25

Hail and Farewell

(1990–1991)

Gorbachëv wanted to prevent the disappearance of self-styled communist leaderships in Eastern Europe being repeated in the USSR. His domestic achievements were already enormous. Official party policies in the USSR would have been compelled to get nastier if left intact. Economic decline, political conflict, national embitterment, social alienation and environmental degradation: all these would have increased. The communist party apparatus might well have reverted to a clumsy version of Stalinism or might even have stumbled into a clash with the USA at the risk of a Third World War.

Instead Gorbachëv had been working at the renewal of the Soviet compound by means of reform. But reform implies a series of modifications which leave the basic political, economic and social order intact. In fact Gorbachëv’s rule already involved change of a much greater dimension. Several of the principal features of communism in the USSR were being undermined by his activity: the one-party state, the mono-ideological controls, the militant atheism, the centralized administration, the state economic monopoly and the suspendability of law. Perestroika was no longer a project for partial alterations but for total transformation. It was scarcely surprising that many Soviet leaders, including several who owed him their promotion to the Politburo, were aghast. Gorbachëv was no longer what he had claimed to be. By his actions, if not by his deliberate purpose, he was abetting the disintegration of the existing compound.

His intuitive brilliance did him little good; he remained hampered by his background from foreseeing where his path of transformation was leading. While wanting a market economy, he did not think this would involve much capitalism. While approving of national self-expression, he had set his face against any republic seceding from the USSR. While wishing to replace traditional communist functionaries with energetic newcomers, he often chose newcomers who had no commitment to serious reform. While aiming at an institutional division of powers, he induced chaos in governance. His personal confusion had practical consequences. Although he radicalized his proposals, he did this always more slowly than the pace of the deepening crisis over the economy, the republics, the administration and the personnel of the Soviet order. And this made his eventual fall all the more likely.

About Gorbachëv’s dedication there was no doubt: ‘I’m doomed to go forward, and only forward. And if I retreat, I myself will perish and the cause will perish too!’¹ He expected the same self-sacrifice from his associates. His group of intimates included several of his promotees to the Politburo: Alexander Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnadze, Vadim Medvedev and Vadim Bakatin. Also important to him were aides such as Georgi Shakhnazarov and Anatoli Chernyaev; and he derived indispensable intellectual and emotional support from his wife Raisa despite her unpopularity with politicians and public alike.

But whereas he had once led from the front, by the end of the decade he was operating from the centre. Gorbachëv’s technique was to calm the communist radicals, convince his loyalists and reassure the conservatives. In practical terms he aimed to dissuade as many critics as possible from leaving the party and campaigning against him. For this purpose he opted to remain in the party as its General Secretary; he argued that the alternative was to abandon the party and let his critics use it as an instrument to struggle for the rejection of his reformist measures. It was an uncongenial task. Most central and local functionaries incurred his contempt: ‘They’re careerists; all they want is their hands on power and their snouts in the feeding trough!’² But he said no such thing in public, and hoped that his patience would be rewarded by success in making the process of reform irreversible.

Within his entourage, Yakovlev argued against his refusal to leave the party. Yeltsin agreed with Yakovlev. So, too, did the dissenter Andrei Sakharov from outside the ranks of communism. Better, they all urged, to make a clean break and form a new party. But Gorbachëv spurned the advice. He increasingly thought of Yakovlev as unsound of judgement and Yeltsin as irresponsible. He had a higher estimate of Sakharov, who was widely acclaimed as Russia’s liberal conscience. Gorbachëv was not averse to cutting off Sakharov’s microphone when he did not like what he heard.³ But by and large he ensured that this frail, croaky-voiced scientist should be given a hearing at the Congress of Soviets; and when Sakharov died in mid-December 1989, Gorbachëv paid his respects at his coffin.

Nevertheless Gorbachëv did not alter his mind about the communist party and continued to work for its fundamental reform from within. In February 1990 he produced a ‘platform’ for the Central Committee which was entitled ‘Towards a Humane, Democratic Socialism’ and which used his most extraordinary language to date: ‘The main objective of the transitional period is the spiritual and political liberation of society.’⁴ Gorbachëv’s implication was that the USSR had always been a despotism. His vision of a socialist future, moreover, barely mentioned Lenin and Marxism-Leninism. None too gently Gorbachëv was repudiating most of the Soviet historical experience. Communism was no longer the avowed aim. Since Lenin, socialism had been depicted as merely a first post-capitalist stage towards the ultimate objective: communism. Now socialism itself had become the ultimate objective; and Gorbachëv’s socialism would be a socialism antagonistic to dictatorship, to casual illegality, to a hypertrophied state economy and to cultural and religious intolerance. Indeed the draft platform was strongly reminiscent of Western social-democracy.

This similarity was not lost on Gorbachëv’s critics. Provincial party secretary Vladimir Melnikov had already accused him of sculpting policies so as ‘to appeal to the bourgeoisie and the Pope in Rome’.⁵ Most critics, however, were more restrained. At the February 1990 Central Committee plenum they desisted from undertaking a frontal attack on the draft platform; they even acquiesced in Gorbachëv’s demand for the repeal of Article 6 of the 1977 USSR Constitution, which guaranteed the political monopoly to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. No rival party had been permitted to operate in the country since the early 1920s: Gorbachëv was breaking with the dictatorial heritage of his hero Lenin.

Gorbachëv was still but weakly aware of the implications of his activities; he continued to talk of going off to ‘confer with Lenin’ for inspiration.⁶ But the rupture with Leninism was real. On 27 February 1990 Gorbachëv addressed the USSR Supreme Soviet and obtained its sanction for multi-party politics. The third convocation of the Congress of People’s Deputies ratified the change on 14 April. The one-party state defended by communist apologists since the Civil War was relegating itself to oblivion. Gorbachëv reversed Lenin’s policy as deftly as Lenin had introduced it. And while being innocent in his understanding of essential Leninism, Gorbachëv also needed to display much deviousness in order to get the institutional changes he desired. Otherwise he would never have succeeded in manipulating the central party apparatus, the ministries, the local administrations, the military high command and the security organs into accepting the step-by-step transformation of the Soviet state.

Yet the communist radicals were disgruntled with him. Yeltsin, who was still a Party Central Committee member as well as a leader of the Inter-Regional Group, was the most vociferous in demanding faster and deeper reform; and he grasped an opportunity to press his case when, in March 1990, he stood for election to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet and became its Chairman. Politically he was playing the ‘Russian card’. Unable to challenge Gorbachëv directly at the level of the USSR, he asserted himself in the organs of the RSFSR.

The communist-conservative enemies of perestroika reacted furiously. Wanting to put pressure on Gorbachëv as well as to strike down Yeltsin, they adopted the device of forming a Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Their leader was Ivan Polozkov, Krasnodar Regional Party First Secretary. Why, asked Polozkov, should the RSFSR be denied a party tier long ago given to Ukraine and Uzbekistan? Gorbachëv accepted the validity of the question and assented to the foundation of the Russian party. Its first congress was held in June, and Polozkov became its First Secretary. Polozkov tried to take up the role of leading the party traditionalists, a role lost by Ligachëv after his successive demotions in 1989. Yet Polozkov was a much less prepossessing figure than Ligachëv. Gorbachëv kept him firmly in his place by refusing to intervene on his behalf to secure a suitable apartment for him in Moscow. Polozkov, a grumpy fellow, did little to enhance the popularity of his ideas in his few public appearances.

The dispute between Yeltsin and Polozkov took some of the heat off Gorbachëv. One of Gorbachëv’s devices was to occupy a position above all the country’s politicians and exploit their disagreements to his own advantage. He also had an interest in refraining from protecting any rivals from nasty accusations. Newspapers claimed that Ligachëv had made pecuniary gain from the corruption in Uzbekistan. Similarly it was alleged at the Congress of People’s Deputies that Ryzhkov had been involved in shady industrial deals. Gorbachëv did nothing to help either of them.

Yeltsin, too, complained that dirty tricks were being played against him. In September 1989, when he was touring the USA, Pravda had reported him as having been drunk at Johns Hopkins University. Yeltsin claimed the problem to have been the tablets he was taking for his heart condition;⁷ but he was less convincing about another incident, which happened upon his return to the USSR next month. As he walked late at night towards a dacha in Uspenskoe village near Moscow, he inexplicably tumbled into a river. His supporters claimed that this was an assassination attempt on him. Yet Yeltsin omitted to complain to the authorities. The conclusion of dispassionate observers might have been that there is no smoke without fire, but in Russia Yeltsin’s predilection for vodka was not frowned upon. The Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet continued to be hailed as the people’s champion. If anything, his escapade was regarded as near-martyrdom, and his prestige rose higher.

Speaking on behalf of the RSFSR, he assured Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that he did not seek their forcible retention within the Soviet Union (whereas Gorbachëv’s hostility to secession was the despair of his radical counsellors). In June 1990 Uzbekistan declared its sovereignty. On Yeltsin’s initiative, so did the RSFSR. The disintegrative process affected even the internal affairs of the RSFSR when the autonomous republics of Tatarstan and Karelia demanded recognition as wholly independent states. The USSR’s entire constitutional basis was being undermined. The threat no longer came mainly from defeated émigré nationalists but from active Soviet politicians.

By September, when even obedient Turkmenistan declared its sovereignty, it had become the general trend. Everywhere the republican leaderships were calling for democracy and national self-determination. In some cases, such as Estonia, there was a genuine commitment to liberal political principles. In most, however, the high-falutin terms disguised the fact that local communist party élites were struggling to avoid the loss of their power. The national card had been played by them quietly in the Brezhnev period. Republican assets had been regarded by the respective élites as their own patrimony; and, after they had seen off the anti-corruption campaigns of Andropov in 1982–4 and Gorbachëv in the mid-1980s, they settled down to enjoy their privileges. While detesting Gorbachëv’s perestroika, they used his democratization of public affairs as a means of reinforcing their position and increasing their affluence. By announcing their independence, they aimed to seal off each republic from Moscow’s day-to-day interference.

Gorbachëv held tight to his strategy. The Twenty-Eighth Party Congress met from 2 June 1990 and discussed the de-Leninized party platform approved by the Central Committee in February. This time Gorbachëv’s critics shouted angrily at him, and delegates for the Russian Communist Party led a successful campaign to vote Alexander Yakovlev off the Central Committee. But Gorbachëv was retained as General Secretary by a huge majority and his platform was ratified by the Congress. When the election was held for the new post of his deputy in the party, Ligachëv was defeated by Ukrainian party first secretary Ivashko, whom Gorbachëv favoured, by 3,109 to 776 votes.

The Congress had granted that the Politburo should no longer intervene in day-to-day politics and that the USSR Presidency ought to become the fulcrum of decision-making. But Gorbachëv’s victory did not satisfy Yeltsin and other communist radicals. They were annoyed by the down-grading of Yakovlev and urged Gorbachëv yet again to leave the communist party. When he refused, they walked out. Thus the Soviet President’s support was narrowed at the very moment of his triumph. He repeated that if he left the communist party, its central and local officials would carry out a coup against him and his reforms. Was this plausible? The attempted coup in August 1991 was to show that his fears were not imaginary. But this in itself does not vindicate Gorbachëv’s judgement. For the coup leaders would have had much greater difficulty if they had confronted a Soviet social-democratic party under Gorbachëv that had split from the communist party.

But Gorbachëv had made his political choice to stay with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Among other things, this had the consequence that drastic economic measures would be postponed and that popular living standards would go on falling. The industrial, commercial and financial sectors were on the edge of collapse. Even according to official figures, output from manufacturing and mining enterprises in 1990 fell by one per cent over the previous year.⁸ Retail trade was reduced to pitiful proportions. Massive state loans were contracted with Western banks. Imports of grain and industrial consumer goods increased. Gorbachëv refused to allow any factory or kolkhoz to go to the wall, and there were no bankruptcies. But the general economic condition was dire. Most Soviet citizens could hardly believe that so rapid a deterioration had taken place. Industry was on the verge of collapse. Inflation was rising; banking and commerce were in disorder.

They blamed Gorbachëv. What counted for them was not that the economy had basically been in long-term decline long before 1985 but that they themselves were worse off than for decades. Even if they were unaware of the huge technical flaws in the Law on the State Enterprise, they knew from direct experience that the attempt at reform had not worked and that Gorbachëv’s promises of economic regeneration had not been fulfilled. By 1990, people were wondering whether they would soon be starving. There had not been such fear about the popular living conditions since the end of the Second World War.

At this point of crisis there was danger to Gorbachëv if he was cautious and danger if he was daring. He would have had a somewhat easier time if he had known his mind on the economy. Although he wanted some basic reform, he was unclear about exact measures and schedules. Nor did he recognize the need to dispense with the services of Ryzhkov as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Ryzhkov had voiced his unhappiness about extensive de-nationalization and monetary reform in December 1989.⁹ By June 1990 Ryzhkov yielded somewhat, but still called in opaque terms for a ‘regulated market’; he also announced that he would soon be introducing an increase in food prices so as to correct the gross imbalance in the state budget. Ryzhkov’s position combined the worst of both worlds: a half-hearted, drawn-out privatization programme and a further rise in the cost of living. The most radical among Gorbachëv’s advisers argued that the economy’s collapse was imminent. According to them, measures had to be deep, had to be rapid, had to be consistently imposed.

Even Gorbachëv’s agile mind had failed to assimilate basic economic concepts, and he simply refused to accept that consensus was unobtainable. In August 1990 he got permission from the USSR Supreme Soviet to create a commission to elaborate a plan for industrial, agricultural and commercial recovery – and Yeltsin agreed to co-operate with the commission. The result was the ‘500 Days Plan’, composed chiefly by Stanislav Shatalin. Gorbachëv supported it, but then vacillated under pressure from Ryzhkov. In September he ordered a reworking of the ‘500 Days Plan’ by Abel Aganbegyan to effect a compromise between the positions of Shatalin and Ryzhkov. This was like mating a rabbit with a donkey. Aganbegyan produced a predictably unworkable mixture of radical language and conservative ideas. But he had helped Gorbachëv out of his political complications, and in October the Supreme Soviet gave its assent to the set of ‘Basic Guidelines’ he presented to it.

At the time his angriest adversaries were the conservatives in the Congress of People’s Deputies who formed their own Soyuz (‘Union’) organization in October 1990.¹⁰ Most Soyuz members were Russians, but otherwise they were a diverse group. They included not only communist party members but also Christian believers, nationalist writers and ecological activists, and some of them were simply Russian functionaries who lived outside the RSFSR and were terrified about their personal prospects if ever the Soviet Union fell apart. Soyuz’s unifying belief was that the Soviet Union was the legitimate successor state to the Russian Empire. Its members were proud of the USSR’s industrial and cultural achievements of their country; they gloried in the USSR’s defeat of Nazi Germany. For them, Gorbachëv was the arch-destroyer of a great state, economy and society.

Gorbachëv was more disturbed by Soyuz than by those of his own supporters who wanted him to be still more radical. He knew that Soyuz had many undeclared sympathizers and that these were even to be found among central political and economic post-holders. Having backed down over Shatalin’s ‘500 Days Plan’ for the economy, he was sufficiently worried to give ground also in politics. One by one, he dispensed with prominent reformers in his entourage.

Alexander Yakovlev ceased to be one of Gorbachëv’s regular consultants after his bruising treatment at the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress. Yakovlev and Gorbachëv ceased to appear publicly together. In November, Vadim Bakatin was asked by Gorbachëv to step down as Minister of Internal Affairs. Gorbachëv also lost his close party colleague Vadim Medvedev. Bakatin and Medvedev had been constant proponents of the need to take the reforms further and faster. Then, Eduard Shevardnadze followed. In his case he went without being pushed; but unlike the others he did not go quietly. In an emotional speech to the Congress of People’s Deputies on 20 December he declared that, unless Gorbachëv changed his present course, the country was heading for dictatorship. Thereafter Nikolai Petrakov, Gorbachëv’s economics adviser, also departed. Even Ryzhkov left the political stage, laid low by a heart condition.

Ryzhkov’s job as Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers was taken by Valentin Pavlov, the Minister of Finances. Pavlov was even more suspicious of reform than Ryzhkov; and the new Minister of Internal Affairs was Boris Pugo, who was known as an advocate of repressive measures. Gorbachëv’s choice of Gennadi Yanaev, who agreed with Pavlov and Pugo, as Vice-President of the USSR was another indication that Shevardnadze’s fears were not entirely misplaced. Furthermore, on 13 January 1991, Soviet special forces in Lithuania stormed the Vilnius television tower. Fifteen people were killed in this flagrant attempt to deter separatist movements throughout the USSR. Gorbachëv disclaimed any knowledge of the decision to use force, and the blame was placed upon officials at the local level.

Yet Gorbachëv retained his determination to protect the territorial integrity of the USSR. On 17 March he organized a referendum on the question: ‘Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of the individual of any nationality will be guaranteed?’ Gorbachëv’s phrasing made it difficult for reform-minded citizens to vote against sanctioning the Union. But in other aspects of public life Gorbachëv was beset by trouble. Another Russian miners’ strike had broken out days earlier. In March, furthermore, supporters of Polozkov called an emergency session of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies in a bid to oust Yeltsin; and Gorbachëv, still leaning in the direction of Pavlov and Pugo, allowed 50,000 Ministry of Internal Affairs troops to be introduced to the capital to prevent a demonstration in Yeltsin’s favour. For a brief time Moscow seemed near to upheaval. But Gorbachëv baulked at the potential violence needed to restore direct control. He was also impressed by the 200,000 Muscovites who took the risk of turning out for a rally in support of Yeltsin. At last – alas, far too late! – Gorbachëv definitively reverted to the agenda of reform.

A rapprochement with Yeltsin ensued. Gorbachëv and Yeltsin announced that they would work together with common purpose. On 23 April a meeting of nine republican leaders was arranged at Gorbachëv’s dacha at Novo-Ogarëvo to draft a new Union Treaty that would augment political and economic powers of the governments of the Soviet republics. The final version was to be signed on 20 August. This tried the patience of Polozkov and his supporters beyond their limits, and they vehemently criticized him at the Central Committee of the USSR Communist Party on 24–5 April. Their comments enraged Gorbachëv in turn. At one point he handed in his resignation as General Secretary; only a petition in his favour organized by Bakatin and sixty-nine other Central Committee members persuaded him to stay in office. Polozkov lacked the nerve to push him out.¹¹ The result was victory for Gorbachëv: the terms of the proposed Union Treaty were accepted in principle by the Central Committee. The date of signature was set for 20 August.

A delighted Yeltsin travelled around the RSFSR urging the autonomous republics to ‘take whatever helping of power that you can gobble up by yourselves’.¹² When submitting himself to a presidential election in Russia on 12 June, he won a massive majority. His running-mate Alexander Rutskoi, an army colonel, became Russian vice-president. Other prominent associates were Ivan Silaev and Ruslan Khasbulatov: Silaev was appointed the RSFSR Prime Minister and Khasbulatov the Speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet. On 20 July Yeltsin pressed home his advantage by issuing a decree banning communist party organizations from keeping offices in administrative institutions and economic enterprises in Russia. This so-called ‘de-partization’ was not approved by Gorbachëv; but even he was exasperated by his party’s resistance to self-reform, and he arranged for another Party Congress to be held to determine a permanent strategy.

But Gorbachëv had scarcely any credit left with Soviet society. The economy was collapsing in every sector. Industrial output fell by eighteen per cent in 1991, agriculture by seventeen per cent. Even energy production, whose exports had supplied the backbone of state revenues in previous years, went down by ten per cent. The USSR budget deficit was between twelve and fourteen per cent of gross domestic product whereas it had been only four per cent in 1990. The result was a decline in the government’s ability to sustain the level of imports of consumer goods. The USSR’s towns and villages also experienced a shortage in fuel supplies. Consumers were further troubled by Pavlov’s decision at last to start raising the prices for food products in state shops. The result was highly unpleasant for a population unaccustomed to overt inflation. Across the year, it is reckoned, prices in such shops almost doubled.¹³

The hero of the late 1980s was regularly pilloried by his fellow Soviet citizens. He was much more popular abroad than at home. But even in international affairs he was buffeted: when in July 1991 he appealed to the ‘Group of Seven’ leading economic powers in London for assistance, he received much sympathy but no promise of a quick loan large enough to give relief to the traumatized Soviet economy. Gorbachëv’s demeanour appeared to many Soviet citizens as that of a cap-in-hand beggar. Yeltsin, who urged that Russia should get up off her knees, gained in popularity.

Several leading colleagues of Gorbachëv had long ago concluded that the USSR’s domestic chaos and international parlousness resulted from an excess of reform. Oleg Shenin, who had taken over the Central Committee Secretariat in the absence of both Gorbachëv and the physically-ailing Ivashko, called in January 1991 for an ‘end to the careless, anarchic approach’ to party affairs. USSR Vice-President Gennadi Yanaev talked often about the need for at least ‘elementary order’ in the country. Oleg Baklanov, Deputy Chairman of the Defence Council, regretted the arms agreements made with the USA. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov at the April 1991 Central Committee plenum demanded the declaration of a state of emergency on the railways, in the oil and metallurgical industries and in several whole regions of the USSR. At the Supreme Soviet, in June, he undermined the Novo-Ogarëvo negotiations by stating that the sovereignty demanded by the various Soviet republics could not be unconditional.

Gorbachëv was a tired man, too tired to take full cognizance of the dangers. He had often heard Shevardnadze and Yakovlev warning of an imminent coup d’état; yet nothing had ever happened. In late June 1991, when American Secretary of State James Baker sent him a message naming Pavlov, Kryuchkov and Yazov as possible conspirators, Gorbachëv refused to become alarmed, and went off in early August for an extended vacation in the dacha he had had built for himself in the Black Sea village of Foros.¹⁴

He underrated the extraordinary political discontent he left behind. On 23 July 1991 the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, which had carried Nina Andreeva’s letter in March 1988, published ‘A Word to the People’ signed by twelve public figures.¹⁵ Army generals Boris Gromov and Valentin Varennikov were among them: Gromov was First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Varennikov was Commander of Soviet Ground Forces. Another signatory was Soyuz leader Yuri Blokhin. Russian nationalists such as the film director Yuri Bondarëv and writers Alexander Prokhanov and Valentin Rasputin were also present. Others included Gennadi Zyuganov (member of the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party), Vasili Starodubtsev (chairman of the USSR Peasants’ Union) and Alexander Tizyakov (President of the Association of State Enterprises and Associations). None was at the peak of public eminence, but all were major Soviet personages.

Their ‘Word to the People’ railed against current conditions in the Soviet Union: ‘An enormous, unprecedented misfortune has occurred. The Motherland, our country, the great state entrusted to us by history, by nature and by our glorious forebears is perishing, is being broken up, is being plunged into darkness and oblivion.’¹⁶ All citizens were entreated to help to preserve the USSR. A wide variety of social groups was addressed: workers, managers, engineers, soldiers, officers, women, pensioners and young people.

No reference was made to Lenin and the October Revolution. The signatories appealed instead to patriotism and statehood: the Army, whose feat in vanquishing Nazi Germany was recorded, was the only institution selected for praise. Nor was any disrespect shown towards religion. The appeal was explicitly directed equally at Christians, Muslims and Buddhists.¹⁷ Ostensibly, too, the contents indicated no preference for any particular nation. But out of all countries and regions of the USSR, only Russia was mentioned as ‘beloved’. And indeed the appeal opened with the following phrase: ‘Dear Russians! Citizens of the USSR! Fellow countrymen!’ Here was a fusion of Russian and Soviet identities reminiscent of Stalin in the Second World War. Without saying so, the signatories firmly trusted that Russians would prove the national group that would act to save the USSR from the disaster of the projected Union Treaty.

They had practically written the manifesto for a coup d’état. It is inconceivable that they were publishing their feelings in the press without the knowledge of other governmental personages. Gorbachëv’s refusal to recognize how things stood was surprising: the only precaution he took in summer 1991 was to ask Yeltsin informally to stay in Moscow while the Gorbachëv family took a holiday in Crimea. Yeltsin was meant to mind the shop, as it were, in the owner’s absence. Such casualness later gave rise to rumours that Gorbachëv had secretly been planning to have a pretext to tear up the deal with Yeltsin. Perhaps he even wanted a coup to be attempted so that he might return as the mediator between all the contending forces. All this is far fetched. The likeliest explanation lies in Gorbachëv’s over-confidence. He trusted his fellow ministers because they were his own appointees. He had out-manoeuvred them year after year: he simply could not believe that they eventually might dance rings around him.

And so Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachëv went off to enjoy themselves in Foros with their daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren. Every day they walked six kilometres. (Much as he Americanized his image, Gorbachëv laudably refrained from the practice of TV-accompanied jogging.) Even on holiday, of course, he was a working President. In particular, he prepared a speech and an article on the Union Treaty to be signed on 20 August 1991.

On 18 August his quietude was interrupted, when he was visited unexpectedly by Shenin, Baklanov, Varennikov and his own personal assistant Valeri Boldin. On their arrival he noted that the telephones at his dacha were not functioning. This was the first sign that a conspiracy was afoot. His visitors told him that an emergency situation would shortly be declared, and that it would be appreciated if he would transfer his powers temporarily to Vice-President Yanaev. Baklanov assured him that they would restore order in the country and that he could subsequently return as President without having had to carry out the ‘dirty business’ himself. But Gorbachëv was intransigent. If he had misjudged his collaborators, they had got him wrong to an equal extent; and he swore at them lustily before sending them packing.¹⁸ Varennikov flew on to Kiev to inform Ukrainian political leaders that a state of emergency was being declared and that Gorbachëv was too ill to stay in charge. Baklanov, Shenin and Boldin returned to Moscow to confer with the other principal plotters.

Meanwhile KGB Chairman Kryuchkov and Interior Minister Pugo had been busy persuading functionaries to join them in the State Committee for the Emergency Situation. Vice-President Yanaev, Prime Minister Pavlov and Defence Minister Yazov were courted strongly. All eventually agreed even though Pavlov and Yanaev needed preliminary infusions of vodka. Along with them were Baklanov, Starodubtsev and Tizyakov. Kryuchkov had tried in vain to get Anatoli Lukyanov, the Supreme Soviet speaker and Gorbachëv’s friend since their university days, to join them. But at least Lukyanov handed the plotters an article criticizing the Union Treaty which could be broadcast by television early next morning;¹⁹ he also signalled to the plotters that he would prevent opposition arising in the Supreme Soviet.

From the night of 18–19 August nothing went right for the conspiracy. The plan for the creation of a State Committee for the Emergency Situation was to be announced in the morning. Explanations were to be sent out to the army, the KGB and the Soviet communist party. Then the members of the State Committee were set to appear at a televised press conference. In fact the press conference was a shambles. Yanaev, while declaring himself Acting President, could not stop his fingers from twitching. Pavlov was too drunk to attend. Outlandish incompetence was shown after the conference. Meetings of public protest were not broken up in the capital. The Moscow telephone network was allowed to function. Fax messages could be sent unimpeded. Satellite TV continued to be beamed into the USSR; foreign television crews moved around the city unhindered. The tanks sent into the streets contained naïve young soldiers who were disconcerted by the many bystanders who asked them why they were agreeing to use force upon fellow citizens.

The State Committee’s project for a coup d’état had not been unrealistic. Disillusionment with Gorbachëv in Russia was pervasive by summer 1991; order and tranquillity were universally demanded. Kryuchkov, Yanaev and their associates also had the cunning to gain popularity by releasing basic consumer products to be sold in the shops at rock-bottom prices. Moreover, every Soviet citizen knew that traditional institutions of coercion were at the disposal of the State Committee: resistance to the attempted coup would require considerable bravery.

Yet radical politicians showed exactly that quality. The State Committee had blundered in failing to arrest Yeltsin, Rutskoi, Silaev and Khasbulatov. Yeltsin, on hearing of the coup, phoned his colleagues and prepared a proclamation denouncing the State Committee as an illegal body and calling for Gorbachëv’s liberation. He also contacted Pavel Grachëv, Commander of Soviet Airborne-Ground Forces to request physical protection.²⁰ The State Committee had erred yet again; for they had put Grachëv in charge of military operations in Moscow without testing his political loyalty. Grachëv’s refusal to abandon Gorbachëv and Yeltsin was to prove crucial. Yeltsin got into a car and raced along country roads to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet building – which was becoming known as the White House – in central Moscow. There he rallied his associates, and a crowd of tens of thousands began to gather outside. Barricades of rubble, old trucks and wire were constructed around the building.

Yeltsin’s instincts told him what to do next. Tall and bulky, he strode out from the White House at one o’clock in the afternoon and clambered on to one of the tanks of the Taman Division stationed at the side of the road. From this exposed position the Russian President announced his defiance of the State Committee. The State Committee leaders had expected that the merest show of force, with perhaps only seventy arrests in the capital, would give them victory. Most of them, including Kryuchkov and Pugo, did not want to be responsible for a great number of deaths.

Their coup d’état had therefore depended on immediate total implementation. This scheme had not succeeded. The State Committee’s sole alternative was to intensify military operations. Above all, the White House had to be stormed. The suppression of resistance in Moscow would have the effect of intimidating all the Soviet republics into compliance. Unfortunately for the State Committee, ‘Acting President’ Yanaev was already losing his nerve and trying to avoid trouble. Baklanov, Kryuchkov and Pugo therefore decided to ignore him and direct their troops against the White House. Yeltsin, who had for years been well acquainted with the State Committee leaders, phoned them on a direct line to warn of the unpleasant international consequences. He also predicted that they would not be forgiven at home either. But the core of the State Committee’s membership held firm. Late on 19 August army commanders were asked to draw up a plan for the storming of the Russian White House.

At the same time the Taman Tank Division besieging the building was talking to Yeltsin’s Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi. ²¹ Yanaev’s will cracked. At a State Committee meeting at 8 p.m. he ordered that no action should be started against the White House.²² But the State Committee again ignored him, recognizing that any failure to arrest Yeltsin would bring ruin on themselves. Commands were given for further troop movements. In the night of 20–21 August tanks moved around the Garden Ring Road of Moscow. Crowds of citizens tried to block their path; and in an incident near the White House, three young civilian men – Dmitri Komar, Ilya Krichevski and Vladimir Usov – were killed.

A violent outcome seemed inevitable as Yeltsin and his associates got ready to resist an attack on the White House. Weapons were smuggled inside. The cellist Mtsislav Rostropovich joined Yeltsin in the building, playing his instrument to stiffen morale. Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev arrived to show solidarity. They all did this in the knowledge that they might not come out alive. Crowds of Muscovites, mainly youngsters, formed a human chain around the perimeter of the White House. They had no means of apprehending that in the early hours of 21 August the State Committee’s confidence was on the point of collapse. One after another, the military commanders withheld assistance from the State Committee: even the Alpha Division, which had been ordered to storm the White House, had become uncooperative. Yazov as Minister of Defence called off the military action; and Kryuchkov – to Baklanov’s disdain – refused to seize back control from Yazov.²³

By midday on 21 August the sole effective aspect of the State Committee’s activity was its maintenance of a news black-out on its decisions. In fact its leaders had decided to terminate the coup, and at 2.15 p.m. Kryuchkov and three other State Committee members along with Anatoli Lukyanov boarded a plane for the south. Their purpose was to plead their case directly with Gorbachëv in Foros. Gorbachëv refused to see most of them, but agreed to a brief meeting with Lukyanov. Having asked why Lukyanov had not convened the USSR Supreme Soviet in protest against the State Committee, Gorbachëv called him a traitor and showed him the door.²⁴ Yeltsin’s Vice-President Rutskoi, too, had meanwhile arrived at Foros to take custody of the various plotters. Gorbachëv and his family – including Raisa, who had had a severe collapse of some kind – immediately returned to Moscow. Kryuchkov and others were put on the same plane by Rutskoi to ensure that military sympathizers of the State Committee did not take it into their heads to fire upon them.²⁵

At four minutes after midnight on 22 August, Gorbachëv stepped down from the plane at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. He came back to a changed USSR. Yet Gorbachëv refused to lay blame on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union despite the evidence that many of its officials had collaborated with the ‘putsch’. He filled some of the posts of the putschists with figures who were as odious to the White House’s defenders as the putschists had been. At the funeral of Komar, Krichevski and Usov, it was Yeltsin rather than Gorbachëv who captured the public mood by asking forgiveness of their bereaved mothers for not having been able to protect their sons.

On 5 September the Congress of People’s Deputies set up yet another temporary central authority, the State Council, which comprised Gorbachëv and the leaders of those Soviet republics willing to remain part of the Union.²⁶ Gorbachëv’s resilience was truly remarkable: both his sense of duty and his will to retain power were unabated. But the putsch had altered the constellation of politics. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova had conducted a campaign of passive resistance to the State Committee of the Emergency Situation. Kazakhstan and Ukraine had been less forthright in opposing the Committee, but nevertheless had not co-operated with it. Only a minority of the USSR’s Soviet republics, notably Turkmenistan, had welcomed the putsch. In the RSFSR, Tatarstan under its leader Mintimer Shaimiev took a similar position; but most of the other internal autonomous republics refused to collaborate. When the putsch failed, even Turkmenistan’s President Niyazov started again to demand independence for his country.

No State Council would be able to impose central authority to the previous degree. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania appealed to the rest of the world to give them diplomatic recognition; and Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachëv, had long since supported their right to complete independence. At last the West gave the three states what they wanted. Meanwhile the humbling of Gorbachëv continued in Moscow. Having suffered at Gorbachëv’s hands in October 1987, Yeltsin had no reason to be gentle. At any rate he had never been a gracious victor. When the two of them had appeared together at the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR on 23 August, Yeltsin ordered the Soviet President about as if he were the junior office-holder. With a peremptory gesture of his hand he rasped out that the recently-compiled list of the State Committee’s collaborators should be made public: ‘Read them out!’ A doleful Gorbachëv had no choice but to release the list to the media.

No politician in twentieth-century Russia had effected so stupendous a comeback as Yeltsin. No one was as daring as he. Nor was anyone luckier. Gorbachëv could easily have finished him off politically in 1987. Certainly Ligachëv would have done just that. But Gorbachëv, once he had defeated Yeltsin, showed a degree of magnanimity which no previous Soviet leader had exhibited towards vanquished opponents.

Good fortune had blessed Yeltsin several times in his life. Born in a tiny village in Sverdlovsk province in 1931, he nearly died at his baptism when a tipsy priest dropped him in the font. His grandmother plucked him out to stop him drowning.²⁷ Young Boris was a rascal. Once he and his pals played with a hand-grenade they found in the woods. There was an explosion, and Boris lost two fingers of his left hand.²⁸ Yet his personality was irrepressible. His father had been sentenced to three years of forced labour for criticizing conditions of construction-site workers in Kazan;²⁹ but the young lad managed to keep this quiet when he entered the Urals Polytechnical Institute to train as a civil engineer. A natural athlete, he was quickly picked for the city’s volleyball team. In the vacations he travelled widely in Russia despite his poverty by climbing on to train carriage-tops and taking a free ride. He never lived life by the rules.

On graduating, he worked in the construction industry. In 1968 he switched careers, joining the Sverdlovsk Province Party Committee apparatus. Eight years later he was its first secretary, and in 1981 became a Central Committee member. Sverdlovsk (now a days known by its pre-revolutionary name, Yekaterinburg) is Russia’s fifth largest city. Yeltsin was its boisterous leader in the communist party tradition: he ranted and threatened. He broke legal and administrative procedures to achieve results for his province. He also used charm and guile. In search of finance for an underground rail-system in Sverdlovsk, he asked for an audience with Brezhnev and whispered his case into the ailing General Secretary’s ear. Sverdlovsk obtained the funds for its metro.³⁰

It was already evident that his style had a populistic streak. In Sverdlovsk he had turned public ceremonies into carnivals. Whole families walked in parade on the October Revolution anniversary and Yeltsin addressed them on the city’s main square. One year on the eve of the anniversary, when his car swerved into a ditch sixty kilometres from Sverdlovsk, he bounded over the fields to the nearest village and commandeered a tractor and a drunken tractor-driver to get them to the morning parade on time.³¹ On his transfer to the capital in 1985 he was already an audacious crowd-pleaser. His anti-corruption campaign in Moscow made him an object of hatred among the existing party personnel. But he did not mind about their criticisms; he understood that his popularity rose every time he was victimized by the Politburo from 1987. The more dangers he ran, the better he was liked in ordinary homes.

He had a mercurial personality. As Moscow party chief in 1985–7, he had been a bully and had sacked officials in their thousands without investigation of individual cases. But subsequently the Inter-Regional Group in the Congress of People’s Deputies since 1990 had given him an education in consultative procedures, and he learned how to listen and to act as a member of a team: this was not typical behaviour for a communist party official.

His apparent goal, after the arrest of the putschists, was the inception of a combination of democratic politics and capitalist economy in a Russia unrestrained by the USSR. On 23 August he suspended the legal status of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Russia. Gorbachëv complied by laying down the office of Party General Secretary. Yeltsin’s pressure was unremitting. On 28 October he made a lengthy, televised speech to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies declaring his intention to implement an economic programme based upon the principles of the market. A few days later, on 6 November, he issued a decree banning the Soviet communist party altogether. He stipulated, too, that the ministers of the RSFSR had precedence over those of the USSR; and he applied a veto on any USSR appointments he disliked. Between 6 and 8 November he announced the composition of his full cabinet. He himself would be RSFSR prime minister while Yegor Gaidar, a proponent of laissez-faire economics, would be his Finance Minister and a Deputy Prime Minister. It would be a cabinet for drastic economic reform.

None the less Yeltsin had yet to reveal his purposes about the USSR. Publicly he denied any wish to break up the Union, and he accepted the invitation to return to the Novo-Ogarëvo negotiations. Yet Yeltsin’s aides had been working on contingency plans for Russia’s complete secession even before the August coup; and subsequently Yeltsin lost no chance to weaken the draft powers of the Union he was discussing with Gorbachëv. So what did Yeltsin really want?

Gorbachëv’s proposal was that the USSR should give way to a ‘Union of Sovereign States’. There would still be a single economic space and a unified military command; there would also be regular consultations among the republican presidents. Gorbachëv concurred that the Union President would not be allowed to dominate the others. His despair was such that he offered to step down in Yeltsin’s favour as Union President if only Yeltsin would agree to maintain the Union. ‘Let’s talk man to man about this,’ he implored Yeltsin.³² But Yeltsin was inscrutable. There were reasons for him to keep his options open. Of special importance was the refusal of Leonid Kravchuk, the Ukrainian President, to join the discussions. On 18 October, when a Treaty on the Economic Commonwealth had been signed, Ukraine declined to send a representative.³³ In such a situation, on 24 November, Yeltsin rejected Gorbachëv’s request to him and to the other republican leaders to initial the Union Treaty.³⁴

The people of Ukraine, including most of its Russian inhabitants, were terminally exasperated with Gorbachëv, and on 1 December they voted for independence in a referendum. The voters cast their ballots for a variety of reasons. Supporters of radical economic reform wanted freedom to carry it out fast; opponents of such reform advocated independence because they, too, wished to be liberated from Gorbachëv. And Ukrainian nationalists simply wanted independence. The result of the referendum was a disaster for the proposed Union of Sovereign States. Without Ukraine, such a Union was unrealizable.

Yeltsin arranged an emergency meeting with Ukrainian President Kravchuk and Shushkevich, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus (as Belorussia now insisted on being called), in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha near the Belarusian capital Minsk. On 8 December, Yeltsin and Kravchuk persuaded Shushkevich to agree to the formation of a Common wealth of Independent States (CIS), an even weaker combination than the very weakened version of the Union lately proposed at Novo-Ogarëvo.³⁵ The Commonwealth would maintain a unified economic area and unified strategic military forces. But it would have its central offices not in Moscow but in Minsk, and there would be no president. The declaration of the three Slavic republics presented the other republics with a fait accompli. They could either join the Commonwealth or go it alone. On 21 December eight further Soviet republics assented to membership: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The dissenting republics were the three Baltic states and Georgia.

Perhaps the Ukrainian referendum was the pretext that Yeltsin had been waiting for to break up the USSR in line with a basic hidden strategy. More likely is the possibility that he simply had a keen wish to get rid of Gorbachëv and to assume unconditional authority in Moscow. It may also be that, being a very impulsive leader, he was merely reacting to situations as the mood took him.

What was indisputably clear was that the game was up for Gorbachëv. If there was not even to be a Union of Sovereign States, he had no function to discharge except the declaration of his retirement. He bowed to the inevitable and accepted that the Soviet republics were about to go their own ways. He did this with a heavy heart, predicting that the break-up of the Union would lead to military and political strife as well as economic ruin. But he had fought for the Union, and lost. On 25 December he gave a short speech on television. He spoke with simple dignity: ‘I leave my post with trepidation. But also with hope, with faith in you, in your wisdom and force of spirit. We are the inheritors of a great civilization, and now the burden falls on each and every one that it may be resurrected to a new, modern and worthy life.’³⁶ The USSR would be abolished at midnight on 31 December 1991.

Into oblivion would pass a state which had caused political tremors abroad by its very existence in the 1920s. A state whose borders were roughly the same as those of the Russian Empire and whose population embraced an unparalleled number of nations, religions and philosophies. A state which had built a mighty industrial base in the 1930s and had defeated Germany in the Second World War. A state which became a superpower, matching the USA in military capacity by the late 1970s. A state whose political and economic order had introduced a crucial category of the lexicon of twentieth-century thought. From the beginning of 1992, that state was no more.

Zhirinovski’s newspaper Liberal ridicules Yeltsin as a saint leading a truck full of Western products such as Pepsi Cola. The truck is painted with the sign ‘Market’.