Read Down with Big Brother Online
Authors: Michael Dobbs
In his first appearance before the press Yeltsin seemed pale and shaken. He seemed overwhelmed by the magnitude of his task. None of the other republics was in a hurry to come to Russia’s aid, and the sight of the firepower being brought into the city by his enemies was fresh in his mind. The situation looked hopeless. “At least fifty tanks are on their way to this building,” he told journalists, after a whispered consultation with an aide. “Anybody who wants to save himself can do so.”
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When he returned to his office, on the fifth floor of the White House, Yeltsin could see a column of tanks lined up along the embankment. A group of Muscovites had surrounded the tanks and were arguing with the crews. Nobody seemed afraid, even though radio and television were spewing out the dire warnings of the GKChP against anyone who dared resist the state of emergency. “All at once, I felt a jolt inside,” he recalled later in his memoirs. “I had to be out there right away, standing with those people.”
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A roar went up from the crowd when they spotted the towering figure of the Russian president striding purposefully down the ceremonial steps in the front of the White House. They broke into chants of “Yeltsin, Yeltsin” and “Down with the Communist Party.” Surrounded by aides and security guards, Yeltsin approached Tank No. 110 of the Taman Division and posed for pictures. Television cameras whirred as he shook the hand of the tank commander. The crew seemed dazed, utterly bewildered by what was happening.
“Apparently they are not going to shoot the president of Russia just yet,” Yeltsin quipped to the crowd.
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Friendly hands helped Yeltsin up onto the tank. A dozen security guards and Russian deputies climbed up after him. Someone held up the white, blue, and red tricolor that had been the Russian flag prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The president stood by the gun turret and straightened himself up tall, raising his right hand for silence. He twisted his face into a defiant scowl and began to read from the “Appeal to the Citizens of Russia” that he and his colleagues had written earlier that morning.
“The use of force is absolutely unacceptable,” Yeltsin boomed. “We are absolutely sure that our compatriots will not permit the tyranny and lawlessness of the putschists, who have lost all sense of shame and honor, to be confirmed. We appeal to military personnel to display their high sense of civic courage and refuse to participate in the reactionary coup.”
As he stood on top of the tank, surrounded by cheering supporters, Yeltsin felt both a surge of energy and an intense sense of relief. It was like the time he had stood up in school and accused his headmistress of sadism. Everything was clear now. An intensely complicated political struggle had just been reduced to a case of us against them.
They
—the authority figures—had the guns. But
he
, Yeltsin, had a burning sense of moral conviction and political legitimacy. He also had the people on his side.
FOROS
August 19, 1991
O
VERNIGHT
G
ORBACHEV’S PRIVATE PLAYGROUND
in the Crimea had been transformed into a luxurious—and very isolated—jailhouse. The president had become a prisoner of the security forces assigned to protect him. There was no way for the Gorbachev family to escape from Foros, just as there was no way for outsiders to penetrate the security fences that surrounded the compound. Fire engines had been parked across the helicopter landing pad to forestall any rescue attempt. Border guards blocked all the approach roads to Camp Dawn, the KGB code name for the dacha. The previous night Gorbachev’s personal secretary had counted the lights of sixteen naval ships surrounding the bay.
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On the grounds of the dacha itself, a standoff had developed between two rival groups of security guards. The presidential bodyguards—with the exception of General Medvedev—had remained loyal to Gorbachev. No attempt had been made to disarm them, and they were permitted to continue protecting the president. The task of guarding the perimeter of the compound had been taken over by a fresh contingent of KGB men, who had arrived from Moscow with the conspirators. They took over control of the gates, impounded all the vehicles, and decided who would enter and leave. They also possessed the only means of communication with the outside world.
One of the first people to attempt to enter Camp Dawn after the coup was the president’s senior nuclear aide, Colonel Viktor Vasilyev.
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He had the job of taking over responsibility for the
chemodanchik
from Kirillov and escorting Gorbachev back to Moscow. Together with his two assistants, he reported to the entrance gate of Foros around eight on the morning of August 19. None of the trio had any idea what had happened in the country. There was no television and no telephone in the military rest home where they were billeted.
After examining their passes, the guard asked the nuclear aides to wait, while he phoned his superiors. A few minutes later a KGB colonel appeared and told them the passes were no longer valid. When they asked why, he suggested they listen to the radio, which was broadcasting GKChP decrees over and over again.
It took many hours for the Defense Ministry to decide what to do with Gorbachev’s nuclear briefcase. They were in no particular hurry. The
chemodanchik
had ceased to be operational from the moment that communications were interrupted with Foros, at 4:32 p.m. the previous day. (The defense minister and chief of the General Staff possessed identical pieces of equipment, which they could have used in the event of a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.) The significance of the
chemodanchik
was now symbolic, rather than practical. Without it, Gorbachev was no longer the commander in chief. This happened, without any ceremony, at 2:00 p.m. on August 19, when a jeep arrived for the nuclear aides. They flew back to Moscow that evening, aboard the presidential plane, taking the
chemodanchik
with them.
T
HE CONSPIRATORS HAD CUT OFF
the television and radio cable to the presidential compound. Gorbachev, however, still had a little Sony transistor radio that he used to listen to the news while shaving. He spent the night fiddling with the dial, desperate for any news about the plans of the GKChP. There was nothing until shortly after six that morning, when Radio Moscow began broadcasting the announcement that Yanayev had taken over as “acting president.”
Apart from his bodyguards and private secretary, the only aide that Gorbachev had taken with him to Foros was his foreign policy adviser, Anatoly Chernyayev, who had been helping him write an article outlining several scenarios for the future development of the country. These included the imposition of a state of emergency, a course Gorbachev raised only to reject. When the conspirators arrived, Chernyayev was staying in the guesthouse
behind the presidential mansion and was unable to leave the compound. He was to remain by Gorbachev’s side throughout the coup.
On Monday morning Chernyayev found the president lying in bed, writing notes to himself. His back was still giving him problems, and any movement was painful for him. Together, they tried to analyze the coup’s chances of success. Gorbachev was contemptuous of the putschists. He did not believe they would be able to put the economy back on its feet or restore order. In the long term they were doomed. In the short term, however, he feared that they might come out on top.
“This could end very badly,” he said gloomily. “In this situation, I trust Yeltsin. He will not give in to them, he will not make any concessions. There could be bloodshed.”
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Raisa Gorbachev put herself in charge of security. Shattered by the betrayal of Boldin and Plekhanov, she was now hypervigilant. The GKChP announcement that Gorbachev was incapable of performing his duties because of ill health terrified her. The plotters’ next step, she reasoned, would be to turn her husband into a real invalid, in order to support their previous statements. Fearing a possible poisoning attempt, she kept the family from eating any food not already stocked on the premises. Her daughter, Irina, collected all the fruit in the house and hid it in a cupboard, to ensure that the children would have something to eat.
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Convinced the entire house was bugged, Raisa insisted that confidential conversations be held out in the open.
After lunch the entire Gorbachev family plus Chernyayev took the enclosed glass escalator down to the rocky beach. While the children swam in the sea, Gorbachev and Chernyayev sat in a little changing hut, planning the president’s next move. Gorbachev decided to bombard the leaders of the GKChP with constant demands, as a means of psychological pressure. Chernyayev jotted down his first orders, which he later handed to Plekhanov’s deputy, the GKChP representative at Foros:
By Monday afternoon the security guards who remained loyal to Gorbachev had rigged up a makeshift television aerial. The television set was working again, in time for the GKChP press conference that evening. Like
everybody else in the country, Gorbachev was more struck by the way the coup leaders looked than by what they had to say. It was a pathetic sight. The advocates of a “firm hand” seemed terribly nervous and unsure of themselves. Yanayev was unable to keep his hands from shaking, as he promised to restore law and order in the country.
Equally revealing was the journalists’ lack of respect toward the would-be saviors of the nation. After six years of glasnost, they clearly had no intention of surrendering their hard-won freedoms. “Do you realize that you have carried out a state coup?” asked a twenty-four-year-old reporter for
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
, Moscow’s latest independent newspaper. “Which comparison do you find more appropriate: 1917 or 1964?” The Bolshevik coup or the removal of Khrushchev? Other reporters wanted to know if Yanayev would be seeking the advice of Chilean General Pinochet and why the Soviet people had not been told exactly what was wrong with Gorbachev.
After watching the pitiful performance of the coup leaders, Gorbachev decided to make his own appeal to the Soviet and international public. After midnight he sat down to record his message, in front of the family video camera. “Everything that has been said concerning the state of my health is false. On the basis of this lie, an anti-constitutional coup d’état has been carried out. The legitimate president of the country has been barred from carrying out his duties.… I am under arrest and nobody is allowed to leave the territory of the dacha. I am surrounded by troops from both the sea and the land. I don’t know whether I shall succeed in getting this out, but I shall try to do everything to see that this tape reaches freedom.”
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Gorbachev read the appeal four times in succession. His daughter, Irina, and his son-in-law, Anatoly, cut the tape into four sections. They wrapped each section separately in a tiny paper envelope and sealed it with Scotch tape. Then they began to rack their brains over how to smuggle his message out of Camp Dawn.
MOSCOW
August 20, 1991
M
ARSHAL
D
MITRI
Y
AZOV HAD SCARCELY SLEPT
in the two nights since he had ordered his troops to occupy the streets of their own capital. He was depressed and irritable. He had joined the plot against his commander in chief after becoming convinced that Gorbachev was leading the Soviet Union to disaster and destroying its armed forces. But the more he saw of his fellow conspirators, the more he wondered whether he had made the right choice. Half of them were drunkards; the other half were incompetent.
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The attempt to reestablish Soviet power was not going well. Moscow was buzzing with rumors that half a dozen tanks of the Taman Division had defected to the Yeltsin camp. They had been assigned to take up positions at the Kutuzov Bridge, a couple of hundred yards from the White House. After talks with Russian leaders, Major Sergei Yevdokimov had agreed to move his tanks, deploying them in a defensive position around the parliament building, with their gun turrets facing outward. There were other signs of dissent as well. A paratroop training academy in Ryazan had declared its support for Yeltsin, as had garrisons on the island of Sakhalin and the Kamchatka peninsula, eight time zones to the east. Morale among the five thousand troops now occupying the center of Moscow was reported to be poor.
“What have we got ourselves into?” muttered Yazov at a meeting of his
senior commanders, at six o’clock Tuesday morning, as he reviewed the situation in the army.
Opposition to the GKChP even extended to the defense minister’s own family. His wife, Emma, had reacted to the coup with shock and dismay. Although she was recovering from a serious automobile accident, she had ordered a car to take her to the Defense Ministry, on Arbat Square, half a mile from the Kremlin. Weeping and sobbing, she had hobbled into Yazov’s office in a plaster cast.
“Dima, this means civil war. You have to stop this nightmare. Call Gorbachev.”
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