Down with Big Brother (64 page)

“What comrades?” he asked sharply. “I am not expecting anyone.”
⁷³

The president was angry. He rarely invited Kremlin officials to visit him while he was on vacation. When he was at Foros, he preferred to be alone with his immediate family: Raisa, their daughter, Irina, her husband, Anatoly, and their two children. For outsiders to show up uninvited at his private retreat was a gross breach of protocol. It was also a serious violation of the elaborate security arrangements that surrounded a Soviet leader. Gorbachev wanted to know why his bodyguards had permitted the visitors to enter the compound.

“They came with Plekhanov,” Medvedev replied nervously.

This, at least, explained how the “comrades” had managed to get past the guards. Lieutenant General Yuri Plekhanov was head of the Ninth Directorate of the KGB, the division responsible for the protection of Soviet leaders. The president’s bodyguards ultimately reported to him. It was Plekhanov who had devised the seemingly impenetrable security system around the residence, which consisted of three circles of guards, a total of five hundred superbly armed men. There were the president’s personal bodyguards, headed by Medvedev. There were KGB soldiers, who were responsible for defending the internal perimeter of the compound and manning five high watchtowers. Finally there were border troops, who patrolled the outside of the compound. Every year Plekhanov spent a few days at Foros, to ensure that the system was functioning properly.

“Okay, let them wait a little,” Gorbachev told Medvedev. He planned to ask Kryuchkov what was going on. The fact that a group of Soviet leaders would come to visit him in Foros on the eve of his departure for Moscow struck him as strange. But he had confidence in the KGB chief, who seemed the model of the loyal subordinate. While he was at Foros, he spoke to him almost every day by phone.

The president picked up the
vertushka
, but it was dead. He picked up a second phone, a third, and a fourth, with the same frustrating result. Finally he removed the cover from a special red phone reserved for the commander in chief. This was the hot line to the defense minister and the chief of the General Staff, for use in the event of a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. No one else was permitted to touch this phone, even to dust it. It too had gone dead. Gorbachev now had no doubt that an attempt was under way to overthrow him. He looked at his watch. It was 4:50 p.m.

He rushed outside onto the veranda, where his wife was resting after a day by the beach. During the past six years he had shared all his hopes and worries with her. Now he told her that he detected “a plot.” It was the only plausible explanation for the unprecedented communications blackout, combined with the sudden arrival of uninvited visitors. Even the television set had been disconnected. They had to prepare themselves for a period of enforced isolation, perhaps even arrest.

“If they think that they will get me to change my policies, they will not succeed. I will not give in to any blackmail or threats,” said Gorbachev after a moment’s silence. “This will be difficult for all of us, for the whole family. We have to be ready for anything.”
⁷⁴

“You have to make this decision yourself, but I will be with you, whatever happens.”

Raisa fetched Irina and Anatoly. They understood that anything could happen. As Raisa said later, “We all knew our history, its terrible pages.” They remembered how the last Kremlin reformer, Nikita Khrushchev, had been stripped of all his posts and exiled to a Moscow dacha from one day to the next. Russian history was replete with leaders who had been executed, tortured, and thrown into prison. One by one, the members of Gorbachev’s family said they supported his decision not to give in to blackmail.

His mind made up, Gorbachev returned to his study, where the “comrades” were already waiting for him. Half an hour had gone by, and they were getting nervous. There were five of them altogether: Baklanov, Shenin, Boldin, Varennikov, and Plekhanov. All were in suits. Gorbachev, who was dressed in shorts and a sweater, immediately began throwing questions at them.

“Who sent you?”

“The committee.”

“What committee?”

“The committee set up to deal with the emergency situation in the country.”

“Who set it up? I didn’t create it, and the Supreme Soviet didn’t create it. Who created it?”
⁷⁵

Gorbachev’s office was small, and there were not enough chairs for everybody. The visitors were nervous, unsure of themselves. They had not been expecting such a hostile reception from the president, a compromiser to his fingertips. They thought they would haggle with him and reach “a mutually agreed solution.”
⁷⁶
But this time the president seemed in no mood to compromise. He glared at Plekhanov and ordered him rudely out of the room. As far as he was concerned, Plekhanov was a flunky, and flunkies had no business meddling in politics.

The visitors told Gorbachev the names of some of the members of the Emergency Committee. The list included the vice president, the prime minister, the defense minister, the interior minister, the KGB chief. He jotted down the names on a notebook with a blue felt pen. These were people he knew and trusted, people whom he himself had promoted to the top positions in the state and government.

The only member of the committee who had come to Foros was Baklanov, and he did most of the talking. He told Gorbachev that he had two alternatives. He could either sign a decree implementing a state of emergency or temporarily transfer his power to Vice President Yanayev. When Gorbachev said that republican leaders were due to sign the new Union Treaty on August 20, Baklanov interrupted him: “There won’t be any signing ceremony.”

“Yeltsin has already been arrested,” Baklanov added. A few seconds later he corrected himself: “He will be arrested.”
⁷⁷

“You and the people who sent you are irresponsible. You will destroy yourselves, but that’s your business. To hell with you. But you will also destroy the country and everything we have already done. Tell that to the committee that sent you.”

Gorbachev was working himself up for one of his long monologues, his preferred style of political discourse. He browbeat the conspirators, just as he browbeat the parliament and Central Committee, telling them repeatedly to “go to hell.” The Soviet Union faced many crises, he told them, but a state of emergency was no way to resolve them. The country’s problems could be solved only by democratic means. Anyone who thought otherwise was an “adventurer” and a “criminal.” Nothing would come of their plans.

“Only people bent on committing suicide could now propose introducing a state of emergency in the country. I will not have anything to do with it.”

“Mikhail Sergeyevich,” pleaded Boldin, hitherto the most sycophantic of the president’s aides, who was standing by the window, “you don’t understand what the situation in the country is.”

“Shut up, you prick,” Gorbachev shot back. “How dare you give me lectures about the situation in the country.”
⁷⁸

Varennikov, barely able to contain himself, was sitting across the table from Gorbachev. The former commander of the Soviet military operation in Afghanistan had a voice that carried naturally to the most distant corner of a parade ground. He was used to giving orders, not receiving them. He bellowed at his commander in chief as if he were a junior officer who had just disgraced the regiment.

“Resign!”
⁷⁹

Varennikov launched into a tirade of his own, complaining about the way in which the Soviet armed forces had been “humiliated,” particularly over the withdrawal from East Germany. Why, he wanted to know, were separatist, nationalist forces being allowed to run riot? Why was the president ignoring the constitution he had sworn to uphold?

Gorbachev brushed aside the general’s demand for his resignation and, for good measure, pretended that he had forgotten Varennikov’s name and patronymic.

“Valentin Ivanovich, is it? Well, just listen, Valentin Ivanovich. The people are not a battalion of soldiers to whom you can issue the command ‘right turn’ or ‘left turn, march,’ and they will do just as you tell them. It won’t be like that.”
⁸⁰

After hurling some more Russian swearwords at his former subordinates, Gorbachev told them they were “criminals” who would be held responsible for their actions. As the conspirators left the room, he shook them by the hand.

Raisa was sitting in the hall with her daughter and son-in-law. She was frightened that the conspirators would arrest her husband on the spot. She was particularly shocked to see Boldin among the group that had confronted her husband since she regarded him as a friend of the family. He stopped a short distance from her but did not say anything. Shenin and Baklanov said hello.

“Why have you come here?” she asked Baklanov.

“Force of circumstances,” he replied, adding, “We are your friends.”

He held out his hand to say good-bye, but Raisa refused to take it.
⁸¹

MOSCOW
August 18, 1991

G
ORBACHEV’S COLLEAGUES HAD GATHERED
in the prime minister’s office, on the second floor of the government building in the Kremlin. They were seated around a long conference table, covered with green baize. Bottles of mineral water, half-drunk cups of tea and coffee, plates full of biscuits and sandwiches, and top secret documents were scattered around the table. Cigarette smoke hung in the air.

The participants in the meeting had arranged themselves on either side of the table, in order of seniority. The most senior officials were farthest from the door. Whenever someone came into the room, there would be a shuffling of places, in order to preserve the Kremlin pecking order. But the seat at the head of the table—the place reserved for the chairman of the meeting—was always left vacant. It was as if none of the men around the table were willing to assume individual responsibility for the events that were taking place. All sought refuge behind the anonymity of the collective. In the absence of Gorbachev, they were effectively leaderless.

Vice President Yanayev arrived late and reeking of alcohol. The conspirators were hoping he would agree to declare himself acting president, but he had yet to give his consent. He had spent the afternoon in the company of an old drinking buddy at a government rest home outside Moscow. His somewhat disheveled appearance provoked a sarcastic comment from
Prime Minister Pavlov, who had also been drinking heavily that afternoon, having attended a homecoming party for his son.

“Here we are, discussing important matters, and the vice president is wandering about somewhere,” Pavlov remarked jocularly as Yanayev entered the room.
⁸²

The vice president sat down in his usual place, to the immediate left of the empty chair. The place opposite was reserved for the speaker of the Soviet parliament, Anatoly Lukyanov, who had also been summoned to the Kremlin at short notice. The wily Lukyanov was insisting that his name be removed from the list of members of the GKChP. As the representative of the legislative authority he could not take part in the work of the executive.

The meeting had been convened by Kryuchkov, on the pretext that the president was “ill” and urgent measures were necessary to stabilize the situation in the country. Now that he had isolated the president, the KGB chief had the delicate task of broadening the plot to include other members of the leadership. Gorbachev’s “illness” was a convenient fiction that enabled everyone at the meeting to hide behind a cloak of legality.

Yanayev allowed the debate to swirl around him. He was unsure what position to take, and his alcoholic stupor made it even more difficult for him to think straight. He had talked to Gorbachev a few hours previously by phone—the president had told him he was flying back to Moscow on the nineteenth—so he knew perfectly well that he was not seriously ill. He shared his colleagues’ dismay at the state of the country and believed that a “strong hand” was the only solution. On the other hand, he had never had any pretensions to being a leader, far less a dictator.

Like most Russians, Yanayev had been surprised by his election as vice president eight months earlier. The press had dismissed him as a colorless bureaucrat who had managed to reach the top by never sticking his neck out. After writing a doctoral thesis on Trotskyism and anarchism, he had spent most of his career in the Communist youth organization, the Komsomol. He had also worked for the official trade union organization, which was known as a refuge for mediocrities. Yanayev’s lackluster biography and weak personality had caused a revolt in the Congress of People’s Deputies when Gorbachev proposed him for the post of vice president. Even his jokes fell flat. Questioned by deputies about the state of his health, he replied, “I perform my husbandly duties satisfactorily.” (According to Russian prosecutors, Yanayev was a notorious womanizer.) It took two ballots to get him elected, but Gorbachev seemed satisfied with his choice. The president did not want a strong number two, who might one day challenge him.

Shortly after 10:00 p.m. the delegation that had visited Gorbachev in
Foros burst into the room. They too had been drinking, on the plane home. Shenin and Baklanov gave their accounts of the meeting with the president, complaining that he had refused to go along with their perfectly reasonable suggestions for a state of emergency. Yanayev attempted to find out precisely what was wrong with Gorbachev but had no success.