Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

“I won’t sign this decree,” he said finally. “I do not consider myself morally or professionally ready to assume these responsibilities.” 87

Everybody around the table attempted to calm Yanayev down. They told him that the GKChP would take care of everything. His duties would be limited to signing a few decrees. When Gorbachev’s state of health improved, he would naturally resume his old duties.

“Sign, Gennady Ivanovich,” said Kryuchkov softly.

Yanayev took out his pen and signed the document in a shaky hand.

SHORTLY AFTER SIX THE NEXT MORNING, Yeltsin’s youngest daughter, Tanya, flew into his bedroom, yelling, “Papa, get up! There’s been a coup!”

“That’s illegal,” said Yeltsin, still half asleep. Just six weeks previously he had been sworn in as the first popularly elected president of Russia in a millennium, and his own children were already making jokes about a coup.

Tanya told her father what she had just heard on television. Gorbachev had been replaced for “reasons of health.” A committee with a strange-sounding acronym had been appointed to run the country, in order to impose a state of emergency. Its members included Kryuchkov, Yazov, Yanayev. By now Yeltsin was wide-awake. His first reaction to the coup was the same as that of millions of other Soviet citizens when they heard the news that Monday morning either by switching on the television or from telephone calls from their friends.

“Are you kidding me?” 88

Still in his nightclothes, Yeltsin dragged himself to the television set. A stern middle-aged matron was reading from a pile of decrees.

“The holding of meetings, street processions, demonstrations, and also strikes is forbidden. In the case of necessity, a curfew and military patrols will be introduced. Important government and economic installations will be placed under guard. Decisive measures will be taken to stop the spreading of subversive rumors, actions that threaten the disruption of law and order and the creation of interethnic tension, and disobedience to the authorities responsible for implementing the state of emergency. Control will be established over the mass media….”

Like most senior officials, Yeltsin had spent the weekend at his dacha in the bucolic Moscow countryside. After long negotiations with the central authorities, the Russian government had finally been allocated a complex of a dozen state dachas in the village of Arkhangelskoye, on the Moskva River, a twenty-five-minute drive from the center of the city. All of Yeltsin’s key aides, including Russian Parliament Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov and Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silayev, had weekend homes in the same compound. They began assembling at Yeltsin’s dacha as soon as they heard the news.

The immediate priority was to establish how much support the coup leaders enjoyed across the country. None of the republican leaders seemed very eager to take the Russian president’s call. He had just returned from an official visit to Kazakhstan and thought he had a good relationship with the Kazakh leader, Nazarbayev. The day before, they had toasted their success in persuading Gorbachev to accept a new Union Treaty. This morning, however, Nazarbayev was extremely cautious in committing himself, one way or the other.

“It is obvious that this is a coup. Gorbachev has been stripped of power by force. How do you intend to react?” Yeltsin said down the phone line to Alma-Ata. 89

Nazarbayev replied that he did not yet have enough information to make any kind of public statement. A similar wait-and-see position was adopted by the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus when Yeltsin finally managed to get through to them.

At least the vertushka was still functioning. Yeltsin used it to call Yanayev but was told that the “acting president” was “resting” after working all night. He then placed a call to Gorbachev in Foros. A few minutes later the government telephone operator called back to say the call could not be put through.

The most significant call that Yeltsin made from Arkhangelskoye that morning was to the paratroop commander, General Pavel Grachev. The two men had first met just a few weeks before, during the Russian presidential election campaign. Displaying the sixth sense that was his political hallmark, Yeltsin understood that he might one day need the support of the military. After a campaign stop in the provincial town of Tula, he had made a point of attending a paratroop training exercise nearby. Grachev had been his host. After watching paratroopers float down from the sky, the two men repaired to a hut by a lake, where they downed numerous bottles of vodka. Yeltsin went for a nude swim in the lake. As the banquet ended, officers and politicians repeatedly assured each other of their “eternal love and friendship.” 90

In his alcoholic haze, the future president of Russia had posed a crucial question to the Afghan war hero. “If our lawfully elected government in Russia were ever threatened—a terrorist act, a coup, efforts to arrest the leaders—could the military be replied upon? Could you be relied upon?”

“Yes, we could,” Grachev had replied. 91

Unbeknownst to Yeltsin, Grachev had played a key role in drafting the plans for a state of emergency. On Kryuchkov’s invitation, he had joined a working group of senior KGB and Defense Ministry officials that began preparing for a crackdown as soon as Gorbachev left for Foros. The documents drawn up by Grachev and his colleagues formed the basis of the decrees issued by the GKChP that had been read over television that morning. When Yeltsin reached him on the phone, the general was supervising the deployment of tens of thousands of troops into the capital, including the Tula Division. Defense Minister Yazov had put him in charge of the military side of the coup.

The Russian president asked Grachev if he remembered the conversation they had had in Tula a few weeks previously. After a long pause Grachev replied nervously that he was duty-bound to obey the orders of his superiors. But then he added, “Wait a minute, Boris Nikolayevich, I’ll send you a security detachment.” 92

Yeltsin thanked Grachev, and they said good-bye. There was something about the general’s tone of voice that was encouraging. For a military officer, who knew that someone might be listening in to the telephone conversation, he had seemed sympathetic.

“Grachev’s on our side,” Yeltsin told his wife, Naina, as he put down the phone.

While Yeltsin was on the phone, the other Russian leaders had begun drafting an appeal to the citizens of Russia. They understood there was little point negotiating with the members of the GKChP. Their best hope was to take a firm stand on the issue of constitutional legality. There could be no compromise with the people who had overthrown the democratically elected president of the Soviet Union.

Since there was no typewriter available, Khasbulatov began writing out the appeal by hand. “We are confronted with a right-wing, reactionary, anticonstitutional coup,” the speaker wrote as the others leaned over his shoulder, making suggestions. “We urge the citizens of Russia to give a worthy answer to the putschists and demand that they return the country to normal constitutional development.” When they signed their appeal, Yeltsin, Silayev, and Khasbulatov had no way of knowing if it would ever reach the outside world.

In fact distributing the appeal turned out to be an amazingly simple operation. Unlike Jaruzelski, in December 1981, Kryuchkov and his colleagues had failed to lay the proper groundwork for their coup. There was no mass roundup of the political opposition. Soviet borders with the outside world remained open. Independent radio stations were still on the air. The telephones were working. The party apparatchiks who had set up the GKChP seemed to assume that once they got rid of Gorbachev, the rest of Soviet society would fall meekly into line. They were operating according to the rules of the last Kremlin coup—against Nikita Khrushchev, in October 1964—when Moscow’s control over information had been total.