Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (14 page)

waiting for the end of the world the surrender of all the gains of the Second World War.

Eastern Europe’s exit from the Soviet orbit had an equally dramatic impact on the Soviet republics, which Gorbachev had unbound from the Communist Party and planned economy centralism, and placed within the vortex of electoral politics.

In March 1990 the parliament of Lithuania voted to secede from the Union, 124 to 0 (with 9 abstentions). The Estonian and Latvian parliaments declared ‘transitional periods’ to independence. Though tiny, the three Baltic republics, which had been independent between 1918

and 1940, seemed to present a special challenge. But in June 1990 the
Russian
republic declared its ‘sovereignty’— vis-à-vis
Moscow
—asserting the primacy of republic laws over Union ones. The parliaments of Ukraine, Belorussia, and newly renamed Moldova (Moldavia) followed Russia’s lead to declarations of sovereignty. Armenia, radicalized by Karabakh, followed Lithuania, declaring independence. Suddenly, Gorbachev announced plans for a new ‘Union Treaty’, to replace the 1922 original. Also, having previously managed to appear a political centrist indispensable to all, he now openly joined forces with the ‘left’ to prepare a 500-day programme for a transition to the market. A few months later, however, in mid-September 1990, he just as suddenly renounced the 500-day plan and confederation plans, asked the Soviet parliament for special ‘emergency powers’, and began to add several proponents of ‘order’ to his government.

Accompanying Gorbachev’s autumn 1990 lurch to the 90

waiting for the end of the world ‘right’, the first draft of a new Union Treaty was published.

It accorded republics only limited control over enterprises and resources on their territories, maintained the primacy of Union laws, specified Russian as the state language, and failed to mention the USSR constitution’s guarantee of secession. The draft may have appeased a disgruntled military and KGB, but it had no prayer of winning republic approval. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had refused to take part in any discussions about a Union even before the draft’s publication. The KGB publicly warned that the Union republics were following ‘an East Germany scenario’. In January 1991 a contingent of special forces commenced a police operation in Lithuania, resulting in thirteen deaths, but the troops were quickly called off.

The Soviet president, though commander in chief, dis-claimed any involvement and failed to discipline anyone.

Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova announced they also would have nothing to do with the Union. In March 1991

a new draft of a Union Treaty restored the right to secession (piled with restrictions), but many republics did not bother to respond. The next month, Gorbachev abruptly reversed course once more, tacking back to the ‘left’ and opening direct negotiations with the nine republics still willing to consider a relationship with Moscow. But he also kept the pro-unitary-state Soviet government in place.

Left, right, then left
and
right—the zigs and zags from mid-1990 into mid-1991 were hard to read. Back in December 1990, when a journalist asked whether he was moving to the right, Gorbachev had quipped, ‘actually, 91

waiting for the end of the world I’m going round in circles’.
7
Indeed, hardline critics mocked him as ‘someone who has missed his train and is scurrying around the empty platform’.
8
But, despite the non-intervention in Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1990, no one could exclude the possibility of an attempted crackdown to save the Union. That remained true even after April 1991, when Gorbachev placed his hopes in negotiations with the republics, above all Russia—meaning his
bête
noire
, Boris Yeltsin. Would Yeltsin compromise to salvage some form of a Union, and if so, would it matter? Would Gorbachev or perhaps others in the Soviet establishment use massive force to hold off dissolution, or to make others pay for the country’s humiliation? The decolonization of Western Europe’s
overseas
possessions had been drawn out and bloody. The Soviet land empire, with several million well-armed troops and a vast doomsday arsenal, could have unleashed a far nastier bloodbath, even an end to the world.

The crowd-bather

Born in 1931, the same year as Gorbachev, to a peasant family in a village east of the Ural Mountains, Boris Yeltsin was almost drowned by a drunken priest in a baptism bath.

During the Second World War, far from the front, the teenage Boris disassembled a grenade to see what was inside, losing two fingers. He almost died of typhus 92

waiting for the end of the world exploring a swampy forest, and requested the floor at his school graduation to deliver a peroration of the collective resentments against an abusive teacher, for which his continuation in higher education was blocked, despite good grades. But Yeltsin took his case to higher authorities, and won, eventually gaining entrance to the Urals Polytechnic University. In 1955—while Gorbachev was writing a senior thesis on the superiority of socialism over capitalism— Yeltsin wrote his on the construction of coal mines. He entered the party in 1961 (nine years later than Gorbachev), and in 1968 was shifted from the building trusts to the provincial party apparat. In 1976 Yeltsin became party boss of his native Sverdlovsk, a strategic territory that produced tanks, aircraft, and nuclear and biological weapons.

As a provincial first secretary, Yeltsin excelled at what one biographer aptly calls the ‘bain de foule’ (bathing in the crowd). He rode mass transit conspicuously, appeared live on local television, and met blue-collar workers and students, answering written questions for hours. His ‘favourite routine’, writes the biographer, ‘was to glance at a slip of paper calling for the dismissal of an especially incompetent or corrupt official, and then announce, to loud applause: “Already fired. Next question.” ’
9
Such ham-handed populism came naturally to Yeltsin, and he had some economic results to back up the theatrics. Yegor Ligachev, in charge of personnel in Andropov’s Kremlin, visited Yeltsin’s fief for an unusually long four-day inspec-tion in 1984. In 1985, after Gorbachev’s elevation, Yeltsin 93

waiting for the end of the world was brought to Moscow as CC Secretary for Construction.

Several months later he was named boss of the Moscow party committee, replacing Viktor Grishin, Gorbachev’s erstwhile rival. Grishin’s career was already finished. The crowd-bather would emerge as a new rival.

Sverdlovsk was a weightier bailiwick than Ligachev’s Tomsk or Gorbachev’s Stavropol, yet Yeltsin got to Moscow later than his provincial peers, and chafed as their subordinate.
10
He also found the capital tough going. His attacks on elite perquisites, and his imperious treatment of subordinates, made him anathema to the powerful party machine. In the autumn of 1987, Yeltsin clashed with Ligachev over apparatchik ‘privileges’, and then with Gorbachev, rising at a party gathering to accuse the general secretary of fostering sycophantism and being indecisive. Offering to resign, Yeltsin was bounced from the politburo and the leadership of the Moscow city party, though Gorbachev threw him a line, the post of deputy head of the construction industry, which Yeltsin took. Two years later, Gorbachev provided an even bigger gift when he introduced competitive elections for a new Congress of People’s Deputies. Yeltsin resumed baiting unpopular apparatchiks like Ligachev—and they obliged, forming a commission to investigate whether his highly popular views were compatible with the party line. Running in the Moscow district, Yeltsin won election to the 1989 Congress in a 90 per cent landslide.

The two-week Congress riveted the country—its televised eight-hour sessions, during the workday, were seen 94

waiting for the end of the world by an estimated 200 million people—and Yeltsin attracted an enormous following inside and outside the hall as the unofficial leader of the ‘democrats’. The KGB conducted an international smear campaign against him, and tapped his telephones (materials later discovered in a safe with annotations in Gorbachev’s hand), but the surveillance did not stop Yeltsin. Fears of a KGB assassination also gripped Yeltsin’s entourage. One night in October 1989, he did show up wet and bleeding at a police station, claiming to have been thrown off a bridge. The bridge was so high and the water so shallow that no one could have survived such a fall. Yeltsin’s bodyguard and bathhouse confidant, Alexander Korzhakov, who arrived to clean the bleeding body with moonshine, has written that a depressed Yeltsin attempted suicide.
11
Rebounding, the crowd-bather was popularly elected in March 1990 to a Russian republic Congress of People’s Deputies, and in May was elected by the Congress as chairman of its Supreme Soviet—by a four-vote margin.

Leading Russia’s drive for ‘sovereignty’, Yeltsin, too, was a product of the Soviet system. But, whereas Ligachev favoured the Andropov school (tough discipline, suspicion of the West), and Gorbachev chased romantic ideals (party democracy, Western partnership), Yeltsin inclined towards paternalistic identification with ‘the folk’. Wielding the common touch Gorbachev lacked, he promised ‘radical reform’, including a market economy, about which he knew nothing but which he and his supporters imagined would provide the better life and social 95

waiting for the end of the world justice that had been the promise of socialism.
12
On the new playing field of electoral politics Gorbachev had created, Yeltsin the martyred ‘man of the people’ presented a far greater challenge than had Ligachev, the ‘conservative apparatchik’ in the red-carpeted hallways. Not one to give up, Gorbachev reached into his bag of tactics and pulled out a referendum, to be held in March 1991, on preservation of the Union. Unable to block the vote, Yeltsin managed to attach a second question on creating a presidency for the Russian republic. With an 80 per cent turnout, three-quarters of the electorate supported a ‘renewed Union’. True, six republics had not allowed the ballot on their territories, but the Soviet president had his ‘mandate’. At the same time, however, Yeltsin launched a Union-challenging presidential election campaign, which he won resoundingly in June 1991.

Moscow now had two presidents, one elected by parliament (Gorbachev) and one (Yeltsin) by the people. That was the background to the Union Treaty negotiations between the leaders of nine republics and ‘the centre’ that opened in late April 1991. The working text dropped the word ‘socialist’, devolved most ministerial functions to the republics, upheld the supremacy of republic laws, called for the dissolution of the USSR Supreme Soviet, and made clear that Union membership was voluntary. This was worse than the deal on confederation that Gorbachev had rejected nine months previously in the 500-day plan. In late July 1991 an agreement was reached ‘in principle’.

Gorbachev went on television to praise the accord— 96

waiting for the end of the world without divulging its contents—and then left on 4 August for vacation in the Crimea. The Treaty was to be signed in Moscow on 20 August. Confident in the support of the Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbaev, the Soviet president claims he remained concerned about Yeltsin’s possible abandonment of the settlement. But Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine did not even attend the negotiations.
13

Two days before the signing ceremony, on 18 August in the early evening, a group of top Soviet officials arrived unsummoned at Gorbachev’s Crimean dacha with a proposal for him to declare martial law. He refused. He also refused to resign outright or claim illness and resign temporarily in favour of his vice-president, Yanaev, returning ‘healthy’ when the dust settled. Rebuffed, the heads of the KGB, army, police, military-industrial complex, and civilian Soviet government went forward with the ‘illness’

scenario anyway. The demise of a unitary state had been made plain by the text of the Union Treaty, which, hoping to cause an uproar, they had leaked to
Moscow News
on 14

August (and which was republished in other papers the next day). The demise was also clear from Yeltsin’s imperious decrees asserting the Russian republic takeover of the valuable USSR oil and natural gas industries on Russian territory, as well as his proclamations on forming a Russian republic KGB and a Russian defence ministry. If members of the Soviet government needed further incentive to act, the KGB chief exhibited the transcript of an eavesdropped conversation on 29–30 July among Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Nazarbaev that named every top USSR

97

waiting for the end of the world official for removal.
14
On 19 August, the men who had stood by as Eastern Europe broke away, sent tanks rolling into Moscow.

Beer hall putsch

Even after becoming general secretary, Gorbachev—who had never served in the army—had remained wary of the Soviet military and the KGB. Using the pretext of the embarrassing May 1987 landing right behind Red Square of a small Cessna aeroplane flown from Germany by a teenager, he cleaned house, thoroughly purging the senior army ranks, and promoting the obscure Dmitry Yazov to defence minister. In 1988, when Gorbachev disarmed Yegor Ligachev by sabotaging the Secretariat, he transferred into that emasculated body KGB chief Chebrikov, who had been making public noises about the downside of reform. The new KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, later wrote that, at the time, he saw Gorbachev, the man responsible for fulfilling his lifelong ambition to head the KGB, as a hard-working leader who deserved full support.
15
In August 1991, however, Kryuchkov, pulling along Yazov, confined Gorbachev at the Crimean dacha and led a group that invoked the ‘emergency powers’

parliament had some time before granted the Soviet president.

Announcing its existence on 19 August 1991, the State Emergency Committee claimed eight members, after 98

waiting for the end of the world some had asked that their names be kept off decrees.

Their stated goals were to uphold the laws and integrity of the Union, restore labour discipline, cut prices, and allocate money to schools, hospitals, and pensioners. They got expressions of ‘support’ from many provincial officials around Russia (and marginal extremists in Moscow). They sent out instructions to local branches of the KGB and interior ministry to fight a war on crime. They instituted a naval blockade of the Baltic republics, and moved armoured troops into Leningrad—a bastion of ‘democrats’—as well as into Moscow. But the Committee also took pains to appear to adhere to the Soviet constitution.