sense of honesty. She got the word from Kravchenko and his deputies that if it was technically possible, she should edit out Yanayev’s trembling hands at the press conference, the laughter in the hall, the scoffing reactions of the correspondents. Although that was easy enough to do, Pozdniak thought, “Let them see it all!” She’d had enough of the lies. In the days of Brezhnev, she had cleaned up the stutters and blurts of the leaders on a nightly basis. Brezhnev had the verbal style of a senile crocodile and required special polishing. “He used to have a favored word, kompetentnost [“competency”], to which he always added an extra letter: kompententnost,” Pozdniak recalled. “I had to find another speech where he said it correctly and then dub that in so no one would notice.” But not this time.

Valentin Lazutkin, Kravchenko’s deputy and a semiliberal man, also made his move. On the air, his rebellion would look slight, if not invisible; the broadcast was filled with the proclamations and approved commentaries of the committee. But he put Medvedev’s piece on the air and he let the clips of the press conference run, complete with Yanayev’s waggling hands.

“People got to see that Yeltsin was alive, that he was free and working, and that meant there was hope,” Lazutkin said. The minute Vremya went off the air, the calls started coming in: three Politburo members and, worst of all, Boris Pugo, the interior minister.

Pugo was in a rage. “The story on Moscow was treacherous!” he said. “You have given instructions to the people on where to go and what to do. You will answer for this.” Later, Yanayev called, too. He did not seem to know what to talk about, and so Lazutkin politely asked him how he had liked the newscast. “I saw it,” Yanayev said. “It was a good, balanced report. It showed everything from different points of view.” “But they said I would be punished for it,” Lazutkin said.

“Who are they?” Yanayev asked. “From the Central Committee? Fuck ‘em.” Beginning that night, Lazutkin acquired a new friend: a colonel of the KGB. The colonel went wherever Lazutkin went, listened to all his conversations, watched as he made all his decisions.

“Why are you here?” Lazutkin asked.

“For your security,” the colonel said.

But soon the KGB man came around. He and Lazutkin exchanged smiles as the coup began to erode. And then they took out the bottle, the eternal equalizer of men.

“Cheers!” the agent said.

“Cheers!” said the man who had shown Big Brother with his pants down.

Lazutkin’s son was proud of his father’s subtle rebellion, but he could not call him to say so. Sergei Lazutkin was at the White House, on the barricades.