The American leaders had long been aware that the Soviet Union’s policy of cooperation with the West might be short-lived, and Washington had planned accordingly. In January 1991, after hearing a CIA report on the latest developments in the Soviet Union, Secretary of State James Baker commented to his staff, “What you are telling us, fellas, is that the stock market is heading south. We need to sell.” Baker meant locking in the gains of the unprecedented bull market in US-Soviet relations. In his memoirs he wrote, “‘Selling’ meant trying to get as much as we could out of the Soviets before there was an even greater turn to the right or shift into disintegration.” This policy continued into the spring and summer of 1991. Robert Gates wrote in his memoirs that in the months leading up to the coup the administration was following the approach summarized by Brent Scowcroft at a national security briefing for the president on May 31, 1991: “Our goal is to keep Gorby in power for as long as possible, while doing what we can to help head him in the right direction—and doing what is best for us in foreign policy.”
Now that Gorbachev was out of power, the task was not to forfeit what had been achieved during his tenure. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had led to the reunification of the two German states and symbolized the end of communism in Eastern Europe. Could the old walls dividing East and West be rebuilt by the new leaders in the Kremlin? No one knew. On August 19, 1991, the same day George Bush dictated his warm and compassionate virtual letter to Gorbachev, he also dictated the following into his tape recorder: “I think what we must do is see that the progress made under Gorbachev is not turned around. I’m talking about Eastern Europe, I’m talking about the reunification of Germany, I’m talking about getting the troops out of the pact countries, and the Warsaw Pact itself staying out of business. [[Soviet]] cooperation in the Middle East is vital of course, and we may not get it now, who knows?”6
Judging by his audio diary, Bush was struggling to reconcile the policies he felt he had to conduct in the interests of his country with the personal attachment he clearly felt for Gorbachev. In his thoughts, the president went back in time, trying to establish whether he or his administration could have done anything more to support Gorbachev and help him avoid the coup. Eventually he succeeded in convincing himself that nothing could have been done differently or better. In his diary that day, Bush was eager to answer critics who claimed that he had been too supportive of Gorbachev. He saw the coup as a vindication of his earlier policies vis-à-vis the Soviet center and the republics—represented by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. “If we had pulled the rug out from under Gorbachev and swung towards Yeltsin you’d have seen a military crackdown far in excess of the ugliness that’s taking place now,” wrote Bush in his diary.
A more difficult question to answer was whether the United States and its allies had done enough to support Gorbachev in London in July when he had asked for money. That question was raised by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada in a telephone conversation with Bush after the press conference. He reminded Bush of the question he had asked Helmut Kohl in London: “If a month from now, Gorbachev is overthrown and people are complaining that we haven’t done enough, is what we’re proposing the kind of thing we should do?” Kohl, who owed Gorbachev a debt for his role in the reunification of Germany and was the strongest advocate of granting the Soviet Union as many credits as possible, allegedly said, “Absolutely.” Both Bush and Mulroney knew that Kohl’s position at the G-7 meeting in London had been much more supportive of Gorbachev than their own, but afterward they took comfort in Kohl’s change of heart as he indicated that Germany would go along with the United States and the rest of the G-7 in offering Gorbachev encouragement but little money. “Any doubt in your mind that he was overthrown because he was too close to us?” asked Mulroney. “I don’t think there is any doubt,” answered the president.7
GORBACHEV HAD PLANNED TO RETURN to Moscow from his summer vacation in the Crimea on August 19. He had flown there on August 4, about the same time that President Bush went to Walker’s Point. Like Bush’s estate, Gorbachev’s vacation home was located by the sea, but whereas Bush went to Maine to avoid the heat of the American summer, Gorbachev went south to bask in the sun: like many Soviet citizens of his generation, he could not imagine a vacation without getting a suntan and swimming in the Black Sea. Unlike other Soviet citizens, however, he could afford to spend his vacation in what was considered utmost luxury by Soviet standards.
In 1988, a brand-new villa had been constructed for Gorbachev on the high bluffs of the Crimea near a settlement called Foros. Located in “greater Yalta,” Foros was some forty kilometers from Livadia, where Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin had conferred in 1945. The new mansion, known as State Resort No. 11 or the Sunrise Building, was constructed at a time when Gorbachev and his colleagues in the Politburo had launched a campaign against privileges for the party leadership and apparatus. When the Gorbachevs came to Foros in August 1991, Raisa ordered that crystal chandeliers be removed from beach houses near the sea. That did little to change the reality: it was a luxurious development indeed.
The Sunrise Building went up in record time on what previously had been bare rock. To make the environment more hospitable, thousands of tons of soil, along with bushes and trees, were brought there from afar. Every year, as winter rains and winds pushed soil down to the sea, new soil was brought in to replace what had been lost. The beach, created by removing rocks and adding hundreds of tons of sand, was connected with the main terrace by an escalator. To protect the mansion from the winds, which were especially strong there, part of the huge rock face was cut off to accommodate the building. The officers of the KGB bodyguard department, which oversaw construction and was charged with ensuring the security of the mansion, complained that it was difficult to protect from approaches by both land and sea, but the Gorbachevs loved it. As in previous years, in August 1991 they vacationed there together with their daughter’s family—the thirty-four-year-old medical doctor Irina Vigranskaia, née Gorbacheva, together with her doctor husband, Anatolii, and their two young daughters.
August 18, the last day of Gorbachev’s vacation, had begun for him like any other part of his Crimean holiday. He and Raisa woke up at about 8:00 a.m. and had breakfast, and at around 11:00 a.m. Mikhail and Raisa, whose movements were recorded by their KGB guards under the code names 110 and 111, went down to the sea. As always, Raisa went for a swim, but Mikhail remained on the beach: a few days earlier he had suffered an attack of lumbago and was now staying away from the water. As always, it was a working vacation for Gorbachev. After lunch he revised the speech he was going to deliver in Moscow on August 20 at the signing ceremony for the new union treaty, which was the result of many months of maneuvering and negotiation between the weakening center and the ever more assertive republics. At about 4:30 p.m. Gorbachev spoke by phone with one of his aides, Georgii Shakhnazarov, who was vacationing at a nearby resort and helping him draft the speech. It turned out to be the last phone conversation Gorbachev would have for the next several days.
A few minutes earlier, two KGB officers who had arrived in the Crimea together with the head of the bodyguard department of the KGB, General Yurii Plekhanov, ordered Tamara Vikulina, a telephone operator at the KGB-run government telephone center, to cut Gorbachev’s lines. Vikulina asked them to allow her to place the last call—she had just told Gorbachev that she was connecting him with Shakhnazarov. The officers agreed. But once the call was over, all the lines linking Gorbachev’s mansion with the outside world were cut, including the communications network that allowed the Soviet president to launch a nuclear attack. The president’s nuclear briefcase would be sent to Moscow the next day, where it ended up in the hands of the plotters, who included the minister of defense, Marshal Yazov, and the chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Moiseev, the bearers of two other nuclear briefcases. The Ministry of Defense became the sole master of the Soviet nuclear force.8
Gorbachev realized that
something was wrong when Vladimir Medvedev, the chief of his personal security detail, came to his room around 4:45 p.m. and interrupted his afternoon newspaper reading with the announcement that there was a group of visitors from Moscow waiting to see him. Members of the group included his chief of staff, Valerii Boldin; two secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; and the commander of Soviet ground troops, General Valentin Varennikov. All except Varennikov were trusted aides long known to Gorbachev, but the Soviet president was clearly worried. He asked Medvedev how they had made their way to the heavily guarded compound. Medvedev replied that the group included General Plekhanov, the chief of all bodyguards, including Medvedev himself. What did they want? Medvedev could not answer that question. By then he already knew that a coup was under way. When Plekhanov had showed up in his office a few minutes earlier and asked that the delegation be taken to Gorbachev, Medvedev had first tried to reach the president by phone. The line was dead. “Now I understood,” he later wrote, “this was the Khrushchev scenario. All communications had been cut.”9
Gorbachev understood that it might be a coup after he told Medvedev to ask the guests to wait and then tried to call Moscow to find out what was going on. He wanted to reach the head of the KGB, his trusted ally Vladimir Kriuchkov. The telephone was dead. So was another, and another—all five, including the red telephone provided for Gorbachev as commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces. Now there could be no doubt: it was a coup, and not only had the visitors violated protocol by showing up without being summoned, they had also isolated the Soviet leader from potential allies outside. Gorbachev summoned Raisa and then his daughter and son-in-law to one of the bedrooms. After a short discussion, the entire family decided to stand by him, whatever decision he made. Gorbachev later wrote that he firmly resolved not to succumb to pressure and change his policies, no matter what the cost. It was a moment full of anxiety. “We all knew our history, its terrible pages,” recalled Raisa Gorbacheva later.10
The last Soviet leader ousted by his aides had been Nikita Khrushchev, whose removal in 1964 was immediately recalled by Gorbachev’s bodyguard. Khrushchev was lucky: his life was spared, and he was allowed to retire. All previous Soviet leaders, as well as Khrushchev’s successor, Brezhnev, died in office—some under more than suspicious circumstances. There were persistent rumors that Stalin had been poisoned: he died at a time when he was preparing to strike out against his closest associates, including the head of the secret police, Lavrentii Beria. This alleged mastermind of Stalin’s assassination was soon arrested by the military on Khrushchev’s orders and shot after being accused of working for British intelligence. Leonid Brezhnev had died in 1982, when, according to some reports, he was preparing a transfer of power that would bypass the former head of the KGB, Yurii Andropov. According to Brezhnev’s bodyguard, Vladimir Medvedev, for years Andropov (along with some other members of the Politburo) had been supplying Brezhnev with sleeping pills; Brezhnev died in his sleep. The Gorbachevs knew their history, or rather the Kremlin lore, very well.11
Given the political precedents, it was a good sign that the plotters had decided to talk before acting. After speaking to his family, Gorbachev went to see the uninvited guests. They were already in the building, some sitting on a couch, others wandering around the second-floor hall of the mansion, which they found spectacular. Then they saw Gorbachev. He was clearly suffering from lumbago and moving with difficulty. Gorbachev invited the visitors into his office and, turning to those with whom he felt most comfortable, asked in a low voice whether this was an arrest. They assured him that it was not. They told him that they had come to discuss the situation in the country. His demeanor changed. “Whom do you represent, and in whose name are you speaking?” asked Gorbachev once the plotters had crammed into his office, which had only two chairs for visitors. They were silent, not knowing what to say. He repeated the question. When they told him that they represented a committee including Kriuchkov, Yazov, and Yanaev, the president asked who had created the committee—the Supreme Soviet? They did not have an answer. Gorbachev had immediately identified the weakest spot in their position: the committee they represented was an “extra-constitutional” body at best.12
Valerii Boldin, the fifty-six-year-old chief of the presidential staff and the plotter who knew the president best, believed that Gorbachev felt somewhat relieved when he heard the names of the committee members. Gorbachev’s main concern, argued Boldin in his memoirs, was that the visitors might represent not his indecisive aides but his impulsive archenemy, Boris Yeltsin. In the previous few days Gorbachev had often been on the phone with Kriuchkov, discussing the political situation in the country. Gorbachev was mainly worried that at the last moment Yeltsin would change his position and refuse to sign the union treaty. On August 14 he had had a long conversation with Yeltsin, trying to convince him not to succumb to the pressure of critics who were demanding a Russian referendum on the treaty. “On the whole we parted on good terms,” wrote Gorbachev in his memoirs. “However, I could not get rid of the feeling that Yeltsin was holding something back.”
When, a few days later, on August 16, Yeltsin went to Almaty to see the Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, an ally of his, an alarmed Gorbachev called Valerii Boldin in Moscow to find out whether he knew anything about the visit. Gorbachev suspected a plot. “You understand what’s going on. Independently, ignoring the opinion of the president of the USSR, local leaders are deciding matters of state. This is a conspiracy,” he allegedly told his aide, who was already plotting with Kriuchkov and others to oust his boss. On August 18, the day the plotters showed up on the doorstep of Gorbachev’s Foros villa, Yeltsin had issued a decree taking over any all-Union institutions responsible for supply chains on the territory of the Russian Federation. Gorbachev’s principal concern at the time was how to deal with Yeltsin.13
Judging by Boldin’s memoirs, in the last years of his rule Gorbachev put pressure on the KGB to wiretap Yeltsin’s conversations, despite alleged protests by Kriuchkov, who reported that his people were refusing to do the job. Kriuchkov sent the transcripts to Boldin, who then arranged for their direct delivery to Gorbachev. The Soviet leader was worried about a possible alliance between his political opponents, among whom he listed not only Yeltsin but also his liberal adviser and the “grandfather of perestroika,” Aleksandr Yakovlev, and the military. Gorbachev was especially disturbed by the violent end of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime and the execution of the Romanian leader, along with his wife, by rebels in December 1989. There were discussions about establishing direct presidential control over the KGB directorate in charge of presidential bodyguards, but Gorbachev never acted on the idea. Instead, he dramatically increased the number of his bodyguards and their salaries. He also started to use an armored limousine more often. In August 1991 the bodyguards were still hired by and reported to Kriuchkov, not Gorbachev.
The Romanian events were very much on the minds not only of Gorbachev but also of his security chiefs, although they drew different conclusions from them. On August 18, 1991, surprised by the unexpected appearance of the plotters, Gorbachev’s bodyguards had approached the arriving limousines armed with Kalashnikov automatic rifles. One of the bodyguards’ commanders, General Viacheslav Generalov, had arrived with the plotters: he rushed toward them, telling them to put their rifles aside so as not to repeat the Romanian scenario, when Ceauşescu’s guards provoked bloodshed that led to his execution. The guards obeyed Generalov’s order and let the unannounced visitors pass their checkpoint. Gorbachev’s main line of defense had failed. When he showed the plotters into his small office, he would not admit General Plekhanov, the chief of the KGB directorate. Gorbachev considered him a traitor who had tried to “save his own skin” by betraying the president.14
As Gorbachev sat in his study, facing the representatives of the plotters, it was not the loyalty of the guards but the treason of his most trusted associates that was his first concern. Against all odds, he was trying
to win a political battle, not an armed confrontation that might well have ended tragically for him and his family. Once he learned that the plotters were not his political opponents but his heretofore sycophantic allies and aides, he not only felt psychological relief of sorts but also found himself in a position of strength. “I had promoted these people—and now they were betraying me!” wrote Gorbachev in his memoirs. He had managed to browbeat and keep these people under control before. Now he would not allow Plekhanov to enter his office. He told Boldin to shut up and called him a “prick” who had come to lecture him on the situation in the country.
The visitors were shocked by the forcefulness of Gorbachev’s reaction to their proposals. They offered their boss a choice: either sign a decree declaring a state of emergency or transfer his powers temporarily to Gennadii Yanaev and stay in the Crimea for “health reasons,” while they would do all the “dirty work” in Moscow. The plotters believed that Gorbachev, with whom many of them had discussed contingency plans for the implementation of a state of emergency in the past, would agree to one of these proposals. Gorbachev flatly refused to accept either of them. “If they were truly worried about the situation in the country, I told them,” wrote Gorbachev in his memoirs, “we should convene the USSR Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies. Let’s discuss and decide. But let us act only within the framework of the Constitution and under the law. Anything else is unacceptable to me.” Gorbachev was in his element—negotiating, maneuvering, trying to convince his opponents. He asked them to describe their plans and called their mission suicidal. “Think about it and pass it on to the comrades,” he said to the visitors while shaking hands before their departure. To General Valentin Varennikov, the member of the delegation who was especially insistent on demanding the proclamation of a state of emergency, Gorbachev said, “Now, after such explanations, we obviously will not be working together.”
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