Down with Big Brother (67 page)

Hurt by his wife’s tears, Yazov explained gently that there was no way of communicating with the president. “Emma, please understand, I am alone.”

As they were talking, the television in the corner of the office began broadcasting the press conference by Yanayev and the other members of the GKChP. Emma wanted to know why he was not with them. By way of reply, he waved his hand dismissively in the direction of his colleagues.

“Dima, look at who you have got involved with. You always laughed at these people. Phone Gorbachev.”

The defense minister felt torn between his loyalty to the president and his loyalty to the Soviet Union, or at least his vision of it. Bluff and straightforward, he had tried to steer clear of palace intrigues. This was one reason why Gorbachev had confidence in him, despite his limited intellectual horizons and lack of a formal education. At sixty-seven he was an officer of the old school whose entire life had revolved around his military service and Communist Party membership. He had joined the army as a teenager, during World War II, and had twice been wounded at the front. Soon he would be celebrating his fifty-year jubilee with the Soviet armed forces.

Yazov could not bring himself to betray his fellow conspirators so soon after betraying Gorbachev. He ordered the military preparations for the takeover of the Russian parliament to continue.

A
T THE
W
HITE
H
OUSE
Yeltsin also had hardly slept the previous night. His situation looked desperate. The building was virtually undefended. Workers had practically ignored his call for an immediate general strike against the GKChP. Although there had been protest rallies here and there, most of the population seemed indifferent to what was going on in Moscow.

But the Russian president had one great advantage: He was a fighter who thrived on adversity. As both an athlete and a politician he was at his best
when he was twenty points down and struggling to remain in the game. The ability to perform almost superhuman feats, interspersed with periods of prolonged idleness, is a common Russian trait, which Yeltsin possessed to an almost exaggerated degree. His burst of political activity during the coup was in marked contrast with the strange passivity of the plotters, who virtually dropped out of sight after their disastrous press conference.

When he climbed onto the tank outside the White House, Yeltsin became the symbol of democratic opposition to the new regime. By the second day of the coup he had issued a series of presidential decrees that laid the legal and constitutional basis for defying the authority of the GKChP. In quick succession he summoned the Russian parliament into extraordinary session, issued warrants for the arrest of the coup leaders, suspended the activity of the Russian Communist Party, and named himself commander in chief of all Soviet troops on the territory of Russia. The soldiers patrolling the streets of Moscow were now faced with a choice of whom to obey: Yazov or Yeltsin.

A
T NOON ON
T
UESDAY
, A
UGUST
20, Soviet security chiefs gathered in the office of the deputy defense minister, Vladislav Achalov, to discuss an attack on the White House. Most of the uniformed participants at the meeting were well acquainted with one another since they had all served in Afghanistan. The Interior Ministry forces were represented by Boris Gromov, the last commander of the Soviet Fortieth Army. Sitting next to him was the paratroop commander, Pavel Grachev. The commander of the Alpha Group, Viktor Karpukhin, was wearing his combat fatigues. Also present was Valentin Varennikov, the loudmouthed commander of Soviet land forces, who had demanded Gorbachev’s resignation in Foros two days earlier.

A KGB general, Genii Ageev, opened the meeting by outlining Operation Thunder. It hinged on careful coordination among the army, the KGB, and the Interior Ministry. Grachev’s paratroopers would be responsible for establishing a security perimeter with a radius of a thousand yards around the White House. They would prevent demonstrators from entering the entire area between the Moskva River and the American Embassy. Gromov’s forces would then drive a wedge through the crowds of Yeltsin supporters who already surrounded the parliament. KGB troops, led by the Alpha Group, would move in behind the Interior Ministry forces and storm the building, firing grenade launchers as they went. A squadron of military helicopters would land on the building from the roof.

Once inside the White House, the Alpha Group would arrest the Russian leadership, shooting any resisters. Special ten-man units of KGB troops would comb the building for Yeltsin supporters. These units would include photographers, who had the task of taking pictures of White House defenders using firearms. The photographs would allow the GKChP to claim that the other side shot first.

Both Grachev and Gromov had grave doubts about the operation, but they kept their thoughts to themselves. Instead they raised practical objections, pointing out that they would have to bring more troops into Moscow in order to implement the plan worked out by the KGB. Grachev insisted that the participants in the meeting hear a report from his subordinate, General Aleksandr Lebed, who had just completed a reconnaissance mission around the White House.

“Big crowds are gathering,” Lebed told the security chiefs. “They are erecting barricades. It will be impossible to complete this operation without significant casualties. There are many armed men inside the White House.”
¹⁰⁵

“General, it is your duty to be an optimist,” exploded Varennikov, who had been demanding Yeltsin’s arrest ever since the start of the coup. “You are bringing pessimism and uncertainty into this room.”

Like many other senior officers, Lebed felt confused and bewildered. For the past forty-eight hours, he had been caught up in an incomprehensible nightmare. On Monday, he had been instructed by Grachev to report to the White House and help organize the “defense and protection” of the building. Against whom was unclear: he did not hear about the formation of the GKChP until late Monday afternoon. He had negotiated with Yeltsin aides to station tanks around the building, with their gun barrels facing outwards. “In spite of all my efforts, I could not figure out what was going on,” he later recalled, describing his position as “humiliating.” On Tuesday morning, equally mysteriously, Grachev had instructed him to remove his tanks from the White House. “Again, I understood nothing.” It seemed to Lebed that he was taking part in some “idiotic game” straight out of the theater of the absurd. Later, he would be hailed as a hero for his role in defending the White House. But, as he wrote in his memoirs, “I was following orders when I led my troops into Moscow, and I was following orders when I led them out again.”
¹⁰⁶

D
URING THE AFTERNOON
rumors of Operation Thunder began to filter down to the troops who had taken up positions around the center of
Moscow. In most units the news of an imminent attack on the Russian parliament was greeted with alarm. In the day and a half since their deployment in the capital, the troops had been involved in endless debates with Muscovites about the legality of the state of emergency and the whereabouts of Gorbachev. The prospect of opening fire on their fellow Russians filled them with dread. The operation was set for 3:00 a.m. on Wednesday.

The debates were particularly lively in Manezh Square, alongside the Kremlin wall, which had been occupied the previous day by KGB
spetsnaz
units from the Moscow area. In recent months they had been training to support the Alpha Group in unspecified “antiterrorist operations.” They were well motivated and combat-ready. But even they were beginning to have doubts about their latest assignment.

The operation had begun badly. Driving into central Moscow, they had been delayed by a traffic accident, involving two armored personnel carriers and a passenger car. A soldier was taken to the hospital with a concussion. By the time the armored column reached the Manezh, the entrances to the square were blocked with trolley-buses. The
spetsnaz
had pushed the trolley-buses out of the way with the help of special engineering equipment, only to be confronted with crowds of unarmed civilians. None of the soldiers in the Manezh had any training in crowd control. Clearing the square of demonstrators, without resorting to force, had occupied the rest of the day.

That night the troops had attempted to get some rest in the holds of their armored cars. But they were constantly interrupted by visits from delegations of people’s deputies, representing both the Russian parliament and the Moscow City Council. The deputies distributed packages of Yeltsin decrees, appealing to the troops to ignore the orders of the GKChP and heed the authority of the Russian parliament. The
spetsnaz
officers were impressed by the red badges worn by the deputies in their lapels, a sign of their official status. Discussing the situation among themselves, they gradually reached the conclusion that Gorbachev’s overthrow had been unconstitutional. The officers’ uneasiness encouraged the deputies to push harder.

“Let’s all go to the Kremlin right now, and settle all this with Yanayev,” suggested Boris Nemtsov, a legislator from the Volga River city of Nizhni Novgorod, only half in jest.
¹⁰⁷

“No, boys, that’s your business,” replied a
spetsnaz
colonel. “But you do whatever you want. We won’t stop you.”

In the early evening the
spetsnaz
troops received an order to withdraw from the Manezh and return to their barracks at Teplyi Stan in southwest Moscow. They were told that they would be taking part in a “special operation”
later that night. Every soldier was required to equip himself with a bulletproof vest and two clips of live ammunition. The entire division was placed on battle alert. The officers were convinced that they would soon be ordered to attack the White House. For the first time in their military careers they began to argue about whether to fulfill an order.

“I won’t give an order to shoot,” one company commander told his men. “Act according to your conscience.”
¹⁰⁸

“If I am ordered to shoot, I will obey the order,” said a lieutenant.

After some debate the officers reached a decision. They would halt at the first barricade, switch off their radios, and refuse to take any further part in the storming of the parliament building.

As the
spetsnaz
column pulled out of the Manezh, one of the APCs was flying the Russian tricolor rather than the red Soviet flag. Given the circumstances, it was an extraordinary act of defiance. Plainclothes KGB men accompanying the column launched an immediate inquiry and established that the flag had been raised on the orders of a platoon commander, Captain Oleg Nevzorov. They told him to take it down, adding, “We’ll deal with you later.”

A
LL DAY LARGE CROWDS HAD BEEN GATHERING
in front of the White House. Grachev used the network of Afghan war veterans to send word to Russian leaders that a decision to storm the building had been made. The best chance of avoiding such a catastrophe, he told them, would be to appeal to Muscovites to defend the building. The attacking forces would certainly be very reluctant to shoot unarmed civilians.
¹⁰⁹

The defenders of the White House spent the afternoon erecting barricades from pieces of scrap metal and ripped-up cobblestones. A local transportation company provided dozens of heavy vehicles, which were used to block all the approach roads to the parliament building and the bridges across the river. Soon the area around the White House resembled the scene in Tiananmen Square in 1989, shortly before the military assault. Tens of thousands of people stood in a series of circles around the building, arms linked, ready to sacrifice their lives in the event of a military assault. Many people carried pocket transistor radios, most of which were tuned to the independent Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) station, which was providing regular updates about troop movements.

A large section of the crowd was composed of young people, many of whom had shown little previous interest in politics. It had taken a coup to jolt them out of their apathy and make them realize that they had a stake in
the political future of the country. Members of the new entrepreneurial class were also well represented at the barricades. Brokers on the Moscow commodity exchange had demonstrated their support for Yeltsin by marching to the White House carrying a three-hundred-foot-long Russian tricolor.

As the brilliant sunshine of the first two days of the coup turned to a steady drizzle, the mood of the White House defenders grew steadily more bleak. Everything seemed to indicate that the final preparations for the assault were under way. At first the attack was expected in the early evening. All women were ordered to leave the building. The twenty ground-floor entrances were secured with barricades. Shortly after 6:00 p.m. deputies who had gathered in Yeltsin’s office in the fifth floor began issuing panicky statements over Echo Moskvy, suggesting that Russian democracy was doomed.

“I appeal to you, my brother officers,” said Aleksandr Rutskoi, the Russian vice president and a former Afghan war hero. “Think of the orders that you are being given. The interests you are defending are not those of the state, but those of the junta. Nobody will forgive you.”
¹¹⁰

At the peak of the tension deputies still inside the White House noticed a sudden surge of activity outside. The focal point was an elderly man with a shock of white hair attempting to force his way through the concentric lines of defenders. There was a great deal of shouting and pushing and shoving going on. Some people were urging that the man be let into the building, while others were insisting that he be kept out.