Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

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

ALTHOUGH GORBACHEV 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.