Down with Big Brother (68 page)

“I must see Yeltsin,” the old man kept yelling above the hubbub, a look of total determination on his face.

The intruder’s identity eventually became clear. It was the world-renowned musician Mstislav Rostropovich, who had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship by the Brezhnev regime in 1978 because of his friendship with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Rostropovich had played his cello by the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and was determined to defend the cause of freedom in his native Russia. He had heard about the coup in Paris and had taken the first available Air France flight to Moscow. He had bluffed his way past the border guards, telling them he had come to participate in a conference of Russian compatriots that was being held in the Soviet capital. They had granted him a visa on the spot. From the airport he had taken a taxi directly to the White House. Russian deputies later joked that he was the only person to succeed in storming the building during the coup.
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The sight of Rostropovich pushing his way past the barricades at such a critical moment did not please all the defenders of the White House.
Nemtsov, the deputy from Nizhni Novgorod, feared that a nervous defender might be tempted to open fire. Yeltsin, however, immediately understood the symbolic value of having such a celebrated figure by his side. He permitted the sixty-four-year-old cellist to stand guard for a time outside his fifth-floor office with a borrowed AK-47 assault rifle.
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The irrepressible Rostropovich was soon swapping Lenin jokes with his fellow defenders and insisting that everyone address him as Slava.

T
HE KEY ROLE IN STORMING
the White House had been assigned to the Alpha Group, the crack KGB antiterrorist squad that had already performed so many sensitive operations for the Kremlin. Several dozen Alpha members had been deployed in the woods outside Yeltsin’s dacha in Arkhangelskoye early on Monday morning. It would have been easy for them to have ambushed the Russian president as he drove into Moscow, but the order to move never came. Confident that he was master of the situation, Kryuchkov preferred to wait until his opponent made a false move. It was a fatal mistake. By Tuesday afternoon the price of arresting Yeltsin had risen many times.

The Alpha commander, Viktor Karpukhin, assembled his principal subordinates at 5:30 p.m., following his return from the Defense Ministry. He outlined the plan for Operation Thunder.

“Who gave this order?” asked Mikhail Golovatov, the deputy Alpha commander.

“The order is from the government.”

“Is it a written order?”

“The order is from the government,” Karpukhin repeated testily.
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Golovatov and the subcommanders understood the mood of the rank and file much better than did Karpukhin, a much-decorated Hero of the Soviet Union, who was always rushing off for talks with “the bosses.” They knew that ordinary Alpha members were fed up with being used as pawns in the never-ending Kremlin chess game. The seizure of the television facilities in Vilnius eight months earlier had been the last straw. The politicians who had ordered the Alpha Group into action against a crowd of unarmed civilians had refused to assume any responsibility for the resulting bloodshed. They had even tried to disown the young Alpha lieutenant who was killed during the operation.

When one of the subcommanders described the plan to storm the White House as “senseless,” Karpukhin lost his temper. He called the youthful defenders
of the building “suckers” who would crumble before a determined attack. He ordered his subordinates to prepare for the assault by conducting a reconnaissance of the area around the parliament building.

The reconnaissance mission only confirmed their worst fears. There were some fifty thousand people gathered around the White House, including several thousand armed defenders. Operation Thunder was feasible enough on the technical level—the Alpha subcommanders estimated that they could storm the building in fifteen to thirty minutes—but the losses, on both sides, would be enormous. It was likely that half the members of the SWAT team would be wiped out during the assault.

Golovatov, who had led the attack on the Lithuanian television facilities, conducted an informal opinion poll among his men. One by one they expressed their objections to the operation.

“We will not go to the White House to kill people,” one of the men insisted.

“And we will not lead you there,” replied Golovatov.
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I
NSIDE THE
W
HITE
H
OUSE
the nerveracking tension was more than some of the defenders could bear. Around 8:00 p.m. Yeltsin received a call over the office intercom from the Russian prime minister, Ivan Silayev, who had conducted some of the negotiations with the GKChP. He said he had allowed his staff to leave the building and intended to go home himself. He sounded depressed and defeated.

“I want to say good-bye, Boris Nikolayevich. Tonight, everything will be over with us. This is reliable information. Let them come and get us at home. Good-bye.”
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Soon after the prime minister’s desertion Yeltsin broadcast an appeal over Echo Moskvy for as many people as possible to come to the White House: “Citizens of Russia! At this fateful hour, support those to whom you entrusted the fate of the country during the elections. The people of Russia must pool their efforts to defeat the forces of reaction. You must oppose the tanks and armored personnel carriers with the united determination not to permit dictatorship. Unity and solidarity—these are the keys to our victory … The days of the conspirators are numbered. Law and constitutional order will triumph. Despite everything, Russia will be free!”
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Even though the 11:00 p.m. curfew announced by the GKChP was fast approaching, thousands of Muscovites responded to the Russian president’s appeal. Earlier in the evening Dmitri Komar, who had served in Afghanistan, had told his friends that he had seen “enough fighting” for a
lifetime. After listening to Yeltsin, however, he decided to head for the barricades. The twenty-three-year-old former paratrooper asked a friend to tell his parents that he would not be home that night.

“It is my duty to be there. Tell Mama that I am spending the night with my classmates. She mustn’t worry.”
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Ilya Krichevsky, a twenty-eight-year-old architect and amateur poet, had also spent the evening listening to the reports on Ekho Moskvy. Shortly after 10:00 p.m. the phone rang. It was an old army friend, suggesting they check out the protests around the White House. They agreed to meet by the nearby Barrikadnaya metro station, so named because it had been the scene of a popular insurrection against the tsarist regime in 1905. Ilya pulled on his brown parka and the black and red cowboy boots that were the envy of all his friends. His father stopped him as he was heading for the door and asked him where he was going.

“For a stroll.”

“What do you want to do that for? You just heard there is a curfew.”

“I won’t go far.”
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T
HE PHONES WERE ALSO RINGING
all evening in the offices of the so-called power ministers, the men who ran the Soviet security apparatus. The commanders of Operation Thunder were all waiting for each other to make the first move. No one wanted to be responsible for a bloodbath around the White House, but neither were they willing openly to defy the GKChP. Each, in his own way, was playing a double game.

In the late evening Grachev received a phone call from the head of the air force, Yevgeny Shaposhnikov. The air force commander had a reputation for “democratic” sympathies, and Grachev trusted him. He complained that the “riffraff” in the Kremlin wanted to use him as a scapegoat. As Shaposhnikov later remembered the conversation, the paratroop commander said he would resign or shoot himself rather than order an attack on the White House. They discussed several options, including sending paratroopers to arrest the GKChP or even bombing the Kremlin.

“No, that will lead to complete confusion, and endanger lives,” said Grachev. “Let’s just sit by our phones, and try to avert any stupidities.”
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After their telephone conversation both Grachev and Shaposhnikov sent word to Yeltsin, via intermediaries, that they would not permit their men to be used in an assault on the White House.

T
HE FIRST SHOTS WERE FIRED
shortly after midnight, half a mile from the White House, on the Garden Ring Road. A column of a dozen armored cars from the Taman Division had driven past the American Embassy and was headed toward the Foreign Ministry, skirting the area around the Russian parliament. As they approached the underpass beneath Kalinin Avenue, the soldiers in the lead APC could see a barricade in front of them. It was made of Moscow city buses, scrap metal, and concrete blocks.

As the armored column entered the tunnel, stones, bottles, and paving stones rained down from above. Hundreds of White House defenders were gathered on the ramp, leading from the Garden Ring to Kalinin Avenue. They had little doubt that the long-awaited assault on the parliament building was getting under way. Chants of “Russia, Russia” filled the air, interspersed with cries of “Fascists,” “Bastards,” and “Get out of here.”

Inside the cabin of the lead APCs the crews were beginning to panic. The way ahead was blocked, and it was impossible to turn around. They decided to batter their way through the barricade. After rocking backward and forward and repeatedly slamming the buses, two of the APCs managed to break free, crushing the leg of a White House defender. The enraged demonstrators jumped onto the APCs that remained boxed up in the tunnel and threw tarpaulins over the visors so that the drivers could no longer see where they were going. Soldiers who stuck their heads above their hatch were forced to surrender. Others fired their weapons into the air, in an attempt to scare away their tormentors.

Four hours after responding to Yeltsin’s radio appeal, Dmitri Komar found himself in the center of the action. As a teenager he had dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot. His experiences in Afghanistan—which he refused to talk about, even to his family—had turned him off a military career. But now, as the sound of gunfire echoed through the streets of Moscow, he was once again in his element.

Emboldened by the methylated spirits that he had been gulping back in the course of the evening, Komar climbed on top of APC No. 536. The rear hatch had come loose as a result of repeated collisions with the barricade, and Komar began to climb down into the cabin. The gunner thought he was attempting to take control of the APC and ordered him to get out. Komar refused. The gunner fired his automatic rifle. The shots missed Komar but caused him to lose his balance. He toppled off the vehicle and smashed his head open on the road beneath.
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“Fascists, murderers,” screamed the crowd as it became clear that one of the White House defenders had been mortally wounded. After dragging Komar’s body to the side of the road, the demonstrators surrounded the
APC and began trying to climb on it. From the rampway above, people began hurling firebombs onto the vehicle. Soon smoke filled the tiny cabin, making it difficult for the crew to breathe.

Afraid he was about to be lynched, the gunner of APC No. 536 fired a volley of shots into the air from his AK-47 assault rifle. The shots ricocheted off the half-opened hatch and hit half a dozen demonstrators. One of the demonstrators, Vladimir Usov, was hit in the head with a bullet and subsequently crushed by thirty tons of heavy armor.

Ilya Krichevsky, the amateur poet with the black and red cowboy boots, also found himself in the thick of the fighting that night. The former tank gunner had hoped to talk the troops out of joining the expected assault on the White House. After witnessing the deaths of Komar and Usov, he began throwing stones at APC No. 536. As he ran toward the vehicle, his fist thrust into the air in front of him, he was hit in the forehead by a bullet. He died instantly.

W
HEN THE SHOOTING BEGAN
, Yeltsin’s bodyguards began to implement a secret plan to allow the Russian president to escape from the White House. They hustled him down into the basement garage and bundled him into his bulletproof Zil. The garage exited onto a side street, less than five hundred yards from the new American Embassy compound. Russian officials had already secured the agreement of American diplomats to grant the president refuge if his life was in danger.

Yeltsin sat in the limousine for several minutes, as the sound of street fighting raged aboveground. He later said that he categorically refused to leave the White House, once he understood what was happening.
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He and his aides spent much of the rest of the night in an underground bomb shelter, behind a hermetically sealed steel door. Whether this would have saved his life in the event of an attack on the building is unclear. Russian prosecutors later learned that the KGB possessed blueprints of the labyrinth of tunnels and bunkers beneath the White House and were guarding all the exits.