ON A SLEEPY, hot Monday morning on 19 August 1991, the people of Moscow woke up to the news that the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, had been taken ill at his holiday villa by the Black Sea. An emergency committee led by the Vice President was now in charge and had put the country on an emergency footing, suspending political activity and banning all but Communist newspapers. Within hours, columns of tanks rolled into the centre of Moscow and took up positions around key buildings, including the Kremlin. It had all the hallmarks of a classic coup d’état. The tensions that had been building up over the last couple of years had exploded into a full-blown crisis.
It had been clear for at least 12 months beforehand that Gorbachev’s reforms were in trouble. His introduction of competitive elections and the abolition of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power had begun to shift the country towards a democratic system. But he was also facing growing internal pressures. The changes needed to create a functioning market economy had not been brought in. Gorbachev had repeatedly shied away from the essential but risky step of lifting subsidies on prices. As a result, the country was hurtling towards economic catastrophe.
Economic turmoil was further exacerbated by the actions of Soviet republics who began a ‘war of laws’ with Moscow, rejecting Union-wide laws that conflicted with their local plans, and demanding the right to control their budgets and keep the revenue from taxes. Apart from the three Baltic states, these included the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belorussia (later Belarus), Moldavia (later Moldova), the three Caucasian republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, plus Kazakhstan and the four Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan (later Tajikistan), Turkmenistan and Kirghizia (later Kyrgyzstan). There was also a growing schism between Gorbachev and the newly elected Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, who used his position to set up a rival Russian power base to challenge Gorbachev’s authority as Soviet leader. Unlike the increasingly unpopular Gorbachev, by 1991 Boris Yeltsin had established a massive popular following among many Russians. At the same time, Gorbachev was coming under increasing pressure from the Communist old guard who wanted to thwart his reform agenda and prevent any more power from slipping out of central control.
In an attempt to balance all these opposing forces and to shore up his own weakening grip on central power, Gorbachev brought more old-style hard-line Communists into his government in 1991. He also continued to negotiate with leaders of the republics, led by Boris Yeltsin, to seek a compromise to keep the Soviet Union intact. As he asked the US Ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, to explain to President George H. Bush in early 1991, it was a ‘zig and zag’ tactic to stop the whole fragile structure from imploding into civil war.
In late July 1991 Gorbachev held final talks with Yeltsin and President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan on a plan for a new Union Treaty to turn the Soviet Union into a looser federation, with a reduced role for central government. Among other things, they discussed the removal of the most hard-line members of the Soviet cabinet: the KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, and the Interior Minister, Boris Pugo. Then Gorbachev went off to his villa on the Black Sea in Crimea for a few days’ rest before the treaty signing, which was scheduled for Tuesday, 20 August.
But Kryuchkov, as KGB head, had got wind of what was being planned – the KGB had taped the conversation. With the backing of other hard-line members of government and the Soviet Vice President, Gennady Yanayev, Kryuchkov resolved that the treaty signing had to be stopped. On Sunday, 18 August, a delegation led by Yanayev was despatched to Crimea to warn Gorbachev that the new treaty would be disastrous. They demanded that he either declare a state of emergency or resign and let them restore order instead.
According to Gorbachev, he refused to cooperate, swore at them and sent them packing. They claimed that he effectively told them to do what they wanted, which they took as a green light. Either way, armed guards were set up around his compound and communications were disabled, essentially leaving him and his family cut off and under house arrest. His wife, Raisa, was so terrified that she had a stroke.
Meanwhile in Moscow on the following day, the coup attempt unfolded, but it did not go according to plan. In the first place, it turned out that not all military commanders were willing to take orders from a self-appointed emergency committee without authorisation from the Soviet President. Some made clear they would not follow orders to storm buildings or impose control by force. Some tank commanders even demonstrated their defiance by joining the other side.
In the second place, the coup leaders made the fatal mistake of failing to arrest their nemesis, Boris Yeltsin. He slipped through their clutches and made his way to the Russian parliament, or ‘White House’ as it was known, the symbolic power base of Russian sovereignty at that time. There, Yeltsin’s aides hastily drafted a decree in the name of the Russian President, declaring the coup attempt illegal and appealing to Russian citizens and members of armed forces to ignore it. Yeltsin clambered up on to a tank positioned outside the White House to read it out to the crowds of citizens and journalists who were beginning to cluster around what was fast becoming the centre of resistance to the attempted coup. The moment was captured in photographs and on film by the many foreign correspondents present. Soon, along with flyers distributed throughout the city, the word spread in Moscow and beyond that Yeltsin was leading the resistance against the coup.
Abroad, leaders in the West were aghast. They were dismayed at the thought that their ally Gorbachev, whom many of them by now knew personally and liked, was apparently under arrest. They were also worried about what this would mean for international relations. Suddenly, it looked as though all Gorbachev’s reforms were about to unravel and the clock would be turned back. The Berlin Wall might have come down and reformist governments might have taken over in Eastern Europe after a spate of mostly peaceful revolutions, but now it looked as though the era of Cold War hostility could come back.
In the United States, President Bush was especially worried. On his visit to Moscow in July, he had signed the largest and most complex arms-control treaty in history, the START agreement to limit offensive nuclear weapons. He now wondered whether the arms control agreements the United States had signed with Gorbachev would survive. And all Western leaders began to register that if there was one person in Moscow who could stop the tide of history reversing, it was probably the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin.
In the end, the coup leaders lacked the nerve and the popular support to see their plan through. More and more Muscovites flocked to the Russian parliament to man makeshift barricades and show their resistance. Within three days, the coup attempt crumbled, the coup plotters were arrested, and Gorbachev and his family were brought back to Moscow.
Gorbachev assumed he was returning to the capital to take up the reins of power again, but in those three days the country had changed. Now, Yeltsin was in charge. In a dramatic televised session of the Russian parliament over which he presided, he moved swiftly to ban the Communist Party and to make clear to a humiliated Gorbachev that he was yesterday’s man.
Over the months that followed, Gorbachev struggled to keep the Soviet Union going, but day by day his power and authority dwindled as not only Russia but all the other Soviet republics scrambled to pull free of central control. On 1 December, Ukraine – the second most powerful Soviet republic after the Russian Federation – voted resoundingly in a nationwide referendum for independence. A few days later, on 8 December, Yeltsin secretly met the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus at a hunting lodge in Belarus. There they clinched a deal, known as the ‘Belavezha Accords’ after the Belavezha Forest, where the meeting took place, to bring the Soviet Union to an end and replace it with a new Commonwealth of Independent States. Then they phoned an astonished and outraged Gorbachev to tell him what they had done.
On 21 December, 11 of the 12 other Soviets (the exception was Georgia) signed up to the new arrangement. Gorbachev called it an unconstitutional coup, yet he had little choice but to accept what had been agreed. On the morning of 25 December he appeared on nationwide television to announce his resignation as Soviet President. He declared that an end had been put to the ‘mad militarisation’ of the Cold War and that he had no regrets for embarking on democratic reforms in 1985, however risky an undertaking it had turned out to be. He handed over the launching codes of the country’s nuclear weapons and all other powers of the head of state to Boris Yeltsin, now President of the newly independent Russian Federation. For the last time, the red Soviet hammer and sickle flag was lowered and the red, blue and white Russian tricolour was raised over the Kremlin. The Soviet Union, once a global power and Communist monolith, had quietly dismantled itself and vanished with barely a murmur.
At midnight on 31 December 1991 the new Russian proprietors of the Kremlin celebrated the transfer of power at the end of a momentous year with a massive firework display on Red Square.
The next day Russians woke up in a new country.
The economist Sergei Aleksashenko graduated from Moscow State University in 1986 and took up a post as a researcher at the Central Economic and Mathematical Institute.
In the spring of 1986 Gorbachev was visiting one of the industrial enterprises in Leningrad, nowadays St Petersburg, and there was a live TV [broadcast] from there. Suddenly, he asked one of the workers, ‘What would you think if a foreign owner would purchase your enterprise?’ At that time, to imagine such a question from the General Secretary, it was unbelievable. I was even more surprised by the answer of that worker, who said, ‘I don’t care. What I care about is my wage. If I’m paid well I don’t care who is the owner of this enterprise.’ A person asking such a question has some other ideas in his mind and maybe he will be more decisive in the transformation of the country. But I did not believe until mid-1990, I would say, that the country would be transformed in such a radical manner.
For several reasons, the Soviet economy was in a desperate position in the last years. On one hand, oil prices were declining, the economic mechanism was broken, the Soviet Union spent [an] enormous amount of resources in the Cold War at the end of the seventies, beginning of the eighties. By that time, the shortage for ordinary people became evident. I remember by the mid-seventies, when you visited a shop it was possible to purchase, for example, a TV set or a radio. By the beginning of the eighties, it was not possible to find either a TV set or a radio in the shop. By the end of the eighties, shelves in the shops became empty and the government introduced a system of rationing. The whole period of the eighties, it was visible that the system was deteriorating. But despite all that, it was rather stable.
David Remnick was a 29-year-old reporter when he was offered the post of Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post in 1988.
I was pretty junior. Very few people wanted to go and live in Moscow at that time. I arrived in Moscow with my wife, who’s the daughter of someone who had been imprisoned in Stalin’s camps and whose grandfather had been lost in the purges, but neither one of us had spent much time in Russia. We lived in a foreigners’ compound, which you had to do in those days. In the days of the Cold War, all foreigners either lived on the grounds of an embassy or [in] embassy housing or these housing complexes where they could keep a good watch on you. It was early 1988, Gorbachev had been in since mid-1985, but the economic picture was miserable. There were lines for nearly every consumer good. Grocery stores were empty or close to empty. There were no restaurants. It was not a lively cultural scene, but what was happening – what was most vivid – was politics. Politics was beginning. When I arrived, the first event I covered was the rehabilitation of Nikolai Bukharin, who was one of the old Bolsheviks who’d been arrested and killed by Stalin because he was one of Stalin’s rivals. So that was a kind of politics: the opening up of the past. Gorbachev was allowing history to be discussed. He initiated glasnost, and suddenly you could open a literary journal and there were all kinds of things that had been banned for decades and decades. [Poets Anna] Akhmatova and [Osip] Mandelstam and [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn eventually, Joseph Brodsky’s poems, all kinds of historical chronicles. And you would pick up a newspaper or a magazine which would have [an] article that was quite honest and open about the war in Afghanistan or the economic situation or, if you knew how to read it, conflict within the Communist Party. So that’s what there was when I arrived: politics.
At the end of 1989 Gorbachev became more active in economic transformation and a special agency in the government was established, the Commission for Economic Reform. My boss from the research institute was invited to become head of the department within the commission, and he invited four of his youngsters to join him. He said, ‘Sergei, I cannot promise you anything, but if you want to understand how life is organised in this country you would not have any better chance to understand it.’ At that time, we were not sure that the Soviet Union would collapse; we were not sure that the economic reform would be realised two years later or three years later. That was beyond our horizons. But he advertised the job as an opportunity to understand the life with a helicopter view. I accepted his invitation.
In a domestic sense, a really important moment that doesn’t get as much attention as it should, is when – at a Central Committee plenum – Gorbachev gets up and gives a speech on history. This was on the anniversary of the revolution, a very traditional kind of speech that one gives as the Soviet leader. But instead of celebrating the revolution, Gorbachev got up and analysed it, and he went much further than Khrushchev did in the fifties, analysing the crimes of Stalin. It was the moment at which the past came into play, that it became the requirement of thinking people to study the past in ways that they were never allowed before and come to conclusions about themselves, about the system they lived under, about the politics they lived under and the politics they wanted. This had been, prior to Gorbachev giving that speech, an activity really only given to dissidents, which we must remember, for as much as we admire Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, [Andrei] Sinyavsky and [Yuli] Daniel and all the rest, it was a tiny number of people. In the end, as much as there was influence exerted by the dissidents and half-dissidents, in the end an individual mattered in history. In this case, an individual made a decision and in some sense even fooled the people who propelled him to power and set the Soviet Union on a course that was deeply unpredictable. It was a process that went much faster and more out of control than Gorbachev could ever have predicted or wanted, but one man is owed an enormous debt.
There’s a big difference between a planned economy and a market economy. The main difference is the equilibrium for the market-based economic system is based on the free movement of prices. So, if there are some imbalances, prices move, production changes and that allows the system to find equilibrium. In the Soviet system, the equilibrium was based on computational models, calculated by Gosplan [the State Planning Committee], Gossnab [the State Supplies Committee], the Committee on Prices, the Committee on Labour. They decided everything: what is going to be produced, who is going to produce it, the price, the wage, who is supplying to whom, where to build a new company. It was a huge computational model. And you cannot move from one system to another in two steps. Sooner or later, you should make a decision that from this particular date the prices should be free, that you’re not in control of prices any more. Unfortunately, Mikhail Gorbachev did not make this decision. I don’t know why. He never was able to explain it clearly. He talked about resistance in the Politburo and in the presidential administration and in the government.
Gorbachev was active in political transformation because he established the Congress of People’s Deputies with electoral competition to a certain extent. It was unbelievable for the Soviet Union to have free elections in 1989 and the People’s Congress that was assembled from people with different views that were not supporting official Communist ideology. He made a huge transformation in the organisation of the country, just removing power from the Communist Party and establishing the position of the President. He demolished censorship and allowed free media and freedom of speech. He allowed people of the country to go abroad and to come back. He made a lot of radical changes. But in economics he was constrained by something and to the very end he was never able to accept that he needed to free prices.
In the summer of 1990 there was the 500 Days Plan, which was a joint venture between Gorbachev and Yeltsin and a small group of people, about 15 of us. We drafted an economic plan, a transformation plan that started with the liberalisation of prices. On the other hand, the government, headed by Nikolai Ryzhkov, they drafted their own plan and we had three sessions of debates headed by Gorbachev in the Kremlin. As a result of these debates, Gorbachev said, ‘Okay, I have decided to support [the] 500 Days Plan.’ And the first step of this plan was to liberalise prices. We were so happy. We went to Washington for a meeting of the IMF to present our plan and, three or four days later, as we arrived in the States, we received information that Gorbachev stopped his decision and decided to establish another plan, decided to come back to controlled prices. That is the problem: in the summer of 1990 Gorbachev lost his chance to transform the economy. As he decided not to go for economic reform, I recognised at this point that this country has no future. The transformation will be much more radical and much more painful because we’re losing time. It will be very hard.
By that time, Yeltsin was the head of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. Before the 500 Days Plan he was in some confrontations with Gorbachev, but they were able to find joint interests and joint efforts in this economic plan. But after that, as Gorbachev refused to support the economic transformation, Yeltsin started to distance himself from Gorbachev and it became evident that there was no political alliance possible between Yeltsin as leader of Russia and Gorbachev as the leader of the Soviet Union. After the events in the Baltic countries, when Gorbachev used the army against people protesting and the Baltic countries proclaimed their independence, it became evident that the breakdown of the Soviet Union as a country [was] inevitable.
In mid-August of 1991 I was preparing to go home. As a kind of farewell present, a leading member of the old Gorbachev team, Aleksandr Yakovlev, really his main liberal adviser for so many years, decided to give me an interview. It was an unusual thing at that time for him to give an interview. He said many things that were incredibly revealing. He said, ‘I believe there’s going to be a coup, led by the KGB and the military and all the rest.’ Now, you have to understand that rumours of coups and apocalyptic talk [were] a staple of Soviet and Russian political conversation, so it wasn’t that unusual. But this was Aleksandr Yakovlev saying this to me. So, I dutifully went back to the Washington Post bureau and I wrote a long story, and it ran on the front page of the newspaper, and it said, ‘Aleksandr Yakovlev predicts a coup’. And then my wife and I got on an airplane on August 18th and, with our almost one-year-old child, we flew back to New York.
Sergei Yevdokimov was a tank commander with Tamanskaya Division, stationed 50 kilometres outside Moscow. He was woken in the early hours of 19 August 1991 and ordered to lead his unit into the city.
We had no idea what was going on. We were given orders without much explanation. When we entered the city, we saw some traffic police and continued to the centre. We saw people going to work. Some of them were waving at us, some had a negative reaction, showing us fists. They knew already what was happening.
The order was: enter Moscow, block the Kalininsky Bridge. We did not fully fulfil that task though. We deployed on the sides of the road which leads to the bridge but didn’t block the bridge itself. [We thought] ‘People are travelling to work – are we supposed to crash their cars?’ While we were there, the barricades came up. There was one barricade constructed in front of our vehicles. They brought a trolley bus there as well. I found myself in the thick of it. We were talking, sharing opinions, discussing what is right or wrong. There were different opinions. Some people quietly supported us, saying it was good we had arrived. The others were asking why [we] were there. We were saying we had orders. We were not sure what orders would follow.
As soon as there was enough information, I made a decision that there should not be any actions performed by me which would result in the loss of life.
At about 11 o’clock at night [in New York], we turned on CNN and there were tanks going by our apartment building [in Moscow]. It was already morning [there], and there were tanks going right down Kutuzovsky Prospekt in the centre of Moscow, which was horrible for the Soviet Union and really horrible for me! It was also a hurricane in New York and it seemed like it was going to be impossible to get back to Moscow, but somehow the next morning I flew back to Moscow. I fully expected to be met at the airport by guns and tanks and be put on a plane and sent out, but it was no problem. I hitched a ride into town and went on covering the second and third day of the coup and I stayed for weeks thereafter.
My first reaction was: in Russia, we have such a phrase as ‘the last nail in the coffin’. It became evident that it is the collapse of the Soviet Union because all formal leaders of the Soviet Union, except the President and Vice President, were all members of this coup d’état. Of course, the system could not survive. The first question I asked myself was: ‘Okay, these guys want a coup d’état, but they do not use force. They cannot win.’ I would not say that I was very scared. I was concerned, but it was evident to me that this attempt was toothless.
We saw people gathering around the White House [with] leaflets and heard loudspeakers. I started to get some information, digest it, think what I should do if I get this order, that order. Then we started talking to people. People climbed on to the tanks; we were talking to them. Then we started getting the printouts of Yeltsin’s decrees, so we started to realise what was going on.
By that time, Yeltsin was definitely a rising political leader. He was in attack mode, as [were] many other leaders of the Soviet republics, but I would say that Yeltsin was in front of them. He was fighting Gorbachev over power. Yeltsin was very decisive in establishing the authority of the Central Bank of Russia despite the existence of [Soviet central bank] Gosbank, and he dedicated monetary policy and monetary creation to his agency. He prohibited many, many enterprises located in the Russian Federation to pay taxes to the Soviet budget. He was fighting for power and for victory. And it seems to me that Yeltsin was much less concerned about the integrity of the Soviet Union than by his chances to be promoted to the number-one position. He tried to push Gorbachev to remove as much power as possible and this agreement to sign a new Union Treaty next day after the coup, it was the gift of Yeltsin to say let’s keep the Soviet Union but with no economic power, no role in the economy. It will be a military union and maybe monetary policy as the central bank, very close to what we see in the European Union at the moment. So, Yeltsin in negotiations, in his policy, was looking for power, and he was looking for his personal political leadership over the Russian territory. For him, those days were the very crucial moment. He could be scared, he could hide, and that means his career’s over. But he was a really brave man and he said, ‘Okay, I’m ready to fight.’
This guy came. We started talking, discussing the current situation, and he said, ‘What if the Commander-in-Chief says you need to defend the White House?’ ‘Well, if an order like that comes – we will think about it.’ I was not going to bare my soul; you never know who you are talking to – maybe it is a KGB agent. I told him, ‘If you bring some people of authority, we can talk about it. What’s the point in talking about it to you?’ And then he went to the White House, and then three or four MPs came to me, led by Sergei Yushenkov. And Yushenkov said, ‘I am inviting you to talk to Yeltsin.’
We went to the White House. We didn’t get to the President, though, just to [Russian Vice President] Aleksandr Rutskoy. So, they also told me what was happening, asked me questions: what my orders were, if we had any ammunition. And they asked: ‘Will you help us?’ I replied: ‘Yes, I will.’ I remember one of the last phrases: ‘Do you understand that they are criminals?’
So, the decision was made. We figured out where to put the tanks around the White House and that was that. The tanks would now defend the White House. We moved the tanks to the other side of the road and when we moved, people rushed to hug us, flags came out. Coffee, cigarettes, sandwiches. We stayed there for three days.
It was a pathetic coup. It was a coup that was more out of the Marx Brothers than out of Dostoevsky. It was a last-ditch effort in which the old order did not have the gumption or the cruelty to open fire on the people who rose up against it, led by Boris Yeltsin.
All those people in the streets of Moscow, and in St Petersburg as well, who felt an attachment to the new liberties that had been afforded them, who felt that the future was in question and in real doubt, who were willing to stand up against the return of old-style tyranny, congregated around the White House in the most moving and astonishing way. They set up makeshift barricades. They went and climbed all over the tanks and gave these young kids, these young soldiers, some of them gave them a tongue-lashing, some of them gave them flowers. The popular uprising was there. The key is that the bad guys were not willing to fire on the people. Something had clicked, something had changed, so that absolute cruelty of the likes that we had seen so vividly under Soviet rule, they were unwilling to do that. There were leaders in the military that decided, ‘I’m not going to follow that order.’ At the same time, the leaders of the coup were a wreck: some of them were drunk, some of them could barely get through a press conference without their hands trembling in front of the reporters. They did not have the conviction and the cruelty and the power of their predecessors, and it all collapsed.
Some people say now, if I hadn’t moved the tanks, the Union would have survived. I don’t think there is any basis for this: it’s quite far-fetched. Even though I voted not to keep the Soviet Union as it was, my actions were never against the Soviet Union; they were for the defence of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, because they represented truth. So, how they used the victory they got with my help or without my help, with the help of other military or KGB, with the help of civilians who gathered by the White House, it was up to them. I am not saying either of them is good or bad. They are what they are, they made certain mistakes.
There was no Soviet Union after the coup. The government of the USSR was removed and a special so-called temporary Committee for the Operational Management of the National Economy (COME) was established. There was no parliament of the USSR, because the Supreme Soviet resigned in full in the beginning of September 1991. So, the Soviet Union de facto had disappeared in August 1991. By that time, I was a member [of COME] and I was in the negotiation team who tried to reach some agreements between the Soviet republics on how to rule out economic divorce. So, I saw that from inside. For the bulk of Soviet people, at least for those in Russia, in Moscow, even in Ukraine, they still believed that the Soviet Union existed. The key point for ordinary life after the coup in the autumn and beginning of winter 1991 was an economic disaster and a shortage of everything. By that time, there was no food in the shops of Moscow, and in order to purchase some milk and some bread you needed to stay in line from six in the morning, when the shop opened at eight or nine. The bulk of people were concerned with these day-to-day problems. Inflation started to emerge because the government wasn’t able to control prices. There was no government. The only choice to purchase something was on the black market. Economic cooperation between different enterprises was destroyed and the supply chains were not functioning. The country was in a downward spiral and the economy, the government, the nation was collapsing. Even in November of 1991, [when] Boris Yeltsin announced the new Russian government, still many people were not sure that the Soviet Union was going to disappear. It became evident only in December, when leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed an agreement to dissolve the Soviet Union. After that it was December 25th when Gorbachev resigned. Life was hard. Life was unpredictable, and it was chaos, catastrophe. People were very depressed by what was going on.
The Cold War in the classic sense – meaning the confrontations between two systems, two superpowers – persists to this day. But the level of concentrated confrontation – of proxy wars, of both sides being psychologically and politically obsessed with each other – that certainly began to thaw and end in the era of Gorbachev. And I would give Gorbachev more credit than any single person for the end of the Cold War.
Gorbachev’s tragedy is that the processes that he unleashed finally overwhelmed him. He could easily have banished Boris Yeltsin to the provinces and never heard from him again. Instead, he kept Yeltsin in the political game, and Yeltsin came to be his opponent from the so-called radical or more progressive side. Those two, Yeltsin and Gorbachev, are often seen as oppositional figures. To me, they’re also yin and yang figures; in a historical sense, they are cooperative as well as oppositional. So, he’s tragic in the sense that between 1985 and 1991 things begin to spin out of control; he initiates processes that he certainly didn’t want to see happen. The notion of a socialist economy, which he still had great store in, began to fade. But he was the great initiator of something important in the end of the Cold War, and humane in introducing far greater liberty than anybody had known in that place for a very, very long time.