Down with Big Brother (70 page)

“You must order the immediate evacuation of the building,” said the man, who introduced himself as Vassily Shakhnovsky, chief of staff to the mayor of Moscow. “Otherwise our supporters will come in and throw you out.”
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Kruchina read the piece of paper. When he saw the signature “Gorbachev” scrawled across the top, it was as if his neat, well-ordered world had suddenly exploded.

“It cannot be done. You can’t just close the entire Central Committee down like this,” he said flatly, glancing at the clock on his wall, which was approaching 3:00 p.m.

“Look outside your window. There is a huge crowd out there. They will tear everyone inside here to pieces, unless you go quietly.”

Kruchina went to the window that overlooked Old Square. He parted the white silk drapes and peeked out. A human chain, made up of thousands of people with linked arms, had been formed around the building. Behind them stood more people. Some waved their fists in the air; others held up placards with slogans like “Long Live Democracy,” “Put the Putschists on Trial,” and “Chase the Apparatchiks Out of the Central Committee.” Chants of “Down with the party” filtered through the double-glazed windows. Here and there people were tearing up party membership cards.

There was a scattering of police officers in the crowd, but they seemed to be taking the side of the demonstrators. A loudspeaker had been hooked up on top of a police car and was relaying a live broadcast from the Russian parliament building. Loud cheers went up from the crowd when a legislator got up to demand the disbanding of the Communist Party as a “criminal organization.”

Kruchina began to reconsider his position. With the exception of the KGB guards, he had no security forces to call on. In two hours the building would in any case start to empty for the weekend. The note signed by Gorbachev spoke only of a “temporary” suspension of Central Committee activities, not its permanent closure. If the apparatchiks refused to leave the building, they might be attacked by a vengeful crowd. He decided to allow Shakhnovsky and his colleague Yevgeny Sevastyanov to use the emergency public address system.

A secretary was summoned to lead the men from the mayor’s office to another part of the labyrinthine complex, where the public address system was located. There they went through the same arguments they had already been through with Kruchina. “What do you mean, you want us to leave the building? Is there a bomb in here or something?” said Konstantin Mishin, the deputy business manager, in an attempt at a joke. The Gorbachev note shocked the former Komsomol leader. His political instinct told him to order the women Central Committee workers to leave and the male comrades to stand and fight. But here was an instruction from the man who was still the general secretary of a party run on the principle of democratic centralism: Decisions made at the top are binding on everyone lower down.

“Once the leadership had made a decision, we had to comply,” Mishin said later. “In the past discipline had always been one of the principal
sources of our strength as a party. But at that moment it turned into a fatal weakness.”
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Mishin showed the visitors how to operate the public address system. Sevastyanov, the mayor’s chief of security, sat down in front of the electronic console.

“A representative of the mayor of Moscow is addressing you,” he announced, speaking into the microphone. “By agreement with the president, in connection with recent events, a decision has been made to seal this building. You have one hour in which to leave. You may take your personal belongings with you, but everything else is to be left behind.”

The message was repeated twice. Sevastyanov and Shakhnovsky could hear the announcement echoing around the vast complex. As they came out of the room housing the public address system, they heard the patter of feet in the corridors. The apparatchiks were already leaving the building. “Like rats leaving a sinking ship,” thought Shakhnovsky, torn between disgust and jubilation.

I
N MANY DEPARTMENTS
frantic attempts were under way to prevent secret documents from falling into the hands of the Yeltsin camp. Valentin Falin, the secretary in charge of the International Department, gave orders for the sign on his door to be changed to read “V. I. Falin, People’s Deputy of the USSR.” He calculated that the democrats would think twice before violating parliamentary immunity. He told his aide Anatoly Smirnov to destroy lists of left-wing parties in the West that had received financial aid from the Kremlin. When the order to evacuate the building came over the intercom, officials in the department began to panic. Piles of documents were dumped in the shredding machine, along with large paper clips. Unable to digest the metallic paper clips, the machine ground to a halt.
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Around the corner at the staff canteen on Ipatyev Lane, an oppressive silence had settled over the potted plants and neatly laid tables. The guards were checking the red admittance cards for one of the best restaurants in Moscow. Waitresses in rusty-colored aprons were flitting between the tables, collecting written orders from the customers. A few apparatchiks were slurping down their last bowls of subsidized borsch. Suddenly a maître d’ came rushing in. “It’s all over. They’re sealing the building off.” The silence was broken by a lone, sullen voice: “What are you so happy about? You used to feed us; now you will feed the Americans.”
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As the bureaucrats fretted over their fate, several dozen Moscow policemen
had entered the building to reinforce Shakhnovsky and Sevastyanov. Sevastyanov ordered them to guard the entrances. Periodically he and Shakhnovsky appeared at one of the windows on the ground floor to tell the impatient crowd what was going on.

“The activity of the Central Committee has been suspended,” said Shakhnovsky, holding up the scrap of paper signed by Gorbachev to loud applause. Muscovites stared at the general secretary’s signature, as if it were some magical token.

“Friends, the next act of our life will be to take the stars off the Kremlin,” announced Sevastyanov. “But remember, there are provocateurs here, extremist forces. Do not give any pretext to those who would like to sow disorder here.”
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The crowd, meanwhile, was enjoying the public humiliation of Gorbachev, relayed live by radio and television from the White House, on the other side of Moscow. This was Yeltsin’s revenge for his own disgrace almost four years previously at the hands of Gorbachev and the party elite. Now it was Gorbachev who was down and Yeltsin who was extracting his pound of flesh.

The occasion itself was humiliating enough. Betrayed by his aides, the Soviet president had been saved from political and perhaps physical annihilation by Yeltsin and the Russian parliament. Now he was trying to explain to them why he had placed so much trust in leaders who were prepared to lock him up in his own dacha. The deputies jeered and booed. Gorbachev waved his right forefinger in the air, trying in vain to get them to end his torment. Then Yeltsin approached the lectern. Towering over the president, he ordered him to read the minutes of a cabinet meeting that revealed the depths of his aides’ betrayal.

“Go on, read it now,” Yeltsin insisted, jabbing his powerful right forefinger at Gorbachev.

Amazed at the effrontery of his former protégé, Gorbachev looked at Yeltsin for a second with hatred in his eyes. Then, realizing that he was trapped, he smiled weakly. Yeltsin turned away, unable to conceal the look of triumph on his face, shaking his head in disbelief at the turn history had taken.

A few minutes later Yeltsin invited the chamber to join him in “a little bit of relaxation,” a decree suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party. A protesting Gorbachev urged the deputies to remain “democrats to the end.” He was drowned out by loud applause and stamping of feet. “The decree has been signed,” the Russian president announced with a
sneer. The demonstrators ringing the Central Committee building on Old Square roared their approval.

F
OR SEVEN DECADES
after the 1917 Revolution the Communist Party had deliberately cultivated a sense of mystery as a key to maintaining its own power. Separated from the people they ruled by a wall of ritual, party leaders acquired an aura of omniscience and aloofness. Scarcely anything was known about their private lives or personal political views. No ordinary mortal was allowed to know how these bureaucratic supermen acquired their fine clothes, what kinds of books and films they enjoyed, or how they made a seemingly miraculous appearance on top of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square on public holidays. Everything was hidden behind the veiled curtains of the Central Committee building and the limousines that swept through the silent city. As the mysteries were gradually explained, the party’s grip over society was automatically undermined. Now the final curtain was ripped away, to reveal a group of frightened and rather unremarkable people, more intent on saving themselves than the regime they served.

As the apparatchiks left the Central Committee building, they passed through two lines of democrats chanting, “Shame, shame.” A piercing whistling filled the air as grim-faced bureaucrats in gray suits and white shirts emerged in single file. Occasionally a Yeltsin activist would order an apparatchik to open his briefcase, to make sure that he was not smuggling any papers out of the building.

Yuri Prokofiev, the Moscow Communist Party chief, was grabbed by an angry mob when he emerged from a door next to the Central Committee cafeteria. For a few seconds it seemed as if he might be lynched. He was rescued from the crowd by several policemen and shoved into a passing taxi to a deafening chorus of jeers.

In the early seventies a network of secret tunnels had been constructed underneath Moscow for use in just such an emergency. An underground shuttle train connected the Central Committee building on Old Square, KGB headquarters, and the Kremlin; another metro line led to KGB safe houses and nuclear command posts deep in the Moscow countryside. The victorious Russian leaders were determined not to allow Communist Party officials to make use of these facilities. As soon as they had received reinforcements, Shakhnovsky and Sevastyanov posted guards at the entrances to the tunnels to prevent anyone from escaping.

An exception was made for several members of Gorbachev’s personal
staff who were working in their offices inside the building at the time it was taken over. The president’s foreign policy adviser, Chernyayev, refused to follow the disgraced apparatchiks out into the street. It was a question of personal dignity. Chernyayev had remained at Gorbachev’s side during his imprisonment in Foros. He believed that he should be spared the whistles of a vengeful crowd. Yeltsin’s men eventually relented. Chernyayev was escorted to the Kremlin via the underground tunnel.
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By 9:00 p.m. there was practically no one left in the massive building on Old Square. The KGB guards had been sent away. After being carried along by the tide of tumultuous events, Vassily Shakhnovsky found himself virtually alone in the silent building, which was protected by a few dozen Moscow militiamen.

The past four and a half days had been like a blur for Shakhnovsky, who had left the Communist Party at the same time as Yeltsin. He had scarcely had time to sleep, let alone think, as he rushed from one crisis to another. Now, unexpectedly, he found himself wandering around a darkened and deserted inner citadel of the worldwide Communist movement. Accompanied by the building’s newly appointed commandant, Aleksandr Sokolov, he decided to tour his new domain. He checked the entrances. He looked into the storerooms, glancing over a large batch of recently imported video equipment. He poked his head into the cavernous office of the party’s general secretary on the fifth floor and the Politburo conference room just down the corridor.

Then, suddenly, it hit him. Turning to Sokolov, he announced in awestruck tones: “Aleksandr Ilyich, we have just closed down the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

MOSCOW
August 24, 1991

W
HILE THE VICTORS WERE CELEBRATING
their triumph, the vanquished were agonizing over their defeat. On the day the Communist Party was banned, Gorbachev’s military adviser, Marshal Akhromeyev, sat in his Kremlin office, pondering the collapse of the coup. Eventually he took out a pen and began to write.

First, he wrote a note to the speaker of the Soviet parliament, submitting his resignation as a people’s deputy. Then he prepared an eight-hundred-word farewell address to his fellow deputies. He acknowledged supporting the putsch against his commander in chief, an action he described as a “conscious breach of my military oath.” He had known nothing about the plot in advance. But he had been convinced for at least a year that the Soviet motherland was hurtling toward “destruction.” He had therefore felt morally obliged to assist anyone who acted to prevent such a tragedy, even though he doubted the coup attempt would succeed. It had been impossible to stand on the sidelines at a time when the multinational state was disintegrating and the armed forces were on the verge of breakup.

“These three ideas—the state, the [Soviet] people, the armed forces—have given meaning to my life and the lives of millions of other people. It follows that my life is now losing its meaning,” he wrote.
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The sixty-eight-year-old marshal had heard about the coup attempt
while on holiday at Sochi, on the Black Sea coast. He had immediately made arrangements to return to Moscow to offer his services to the GKChP. He had helped draw up plans for the storming of the White House and the arrest of the defiant Russian leadership, spending the night on the couch in his Kremlin office. When it became clear that the putsch was falling apart, he wrote in his diary: “Let history take note: They protested against the ruin of a great state. And let history judge who was right and who was guilty.”