Down with Big Brother (69 page)

O
N THE OTHER SIDE
of the barricades, some units had already begun to implement the initial stages of Operation Thunder. Shortly after midnight the KGB
spetsnaz
left their barracks in Teplyi Stan in full battle formation. They headed down Lenin Avenue and along the Mozhaisk Highway, on a route that led directly to the White House.

The security chiefs who had attended the noon meeting at the Defense Ministry were busy consulting with one another over the
vertushka
. Resorting to standard Soviet army tactics of prevarication and confusion, Grachev had held off sending his paratroopers to the White House, where they were meant to clear the way for the Alpha Group. When the fighting erupted outside the U.S. Embassy, Grachev called Gromov, to find out what the Interior Ministry troops were doing.

“They are standing still. And they are not going anywhere,” replied the last commander of Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
¹²²

Grachev then received a call from Karpukhin. The Alpha commander said he was waiting, with his men, underneath a bridge on the other side of the river from the White House. (This information later turned out to be false. The Alpha Group remained in its barracks that night.) After feeling Grachev out, Karpukhin announced that his men would not be participating in the operation.

“Thank you,” replied Grachev. “My men are no longer in Moscow. I am not taking another step.”

A
T
KGB
HEADQUARTERS
Kryuchkov had been waiting all night for reports on the attack on the White House. Around two o’clock he received shattering news from Defense Minister Yazov. The army had decided not to participate in the operation. After hearing his subordinates describe the scene around the White House, Yazov had ordered a halt to all troop movements.

The KGB chairman asked the security chiefs to see him in his office on the fifth floor of the Lubyanka. Yazov refused to attend and sent his deputy Achalov. When Achalov entered the room, he was greeted by shouts of rage from the GKChP members, gathered around the table.

“So you chickened out?” asked Baklanov, who had led the delegation to Foros.

Quarrels broke out over who was responsible for the fiasco. KGB officials accused the military of cowardice and incompetence; Baklanov attacked Kryuchkov for failing to cut communication lines to the White House; the generals blamed the civilians. Eventually Kryuchkov bowed to military reality and told his fellow conspirators, in his soft voice, “Well, it looks as though we’ll have to call the operation off.”
¹²³

The coup had effectively collapsed.

FOROS
August 21, 1991

T
HERE WAS NOW ONLY ONE HOPE LEFT
for the conspirators: to plead forgiveness from Gorbachev. The fact that they considered it at all was a measure of their desperation. They had locked the president up for four days, cut off his communications, and taken away his nuclear codes. But they also knew about his rivalry with Yeltsin and his penchant for endless political maneuvering. They had taken advantage of these characteristics in the past. If they could persuade Gorbachev that they had been motivated by patriotic concerns, such as a desire to save the union, there was a chance he might agree to a compromise.

In the presidential compound at Foros, Gorbachev and his family listened all day to the radio. They heard about the shooting incidents near the White House, the continued defiance of the Russian parliament, and the withdrawal of troops from the capital. It was clear that the coup was crumbling. Senior state and Communist Party officials, who had kept silent during the early stages of the coup, were going on Moscow radio to denounce the GKChP and express allegiance to the country’s lawful president.

Although most of the news was encouraging, there was also cause for concern. Raisa Gorbachev was particularly alarmed when she heard, over the BBC, that Kryuchkov had agreed to allow a delegation of parliamentarians
to fly to Foros to confirm that the president was incapable of carrying out his duties. After three nights without sleep she concluded that the conspirators were planning to turn her husband into a real invalid, in order to justify their earlier lies.
¹²⁴
In her panic she began looking for places for him to hide. She was so frightened that she suffered a mild stroke. For a few hours she was unable to talk or move her arm.

Shortly before five in the afternoon a long line of Zils and Volgas swept through the gates of Camp Dawn. The putschists—Kryuchkov, Yazov, Baklanov, Lukyanov—had flown to the Crimea in the presidential airplane. They had nearly two hours’ head start on another plane carrying Russian leaders, led by Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi and Prime Minister Silayev. They were determined to get to Gorbachev first, so that they could present him with their version of events.

As the limousines drew up to the presidential mansion, bodyguards who had remained loyal to Gorbachev leaped out of the bushes and aimed their automatic rifles at the visitors.

“Halt!”
¹²⁵

The bodyguards directed the putschists to the guesthouse, where Chernyayev had his quarters. A presidential adviser, Chernyayev ranked well below most of the visitors, who occupied high state offices. When they saw him, however, they immediately began scraping and bowing. Defeat and humiliation were etched across their faces. He looked at them stone-faced and walked away in disgust. Later Gorbachev’s personal secretary, Olga Lanina, caught a glimpse of Yazov smoking and crying. She could hear the defense minister muttering to himself, “I’m a damned old fool.”
¹²⁶

Gorbachev had a bodyguard tell the putschists he would not meet with any of them until his communications were restored. They replied that this would take some time.

“Tell them I am not in a hurry to go anywhere,” said Gorbachev.
¹²⁷

The communications were restored at 6:38 p.m., as suddenly as they had been interrupted seventy-four hours earlier. From his second-floor study Gorbachev phoned the most important republican leaders, starting with Yeltsin. In subsequent calls he began to reassert his control over the country and his prerogatives as commander in chief. He deprived the putschists of their access to the
vertushka
, placed the Kremlin guard under his personal command, ordered the minister of aviation to allow Rutskoi’s plane to land at the nearby military airfield. He then called President Bush, who was on holiday in Kennebunkport, Maine, to let him know that the coup had failed and thank him for his public expressions of support.

The Russian delegation arrived at the compound around 8:00 p.m., soon
after Gorbachev got off the phone with Bush. They were immediately shown into the presidential mansion. It was a jubilant Slavic reunion. Rutskoi and Silyayev rushed to embrace the president. There were hugs and kisses and tears all around. Everybody wanted to talk at once and relive the drama of the past three days. In the emotion of the moment both Gorbachev and the Russians forgot that they had been mortal political enemies just a few weeks before.

The Russians were flatly opposed to any meeting between Gorbachev and the “traitors,” who were still in the guesthouse. The president said he would talk only to Lukyanov, his old college friend, and Vladimir Ivashko, the deputy secretary-general of the Communist Party. Both men claimed that they had had nothing to do with the GKChP and had resisted the coup, as best they could. Gorbachev listened to their explanations impatiently. “Don’t hang noodles on my ears,” he told the parliamentary speaker, a Russian idiom for “You don’t fool me.”

“Listen, Anatoly, we’ve known each other for forty years. You should have thrown yourself in front of the guns. You delayed convening the Supreme Soviet for almost a week. What do you mean, you did this, you did that? If you were on the side of legality and the president, you should have summoned the Supreme Soviet the very next day. That’s what Yeltsin did.”
¹²⁸

Overriding the objections of Raisa, who was still under the shock of the imprisonment, Rutskoi insisted that everybody return to Moscow that night. The victory over the GKChP was still tenuous and needed to be consolidated. A former Afghan war hero, he supervised all the security arrangements himself. The Gorbachev family would fly in the Russian plane, together with the Russian delegation. Kryuchkov was separated from his security guards and given a seat in the back of the plane. Yazov and the other conspirators were put in the presidential jumbo.

As the plane headed back to Moscow, everybody finally began to relax. There were toasts to the president’s good health and the victory over dictatorship. “We are flying into a new era,” Gorbachev announced.
¹²⁹

In the aft section of the plane Kryuchkov sat deep in thought, clutching his briefcase and staring out the porthole into the night. A Rutskoi aide and former KGB employee, General Aleksandr Sterligov, sat beside him. The KGB chief made little effort to converse although at one point he sighed that he would probably have “to resign” as a result of the events of the past few days. After landing in Moscow, he made a move to leave the plane with the presidential party.

“Wait a little bit,” said Sterligov.

A few minutes later Kryuchkov again rose from his seat.

“Wait a little bit more.”

There was an uncomfortable pause. “I think I understand what is happening,” Kryuchkov said slowly.

“You have understood correctly.”

The chairman of the KGB was charged with high treason and taken to Lefortovo Prison.
¹³⁰

MOSCOW
August 23, 1991

A
LTHOUGH
G
ORBACHEV INSISTED
that he was “a different person returning to a different country,” he initially failed to understand the extent of the changes that had occurred in the Soviet Union during his three-day captivity in Foros. Instead of going straight to the White House from the airport to salute the defenders of democracy, he went home to bed. At a press conference the following day he continued to insist that the Communist Party was a “progressive force” despite the treachery of its leaders. He said he personally would remain faithful to the “socialist choice.”
¹³¹

The extent to which Gorbachev had misjudged the mood of the country became clear that night when tens of thousands of anti-Communist demonstrators marched on KGB headquarters in Lubyanka Square. Chanting, “Freedom, freedom,” and, “Down with the KGB,” they attempted to tear down the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret police. In order to forestall a riot, the Moscow city authorities sent cranes to pluck “Iron Feliks” from his pedestal in the center of the square. Behind the crenellated curtains of the Lubyanka, sharpshooters stood guard, ready to resist the storming of the building, as senior KGB officials shredded documents.

By the following morning popular rage had shifted to police headquarters on Petrovka Street and the Central Committee building on Old Square.
The victorious Yeltsin camp was afraid that the street revolution was getting out of hand. Something had to be done to channel the emotions of the mob in an orderly direction and bring the revolution to an end.

At the urging of Moscow city officials, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Gennady Burbulis, dashed off a memorandum calling on Gorbachev to halt the “intensive destruction of documents” under way in the Central Committee. “An order from the general secretary is needed to temporarily suspend the activity of the C.C. building,” Burbulis wrote. He then took the note to Gorbachev for approval.

“I agree,” scrawled the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party across the top right-hand corner. “M. Gorbachev. 23 VIII 91.”
¹³²

There was no time to type the note out properly. At police headquarters on Petrovka Street, people were already climbing the iron fence around the building. It was important to divert this crowd to Old Square, two miles across town.

“The mayor needs your help,” Moscow city officials shouted into a megaphone. “Everyone to the Central Committee.” A radical air force major took the microphone and urged the demonstrators to continue with the business in hand. But the opportunity to settle accounts with the hated Communist Party had the desired effect. A large section of the crowd began drifting away.
¹³³

Over on Old Square, meanwhile, the representatives of the Moscow City Council were wondering how to deliver Gorbachev’s instruction to “suspend” the work of the Central Committee. First, they tried the ceremonial front entrance flanked by two marble columns that was traditionally reserved for members of the inner Politburo. The stone-faced KGB guards refused them admittance. Then they walked around to the back. After some heated discussion they were eventually shown up to the second-floor office of Nikolai Kruchina, the chief administrator of the Central Committee.

Kruchina rose from his desk as his uninvited visitors came through the soundproofed double doors that separated his spacious office from the anteroom for secretaries. A bearded man with a thin, youthful face shoved a crumpled piece of paper into his hand.