Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

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.

“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.” 134

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.” 135

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.

IN 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. 136

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.” 137

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.” 138

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.