The killings in the Baltic republics cast a pall over the New Year of 1991. No one believed the threat of a hardline coup had disappeared when the troops were withdrawn; the plotters in the Kremlin were merely biding their time. A series of unusual events in the first months of the year raised tensions even higher.
In January, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov announced that all 50 and 100 rouble denomination banknotes were being withdrawn from circulation: citizens could redeem a limited amount of them at the state bank, but anything over the limit would be forfeited. The declared aim was to punish black-marketeers who kept their illegal profits in high-denomination notes, but the criminals found ways to circumvent the measure, while ordinary people saw their life savings wiped out. The public were infuriated by the government’s ineptitude, and the hardliners in the Communist Party blamed Mikhail Gorbachev.
Worse was to follow. Shops in Moscow were hit by repeated shortages of basic foodstuffs; on two occasions bread disappeared completely from the city, leading to long queues while bakeries waited for deliveries that never came. When some limited supplies did appear there was panic buying, then arguments and fist fights. The threat of public unrest seemed a genuine possibility, and the parallels with St Petersburg in 1917, when bread shortages sparked the February Revolution (see here), were not lost on the politicians. Moscow had elected a reformist city council, led by Mayor Gavriil Popov, and there were suggestions that the shortages were being engineered to undermine his authority: the old-style Communists who ran the rural districts that produced the city’s food were accused of deliberately withholding supplies. First milk, then eggs, then meat would suddenly disappear. At times, the big food stores in the city centre were left with nothing more than tinned sardines on their shelves.
Periodic rumours of military build-ups on the outskirts of Moscow threw the city authorities into a panic. Yeltsin reported to the Russian Parliament that he was concerned about the army’s intentions, and Popov at one stage called a news conference to share his fears. ‘Our information1,’ he told us, ‘is that a group of extremists is preparing to take military action on the understanding that the hardline political forces will use this as a reason to impose a state of emergency.’
With the state budget sliding into debt, salaries were going unpaid; increases in pensions and benefits were cancelled; public discontent was growing, and the public blamed the Soviet president. When Gorbachev travelled to London to lobby the G7 group of industrialised nations to invest in the Soviet economy, he was rebuffed. At the urging of the Americans, British and Japanese, the G7 refused to put any cash on the table. In Moscow, Gorbachev’s enemies played the humiliation card adroitly. They portrayed Gorbachev as the man who had brought the Soviet Union to its knees, transforming it from superpower to basket case, trampling on national pride and emasculating the once-mighty Soviet military. The hardliners hinted darkly that none of this was an accident, but that Gorbachev had deliberately ruined the country because he was a paid agent, a sinister traitor in the service of the malevolent West. Television footage of ‘Gorbymania’ in the US, Britain and other European countries, where excited crowds poured adulation on the visiting Soviet leader, was cited as proof that he was a Western stooge. The more he was adored in the West, the more he was loathed by a Soviet population that had seen their standard of living plummet and their pride in their country destroyed since he came to power.
The ‘loss’ of Eastern Europe in the years after 1989 was a huge blow to many who regarded Moscow’s domination of the ‘fraternal states’ as an expression of Soviet potency; and the man who presided over the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact was derided for his weak-willed – or treacherous – willingness to surrender them to the clutches of the West. When Gorbachev’s spokesman joked that the Brezhnev Doctrine had been superseded by the Sinatra Doctrine (Eastern Europe would be allowed to do things ‘their way’), the Western press corps saw it as a graceful acceptance of geopolitical reality;fn1 but the phrase was cited angrily by Communist loyalists as evidence of Gorbachev’s collusion with the capitalist enemy. His failure to prevent the removal of the Berlin wall, the reunification of Germany and the ‘defection’ of the former Soviet satellites was crucial in stimulating conservative opposition to him and to perestroika.
When the Soviet republics began to emulate the example of the Eastern Bloc countries, putting pressure on Moscow to let them also ‘do it their way’, Gorbachev seems to have realised that things had got dangerously out of hand. If his opponents had pilloried him for leniency towards foreign states such as Poland or Hungary, how much greater would their anger be if he sanctioned the loss of integral territories of the USSR such as Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia.
The ‘nationalities problem’ had existed under the tsarist empire and throughout the years of Bolshevik rule. While the state remained a monolithic autocracy, the problem could be kept under control, even if Moscow had at times to resort to extreme measures, such as Stalin’s mass repressions and deportations. But when Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ cast doubt on the state’s willingness to murder and repress, when glasnost gave the subject peoples access to the truth about their histories, the separatists found a new boldness. From the Baltics to Georgia, Moldova, Armenia and Ukraine, demands to secede from the ‘voluntary’ union of the USSR grew daily more vociferous.
The prospect of the imminent collapse of the Soviet state was by far the most powerful factor stoking the conservatives’ anger. Even before the crackdowns in Latvia and Lithuania, the hardliners in the Kremlin leadership had sent troops to smash nationalist demonstrations in Georgia and Azerbaijan. Twenty pro-independence3 demonstrators were killed by troops in Tbilisi in April 1989; and in January 1990 the Soviet army killed up to a hundred Azeris after anti-Armenian pogroms in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku.fn2 Ethnic unrest in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, in the Trans-Dniestr region of Moldova and in Uzbekistan added to the conservatives’ alarm that the USSR was being allowed to disintegrate. The violence put pressure on the army, and its commanders resented being placed in the front line by civilian politicians, whom they regarded as weak and ineffectual.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which had consigned Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to Soviet domination, 2 million people had joined hands in a human chain of protest across the three republics. By January 1991, all three had declared their independence and others were beginning to following suit.
Russia itself was becoming restive. The Russian Republic had traditionally been a mainstay of the Union: Russians had been deployed as senior officials in the 14 other republics to ensure loyalty to Moscow; they were the ‘big brothers’ among the peoples of the USSR, enjoying power and privileges that other groups did not; the Russian language was taught throughout Soviet territory and Russian culture was used as a tool to weaken local, potentially nationalist identity. But there was a lingering resentment that Russian sovereignty had been subordinated to the overarching authority of the Soviet Union, that native ‘Russianness’ had somehow been submerged in a homogenous Soviet identity.
While Gorbachev struggled to hold the Union together, Boris Yeltsin had no such concerns. The period of dual power had pitched him into a battle for supremacy with the Soviet leader, and he regarded Russian nationalism as one of his trump cards. The clash between the two men became inextricably enmeshed with the struggle of the republics against the centre, with Yeltsin making the issue of Russian independence – and the right to independence of all the republics – a central theme of his political platform. It was a deliberate challenge to Gorbachev’s aim of preserving the Union, and it would play into a violent endgame.
When he spoke of his early years, Yeltsin portrayed himself as a young man in conflict with authority. He quarrelled with his teachers, with his peers and with his political mentors. But he makes clear in his memoirs that in all these clashes he regarded himself as being right and the others always wrong. If Yeltsin lost an argument, it was always because he was being unfairly victimised; he stored up his rancour and strove for revenge. He was possessed of an overriding self-belief that spilled over easily into bullying; a smouldering determination to right the wrongs, real or imagined, that others had inflicted on him; a desire for personal recognition, even adulation; and an implacable ruthlessness towards his enemies once they had been laid low.
In the flesh he was an overpowering presence, a great Siberian bear who oozed gruffness and charm. Women fell for him and men admired his natural authority. He had the battered face of a heavyweight boxer, but when he smiled it was the smile of a mischievous boy. Mikhail Gorbachev had an intellectual presence and a nimble mind, but he lacked Yeltsin’s underlying sense of menace: ‘If you disagree with me,’ Yeltsin’s eyes seemed to say, ‘I will crush you.’ When Gorbachev got angry, he went red in the face; but Yeltsin stayed calm, directing his rage coldly, unblinkingly at its target. He could work a crowd with supreme skill; he had the capacity to inspire rare loyalty and implacable hatred in equal measure.
Born just four weeks before Gorbachev, in February 1931, Yeltsin as a young man joined the only political party allowed to exist in his country. With his characteristic drive and need for recognition, he rose swiftly through the ranks of the CPSU; by 1976 he was already the regional party boss in his native Sverdlovsk. His speeches from the 1970s and early 1980s contain no indication of the radical liberalism that would come later. ‘The people are full of gratitude4,’ he told the Sverdlovsk May Day parade, ‘for the titanic efforts of Comrade Brezhnev. We thank him for his outstanding role in perfecting and implementing all aspects of our national policy at home and abroad …’ But it was a new style of Soviet leader who gave Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin the promotion he had long been seeking. It was Mikhail Gorbachev, who in 1985 brought him to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee, who made him Moscow party boss and then, in February 1986, a junior member of the politburo. For two years, he worked as part of the Gorbachev team, until his ambition got the better of him. The stand-up row between the two men at the October 1987 plenum was caused at least in part by Yeltsin’s inordinate sensitivity to perceived slights. The letter he wrote to the Soviet leader setting out his grievances makes clear that he felt Gorbachev was not paying enough attention to him or to his ideas: ‘I have felt a discernible5 change from an attitude of friendly support to one of indifference towards matters concerning Moscow and coldness towards me personally.’
After the humiliation he suffered6 at the plenum, close colleagues reported that Yeltsin tried to kill himself. He was summoned from his hospital bed a few weeks later to be stripped of his party post, an indignity for which he never forgave his former patron. For the next three years, Yeltsin was fired by a desire for vengeance, taking delight in Gorbachev’s travails and adding to them by sniping at the slow pace of reform. When Gorbachev pointed out the obstacles in the way of political and economic changes, Yeltsin ridiculed him in the most cutting language. His rabble-rousing populism was based on promises that could never be fulfilled; his driving motivation was to embarrass and diminish his rival. In confidential documents, the US administration described him as ‘flaky’.
But Yeltsin had the people’s support. When the Kremlin-run media attacked him for being drunk on a lecture tour to the United States, he went up in most Russians’ estimation. When he was fished out of a river with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, people smiled and nodded, archly hinting that he must have been rumbled in the course of some nocturnal gallantry by a jealous husband. On one occasion, we filmed him reviewing paratroopers going through their training routine, which included a spectacular leap from a high building into a pool of burning petrol. ‘I was thinking to myself7 whether I would have jumped into that fire,’ he mused to the camera. ‘Perhaps not, but you never know – I’m such a hooligan at heart that maybe I would have jumped after all.’
It was precisely that hint of the hooligan that endeared Yeltsin to many Russians. They admired his courage in standing up to the Communist Party bullies and they respected his independence of thought. When the troops were sent into Latvia and Lithuania, Yeltsin flew to Riga to pledge Russia’s support for the cause of self-determination. He appealed to the soldiers not to fire on civilians and won the hearts of independence movements everywhere when he told them they should ‘take as much sovereignty as you can swallow’. In his determination to do down Gorbachev and his policies, Yeltsin proclaimed that the Kremlin now stood for repression, an end to reform and the forcible imposition of Soviet rule. ‘But we have the strength8 to stop the forces of reaction,’ he told his Russian parliament. ‘It is within our power to halt the Soviet authorities’ plunge into lawlessness and the use of force. We must show that democracy is irreversible.’
Yeltsin announced that he would respond to the threat of autocracy with the sword of democracy. He would stand in a free and open election for the post of Russian president. The new office would give the incumbent wide-ranging executive powers, and – unlike Mikhail Gorbachev – the winner would have the backing of a democratic mandate from the people.
Gorbachev was quick to recognise the danger. He mobilised the Communist forces in the Russian parliament to try to thwart the initiative, and on 28 March 1991 the battle took to the streets. With the new presidency proposal blocked by his political opponents, Yeltsin called an extraordinary session of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies to get it onto the statute books. Tens of thousands of Yeltsin supporters gathered during the course of the meeting. By late afternoon, with the constitutional crisis still unresolved, a quarter of a million people had crammed into Moscow’s main thoroughfare, Gorky Street, and were threatening to march on the Kremlin.
As the crowds descended the hill, detachments of riot police moved into place, blocking their path: the showdown that had long been threatened between Gorbachev and Yeltsin seemed certain to erupt into violence. But as the first ranks of demonstrators squared up to the militia, the crisis was mysteriously defused. Both sides seemed to have received last-minute orders to back off, and while there was some wielding of police batons that night, a potential bloodbath was transformed into a political watershed. Yeltsin won the majority he needed to call a presidential election and the date was fixed for 12 June 1991. On a wave of popular acclaim, he trounced the men who stood against him, including the Kremlin’s candidate, former prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov. Yeltsin’s platform of democracy, a free-market economy and self-determination for the Soviet republics won him an overwhelming mandate from the Russian people. Gorbachev could no longer argue with the facts: the Russian parliament had granted Yeltsin the right to rule by decree, and if it came to a straight choice between obeying Yeltsin’s decrees or those of Gorbachev, the election had shown which way most people would go. The Soviet president had little choice but to seek an alliance.
The most tangible result of the truce was Gorbachev’s acceptance that the Union would have to cede greater powers to the individual republics. Following negotiations with Yeltsin and the leaders of eight other republics (the Baltic states, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia refused to take part), he brought his plans for a new Union structure before the USSR Supreme Soviet in July. Gorbachev’s Union Treaty proposed a much looser confederation of states, to be known as the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics; individual members would have wide national autonomy, control over their natural resources, including oil, gas and mineral deposits, and a guarantee that republican laws would take precedence over Union legislation. As Soviet president, Gorbachev would retain control of defence and foreign policy, but he would lose much of his legislative authority, performing instead a coordinating role more akin to the president of the European Union.
Despite the misgivings of its conservative members, the Supreme Soviet approved the plan, and Gorbachev announced that the treaty would be formally signed on 20 August. In the meantime, he would take Raisa, their daughter and two granddaughters for a rare holiday at the presidential dacha in the Crimean resort of Foros on the Black Sea.
Gorbachev’s enemies took advantage of his absence. Horrified by what they regarded as the wilful destruction of the USSR and the renunciation of Communist goals (the replacement of the word ‘socialist’ by ‘sovereign’ in the title of the new confederation was a particular bone of contention), the hardliners in the Soviet leadership plotted their last offensive. Anatoly Lukyanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, was active in rallying opposition to the treaty, contacting a range of colleagues to ascertain how far they were prepared to go. A core of committed old-style Communists held a series of secret meetings, where the rhetoric was one of patriotism and self-sacrifice: the country their fathers and forefathers had fought to preserve was being dismembered; it was their duty to defend it, even at the cost of their own lives. With the date for the signing of the Union Treaty approaching, a dozen of them put their names forward to serve on a State Emergency Committee that would declare itself the legitimate power in the country and restore old-style Bolshevik rule. The members of the committee were all men whom Gorbachev had promoted to positions of power: his vice-president Gennady Yanayev, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, and Defence Minister Marshal Dmitry Yazov had all been praised and trusted by the man they were about to betray.
On the afternoon of Sunday 18 August, Gorbachev was working in the study of his holiday home when the head of his bodyguards came to tell him a delegation from Moscow had arrived. Gorbachev was suspicious; he decided to make enquiries by telephone before receiving them. ‘I had a whole series of9 phones,’ he would later recall. ‘A government phone, an ordinary phone, a strategic phone, a satellite phone and so on. When I picked them up I found they were all disconnected. Even the internal phone had been cut. I was isolated.’ He called in his wife, daughter and son-in-law. ‘I knew there was about to be an attempt to intimidate me, or an attempt to arrest me and take me away somewhere. Anything was possible … they could have tried anything, even with my family.’ By now, the dacha was surrounded by KGB troops and Soviet border guards loyal to the coup plotters. Thirty of Gorbachev’s own bodyguards were inside the house and declared that they would defend him to the end. An armed confrontation was in the offing. Convinced that her husband was facing imminent death, Raisa collapsed; the children were hurriedly taken upstairs.
When the plotters’ delegation was shown in, they announced, falsely, that Yeltsin had been arrested. They said a state of emergency was the only way to rescue the country from disaster and they gave Gorbachev an ultimatum: either sign the state of emergency declaration himself, in which case he could stay on as president but would have to remain under guard in the Crimea, or sign over his powers to the new, self-declared president Gennady Yanayev. According to Gorbachev’s own account of his response, he used language so full of expletives that even the hardened politicians who had come to depose him were shocked. ‘I told them that they and the10 people who had sent them were nothing but irresponsible gamblers and criminals … Their actions would mean their own doom and the doom of the whole country … only someone bent on suicide would propose the introduction of such a totalitarian regime in our country …’
Gorbachev refused to sign anything. His position seemed desperate, but he stood firm, telling the plotters their actions would unleash a civil war, with inevitable bloodshed and death. The Soviet people, he said, would prove they were no longer downtrodden slaves: glasnost and freedom had changed all that. ‘“You are wrong to think11 that the people will just do everything you order them to do,” I told them. “You are wrong to count on the people being ready to submit to the first dictator who comes along …”’
For the next three days, Gorbachev and his family were in limbo. His demands to be flown to Moscow were ignored. Fearing that the plotters intended to poison him, he refused the food they brought him. His only contact with the outside world – and one that he later credited with bolstering his resolve in the darkest hours – was a short-wave radio his bodyguards had rigged up. He used it to listen to the BBC’s reports of events in Moscow and was heartened to hear that the plotters were not having things all their own way.
On the morning of 19 August, after I had driven into central Moscow and discovered the columns of tanks descending on the Kremlin, I toured the key sites that anyone seeking to control the country would need to seize. At the headquarters of Soviet radio and television in the suburb of Ostankino, armoured cars had surrounded the main buildings; but the Russian White House, the seat of Boris Yeltsin’s Russian parliament, seemed unaffected – military convoys were driving past on their way into the city centre. The greatest concentration of troops was around the Kremlin. Outside the Hotel National, under the Kremlin wall, a ring of tanks and armoured personnel carriers had cordoned off the approaches to Red Square. With some trepidation, I walked up to the soldiers who were milling around between the vehicles, showed my press pass and asked politely if I might go through. The young officer who spoke to me was apologetic, but explained that he had orders not to let anyone past. I asked if he had been told why his unit had been deployed, and he replied, ‘Not really.’ He did, though, confirm that his men had live ammunition in their weapons and that if the military command ordered them to shoot, they would do so.
At 11 a.m. a new radio broadcast by the State Emergency Committee announced that the state of emergency would last for six months. ‘Our motherland is in12 mortal danger. The policy of reform begun by M.S. Gorbachev has run into a dead end … The existing authorities have lost the trust of the people. Political manoeuvring has replaced any concern about the fate of the motherland. Institutions of the state are openly mocked and the country has become ungovernable.’ The purpose of the State Committee was ‘to overcome the profound and comprehensive crisis, political, ethnic and civil strife, chaos and anarchy that threaten the lives and security of the citizens of the Soviet Union’.
When I spoke to Muscovites on the streets of the capital, I found some who agreed with the aims of the coup leaders: people were attracted by their promises to revive the economy, end the shortages and re-establish the USSR as a world superpower. But I also came across growing instances of defiance. Some civilians were haranguing the troops or standing in the way of the advancing tanks. In one incident, demonstrators clambered onto an armoured personnel carrier and began to drag the driver out of his porthole. The look of terror on the face of the teenage conscript suggested that some troops might not be spoiling for a fight.
By mid afternoon, the army was everywhere. Now a phalanx of heavy armour roared up to the White House, belching acrid fumes and smoke, thundering along the embankment of the Moskva River, leaving the imprint of their tracks in the tarmac. Rumours began to circulate that Boris Yeltsin had evaded the forces sent by the plotters to detain him and managed to take refuge inside the building. As I watched the line of tanks form up at the base of the parliament steps, I was convinced they were here to seize the parliament, to arrest Yeltsin and all those who opposed their masters in the Kremlin.
But the order to attack did not come. At the crucial moment it was Yeltsin himself who seized the initiative. Emerging dramatically from the parliament’s main entrance, he descended the steps and strode towards the leading tank in the column. For a moment, we held our breath. Yeltsin was vulnerable, unprotected from a sniper’s bullet or from a concerted attempt to arrest him. He heaved his burly frame firmly onto the back of the tank and then onto the turret itself. Panting from the effort, he leaned down and shook hands with the startled tank crew who were peering from inside the vehicle. With a trace of a smile, he rose to his full height and in a resolute voice urged the Russian people to unite against the coup:
Citizens of Russia13! The legal president has been removed from power. We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup. The Union Treaty, due to be signed tomorrow … has angered the reactionary forces and pushed them into an irresponsible, criminal act. This is a coup d’état that discredits the Soviet Union in the eyes of the world. It returns us to the Cold War era. The assumption of power by the so-called Emergency Committee is unlawful. Gorbachev has been isolated; I have been denied the right to communicate with him. We appeal to citizens of Russia to rebuff the putsch. We appeal to all soldiers and servicemen to carry out their civic duty and refuse to take part in this reactionary coup. Until all our demands are met, we appeal for a general strike throughout the nation.
The cogency of Yeltsin’s appeal for restraint, at a moment when bloodshed looked inevitable, was remarkable. It was a bravura performance and it galvanised the resistance campaign that would prove decisive over the next few days. The forces of the opposition had no access to the media – their communications were limited to intermittent radio transmissions from inside the White House – but Yeltsin’s words spread like a jolt of electricity through the city. As soon as he finished speaking, the tanks turned around and left, sparking rumours that they had been persuaded to defect to the opposition. Within an hour, crowds had begun to gather around the building, and for the next three days they grew and grew. The White House had become the Alamo of democracy and the Russian people were determined to defend it.
On the other side of town, the coup plotters were about to give their side of the story. In the conference hall of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, the new ‘president’, Gennady Yanayev, and four of his fellow conspirators sat stony faced before the world’s media. When I had interviewed Yanayev just a couple of weeks earlier, he had smiled and professed his loyalty to Mikhail Gorbachev and the ideals of perestroika. He had struck me then as an archetypal Communist forced to pay lip service to the politics of liberal reform, and now that he had usurped his master’s throne, his contempt for Gorbachev was given full rein.fn3 ‘This country is disintegrating15,’ he told his audience. ‘We are determined to take the most serious measures to re-impose the rule of law and order, to wipe the criminals from our streets … We state firmly that we will not allow foreign powers to infringe the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. We are not afraid to assert our pride and patriotism, and we are determined that the coming generations will be brought up in this same spirit.’
As he called for the Soviet people to support the Emergency Committee, Yanayev seemed confident and in control. But when questioning turned to Boris Yeltsin’s demands for opposition to the coup, his face began to twitch and his fingers twisted nervously on the desk in front of him. ‘If Yeltsin is calling16 for strikes,’ he said, ‘he is acting irresponsibly. And that is something we cannot allow. Yeltsin and the Russian leadership are playing a very dangerous game that could lead to armed provocation. It is the duty of the State Emergency Committee to warn all Soviet people about the dangers of such actions …’
With the State Committee in charge, Yanayev promised, there would be immediate improvements in the economy – more apartments, better food supplies, cheaper prices and a twofold increase in wages, pensions and benefits. Bribery had worked well for the men who overthrew Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, and it did seem to soften some people’s attitude towards Yanayev and his cronies.
But tough curfew measures were also announced, banning all movement between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Moscow would be divided into 33 military districts and put under the control of a military commander, who had carte blanche to crush opposition to the coup. The soldiers would have the right to seize any factory that threatened to strike, to run all public transport and to patrol all aspects of public life. Vehicles from outside the city would be prevented from entering Moscow, and the army would be deployed to search apartments, cars and pedestrians. The discovery of any weapons or ‘printed or handwritten materials calling for the violation of public order’ would result in ‘severe legal measures’ being taken. Demonstrations, rallies, meetings, marches and strikes had, of course, already been banned. Now even sports events and public entertainment, including theatres and cinemas, would need the permission of the military district commander. Political parties or groupings deemed hostile to the ‘normalisation’ process were suspended with immediate effect.
As evening fell, I returned to Yeltsin’s White House. I found it surrounded by thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of civilians. Men and women, young schoolboys, gnarled workers, elderly pensioners and invalids had come to stand up for their rights: the defenders of democracy were living evidence that the years of reform had not been in vain. Before 1985 this could not have happened. But the experience of glasnost had shown people that life could be different, that they could make a difference, and they were not prepared to let the fruits of freedom be snatched away from them.
Now the people were building makeshift barricades and tank traps to ward off the attack all believed was imminent. Everything from park benches, concrete slabs and steel water pipes to the contents of entire construction sites was pressed into service; by midnight, every approach road to the parliament had some form of defensive barrier across it. They would have done little to delay a concerted assault, but they were good for morale; all felt safer to have them between us and the tanks we feared were on their way.
Camp fires were beginning to spring up among the crowds; people were roasting sausages and sharing food and drink. Huge Russian tricolours, the pre-revolutionary flag that had become the symbol of the opposition, rose from the ranks of the White House’s defenders and hung from its windows and balconies. Mobile field hospitals were being set up in anticipation of casualties from the impending violence, but spirits were high. Above us, the White House itself was a pale ghost in the darkness.
Late that night, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko came to the BBC office from the White House, where he had just appeared on the balcony with Yeltsin as he encouraged the crowds and appealed for the Russian people to defend freedom and democracy. Yevtushenko had brought with him a poem, scribbled on the back of a leaflet carrying Yeltsin’s decree declaring the putsch illegal, and asked for help with some points of the English translation. An hour later, he was broadcasting to the world:
This day will be glorified17
in songs and ballads.
Today we are the people,
no longer fools
happy to be fooled.
And Sakharov, alive
again, with us
on the barricades,
shyly rubbing over his glasses
cracked by the crowd.
Conscience awakens even in the tanks.
Yeltsin rises on the turret,
and behind him
are not ghosts of the Kremlin,
but our simple people,
deceptively simple –
not yet vanished –
and weary Russian women –
victims of the endless lines.
never again shall Russia be on its knees!
With us are Pushkin, Tolstoy;
With us are the people,
forever awakened.
And the Russian parliament,
Like a wounded marble swan of freedom,
defended by our people,
swims into eternity.
Remembering the moment 15 years later, Yevtushenko smiled and told me that those lines were his ‘best worst poem’. He had been carried away by the emotion of the August days, he said, led into a false grandiloquence. But in 1991 they were the right words at the right time. Everyone present in Moscow that night felt Russia was embarking on an unprecedented new course of liberty, tolerance and democracy. If those hopes have been dashed in the years since then – and we both agreed they had been – the moment still shines in the people’s memory and the poet’s words. Yevtushenko told me he was proud and ashamed at the same time. ‘Yes. And when I compare18 very romantically, a little bit stupidly, Russian parliament with a white swan – wounded white swan – you could kill me! Today it sounds very stupidly [sic], but in that times it sounded perfect. It was a poem like a spark, you know, like one bright star for one moment; then it fell down and touched the earth and it was dead …’
Boris Yeltsin’s moment of drama signalled the beginning of a decisive shift in the balance of power. The Gorbachev era of reform within the Communist Party and restructuring within the Soviet Union was coming to an end, and the Yeltsin era beginning. From 1991 onwards, the process would no longer be one of reform; it would be one of radical change that would sweep away the party, the system and the Union itself.
For the next two days, the stand-off between the coup plotters and the people of Moscow held the country and the world in thrall. Yanayev, Yazov, Pugo and Pavlov ordered more tanks onto the streets. An armoured unit advancing around the Moscow ring road was presumed to be heading for the White House and the news was quickly relayed to the crowds defending the building. But the tanks were intercepted by a group of civilians at an underpass near the US embassy. In the clash that followed, three young men were shot or crushed to death.
Blood had been shed now. At the White House, Boris Yeltsin and his fellow opposition leaders came out onto the balcony to address the 50,000 who had gathered to defend them. Eduard Shevardnadze was there with him, along with Alexander Yakovlev, Gavriil Popov and Sergei Stankevich. Stankevich expressed the anger of the crowd. ‘I’m glad this coup19 has happened,’ he said. ‘I’m glad, because now we know who our enemies are; now we’ve seen the true colours of those bastards who want to destroy democracy! And when we beat this coup, believe me, we’re going to put them all away!’ The applause was tumultuous.
Boris Yeltsin began on a more sombre note; the crowd fell silent.
The shadows of darkness20 have descended on our country, on Europe and on the world. But I can tell you one thing. I have resolved to resist these men! I have resolved to defeat these usurpers in the Kremlin!fn4 I have resolved to do this and I call on you all to do the same! Without your help, I can do nothing … but together with you, together with the Russian people, we are capable of the greatest feats of heroism! Together we can defeat these traitors! Together we can ensure the triumph of democracy!
That evening, Yeltsin’s staff invited foreign journalists inside the White House. The BBC and CNN were still broadcasting from Moscow, and our reports were being beamed by satellite back into the Soviet Union. We were taken around offices that had been fortified against attack. Yeltsin appeared only as a presence flitting between one corridor and another: we were told that he and his closest aides had an inner sanctum, a fortified bunker that would serve as a final refuge in case of a military assault. A few parliamentarians were there carrying machine guns, but most of them looked scared and out of their depth. Yeltsin’s vice-president, Alexander Rutskoi, a former Soviet air force lieutenant, seemed calmer. His bravery during those August days was unquestionable – he organised the defences inside the White House and he instructed the demonstrators how to maintain the human shield around the building – but such was the speed at which Russian politics was evolving that two years later he would be numbered among Boris Yeltsin’s fiercest enemies.
Outside the White House, stewards were advising people how to react if the tanks came, telling them they should form a series of human chains, link arms and stand firm. Unbeknown to the crowd, Yeltsin had spoken to the Russian defence chief, Pavel Grachev, and secured the cooperation of at least some of the Russian military. Half a dozen armoured vehicles arrived to great cheers from the crowds, and took up position in the defensive wall.
For another 24 hours, the crowd waited. By Wednesday 21 August, a cautious optimism was beginning to build. The coup plotters had had their chance to send in the troops, but they had failed to do so. Now it seemed they had seen the tens of thousands gathered at the White House, the splits in the military and the fierce resistance they would have to overcome, and their resolve was beginning to crumble. Rumours were circulating that the plotters were divided and squabbling among themselves; that Pavlov had had a heart attack, that Yanayev and Pugo were drunk and incapable, that Yazov had resigned.
At two o’clock in the afternoon, tanks were sighted on Leningradsky Prospekt, the continuation of Gorky Street where it leaves the Moscow city boundary, and this time they were heading away from the Kremlin. An hour later, armoured columns were seen driving out of town on the Vnukovo road. An hour after that, Radio Moscow confirmed that a general withdrawal was taking place. Marshal Yazov had seemingly weighed the consequences of an assault on the White House and recoiled before the inevitable bloodshed. He had ordered the tanks back into their barracks.
In the barricaded chamber of the Russian parliament, Yeltsin called together the loyal liberal deputies and made an announcement that caused pandemonium. ‘A group of tourists21,’ he said, ‘have been spotted on their way to the airport.’ The coup plotters, said Yeltsin, were fleeing for their lives, their motorcade weaving in and out of the columns of tanks they themselves had ordered onto the streets. It would later transpire that they were flying to Foros to try to do a deal with the still-imprisoned Mikhail Gorbachev. Once there, they apologised and pleaded for their lives, but Gorbachev treated them with disdain, ordering his guards to place them under arrest. Most of the members of the State Emergency Committee, as well as Anatoly Lukyanov and several dozen others, were rounded up and thrown in jail. Boris Pugo, expecting terrible retribution for his treachery, shot his wife and then shot himself. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who had supported the coup but taken no overt part in it, hanged himself in his office.
In the early hours of Thursday 22 August, Mikhail Gorbachev descended the steps of a Soviet air force jet at an airfield outside Moscow. In an open-necked shirt, dishevelled and exhausted, he seemed barely able to take in the magnitude of the changes that had taken place. The Soviet people had resisted the coup, he said, because the years of glasnost and perestroika had taught them to think for themselves. ‘All the work we have22 done since 1985 has borne fruit. People and society have changed, and that is what provided the main obstacle to the victory of the putsch … I congratulate the Soviet people. This is the great victory of perestroika.’ His diagnosis was correct; but Gorbachev seemed too anxious to claim the credit for himself, too slow to acknowledge the pivotal role of his rival, Boris Yeltsin. It was as if he were expecting political life simply to resume its old course.
At a press conference later that day, Gorbachev appeared emotional, halting in his speech and visibly choking back tears. He seemed genuinely surprised that the coup against him had been led by men he had never suspected of disloyalty. ‘They turned out to be men23 in the very centre of the leadership, close to the president himself,’ he said. ‘These were men I had personally promoted, believed and trusted.’ But a moment later he was continuing to defend the Communist Party, seemingly unable to accept that it was the party itself that was the coup’s organising force. ‘I cannot agree with people who condemn the party as a whole, who call it a reactionary force. There are thousands of Communists who are true democrats … I believe that on the basis of the party’s new programme, it is possible to unite all the best and most progressive elements in society.’
Gorbachev rejected criticisms of the Central Committee, which later turned out to have instructed party branches around the USSR to support the coup. He refused to condemn party bosses, even when there was evidence they had been part of the plot. As a lifelong Communist, he said he remained committed to the ideals of the party and its founder, Vladimir Lenin. Gorbachev had failed to realise that Communism’s day was over.
Yeltsin seized his moment in a series of triumphal appearances on the streets of Moscow. His heroics during the coup brought him a tidal wave of gratitude and adulation, and he exploited it to the full. While Gorbachev was warning against anti-Communist ‘witch-hunts’, Yeltsin was celebrating the triumph of democracy and responding to demands for vengeance. ‘All those involved in the coup24,’ he promised, ‘will face the full weight of the law. There will be no mercy for any official who supported the coup, or failed to oppose it!’ He ordered the sacking of scores of party functionaries and announced that Soviet television, which had broadcast the coup plotters’ propaganda, would be purged and brought under his direct control. All Communist cells in the army and KGB would be disbanded, because they had urged cooperation with the putsch; an independent Russian national guard would be created to ‘protect Russia against dictatorship’. Yeltsin declared 22 August a national holiday, and announced that the Soviet flag with the Communist hammer and sickle would be replaced by the old Russian tricolour of white, blue and red horizontal bars.
That evening, outside the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square, the towering bronze statue of the organisation’s hated founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was attacked by crowds wielding hammers and pickaxes. When they failed to topple him, the Moscow mayor Gavriil Popov sent a professional wrecking crew to tie a hawser around his neck and drag him to the ground. The Lubyanka itself, the symbol of decades of repression, torture and murder, had its windows smashed and walls daubed with graffiti. The momentum of anti-Communist rage was reaching the same high tide that had swept away the regimes of Eastern Europe.
The end of the week brought the political showdown that would determine the country’s future. On the afternoon of Friday 23 August, Yeltsin invited Gorbachev to appear before a plenary session of the Russian parliament. It was a trap: Yeltsin had his long-time rival on the ropes and he humiliated the Soviet leader in a confrontation seen live on national television. When Gorbachev repeated his stubborn defence of the CPSU, Yeltsin strolled across the stage and thrust a sheaf of papers under his nose. ‘You should read what25 is contained in these documents, Mikhail Sergeevich,’ he said brusquely. A nonplussed Gorbachev looked at the papers and saw they were the minutes of a cabinet meeting held on the first day of the coup. They showed that every member of the government, all of them Gorbachev appointees, had supported the demands of the coup plotters. Gorbachev was mortified. ‘Having read this,’ he said quietly, ‘I agree that the entire government must be made to resign; we must choose a new one …’ But still Yeltsin would not let him off the hook. All the disgraced ministers, he said, had been personally appointed by the Soviet president himself: would he now accept that the Communist party as a whole was culpable? Still Gorbachev would not abandon the party. ‘No, I cannot agree that the CPSU is a criminal party. It has some reactionaries in it and they must be thrown out. But I will never accept that millions of workers, good Communists, are criminals. I won’t!’
Yeltsin moved in for the kill. ‘On that note,’ he said, looking down at a piece of paper on the table in front of him, ‘I am now going to sign a decree banning the Communist Party of the Russian Republic from any further activity in the political life of the country.’ Gorbachev tried to protest – ‘I am sure the Supreme Soviet will not agree to that,’ he stammered, barely audible above the wave of applause that had filled the chamber. ‘I think that banning the Russian Communist Party would be a major mistake …’ But it was too late. The idea of banning the Communist Party (albeit just the Russian branch of it, not the CPSU) had been uttered in public; it had been greeted with applause; and, most important of all, it had been heard on television by millions of ordinary people, most of whom welcomed the proposal.
Within hours of the drama at the Russian parliament, Yeltsin’s allies were making his decree a reality. Mayor Gavriil Popov ordered militia units to enter party branches throughout Moscow and evict the occupants. The reaction of the Communist officials was incredulous: these were men who had ruled Russia for 70 years, whose right to rule had been enshrined in law as recently as six months ago. Now party offices were confiscated, doors sealed, drawers and safes searched for incriminating documents. At the Central Committee building, where the Moscow party had its headquarters, crowds had gathered to see the hated apparatchiks driven from the premises. Before being allowed to walk out of their own front door, yesterday’s rulers were made to open their briefcases and empty their pockets to prove they were not removing any evidence of past misdeeds; then Boris Yeltsin’s representatives moved in to occupy their desks.
The next morning, Saturday 24 August, both Yeltsin and Gorbachev attended the funeral of the three young men who had been killed trying to stop the tanks advancing on the Russian White House. Thousands lined the route and Yeltsin made an emotional speech asking forgiveness from the three sets of parents for having been unable to save their sons’ lives. It seemed like a moment of spiritual rebirth: a man who had nothing to apologise for was accepting the burden of responsibility, in contrast to the decades of Communist misrule when few could be found to take responsibility for the darkest of crimes.
As Yeltsin was elevated to the role of popular hero, Gorbachev returned to the Kremlin to wrestle with his thoughts. Late on Saturday afternoon, he recorded a short address to be broadcast to the nation. In light of the events of the past week, Gorbachev announced, he felt he could no longer remain as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party; he was recommending that the CPSU Central Committee should take the decision to dissolve the party. For Soviet Communism, 74 years of political domination had come undone in a mere six days.
In my study, I have two front pages from the newspaper Pravda framed on the wall. The first, from 20 August 1991, carries the announcements of the State Committee declaring the state of emergency, installing military rule, appealing to world governments and the United Nations to recognise their authority. It is topped by the traditional Pravda masthead that had graced the paper for decades: ‘Pravda,’ it proclaims, ‘Organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Workers of the world unite!’ and – at the side, over a line drawing of the great man’s face in profile – ‘Founded by V.I. Lenin on 5 May 1912’.
The second is from two days later. Now the masthead announces that this is a ‘General Political Newspaper’; the top story carries photographs of a smiling Mikhail Gorbachev and a serious-looking Boris Yeltsin. And in the right-hand corner is one of the great journalistic apologies of all time. ‘An Announcement by the Editorial Staff of Pravda’, it says. ‘In recent days, a group of men attempted to carry out an illegal, anti-constitutional coup d’état in our country. Like other newspapers, Pravda showed a lack of objectivity in its reports [which supported the coup]. We admit frankly that a long history of relying on orders from above about what we print is behind the reasons for this. Much of the blame for the lack of integrity shown by this newspaper lies with the senior editorial team. In the coming days, the editorial team will be replaced.’
In that short time, things had changed irrevocably. In the days following the collapse of the coup, every one of the 15 Soviet republics declared its intention to leave the Union. Gorbachev’s last three months in office – if not in power – were a desperate scramble to salvage at least something of the once mighty USSR. In October, he signed an economic cooperation agreement with eight republican leaders, but on 1 December his remaining hopes of keeping the Soviet Empire together were dashed when the people of Ukraine voted overwhelmingly to secede. (As Gorbachev himself admitted, ‘There can be no26 Union without Ukraine.’) Without consulting the Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin met Ukrainian and Belorussian leaders near Minsk and agreed that their countries would form a confederation to be known as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). In his communiqué, Yeltsin invited other republics to join the CIS. ‘The USSR as a subject of international27 law, and of geopolitical reality,’ he declared, ‘has ceased to exist.’ Gorbachev argued that Yeltsin’s manoeuvrings were illegal, but on 17 December he accepted the inevitable – the state he had fought to preserve and strengthen was no more. In an emotional television address on 25 December, Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and his resignation as Soviet president. ‘I leave my post with trepidation28,’ he told the millions of viewers. ‘But also with hope, with faith in you, in your wisdom and force of spirit. We are the inheritors of a great civilisation, and now the burden falls on each and every one of us that it may be resurrected to a new, modern and worthy life.’
At midnight on 31 December 1991, the Soviet hammer and sickle was taken down from the Kremlin towers and replaced with the Russian flag. Boris Yeltsin was already sitting in Mikhail Gorbachev’s old office, ready to guide Russia into his new era of democracy, freedom and liberal market economics. He was Russia’s future, but his chance to reshape the country was the result of the actions of his predecessor.
Gorbachev had been – and remained – a committed Communist; he had tried to reform and revivify the party in order to strengthen its position as the wielder of autocratic power; but his plan for limited reforms had unleashed a tidal wave of popular demand for political transformation that had escalated out of his control. As the Russian army general and historian Dmitry Volkogonov wrote, the paradox of Gorbachev’s historical role was to be ‘an orthodox Communist who29, despite his own intentions, emerged as the gravedigger of the Communist system’.
fn1 In fact, the politburo had discussed the possibility of armed intervention to stop the ‘fraternal countries’ leaving the Soviet bloc, but Gorbachev made it clear that he would not countenance the use of force. As early as June 1988, he told2 the Nineteenth Party Conference that ‘our concept of “new thinking” means a commitment to freedom of choice … the policy of force has outlived its time.’
fn2 The Tbilisi massacre happened while Gorbachev was out of the country on a visit to London and Yegor Ligachev was chairing the politburo. The measures in Baku were initiated by the Kremlin envoy Yevgeny Primakov.
fn3 Yanayev’s last words to me were, in retrospect, something of a warning: ‘I joined the Communist14 Party 30 years ago,’ he told me, ‘and I continue to believe that I made the right choice. I am and shall remain a Communist. Communism in the Soviet Union is not dead … Let me tell you: you would be premature in saying that the Communist ideal is dead here.’
fn4 Yeltsin used the word samozvantsy, redolent with overtones of impostors or pretenders from Russian history who dared to usurp the power of legitimate rulers and reaped the bloody consequences of their treachery.