The issue of Soviet versus Russian identity now came to the fore. When paratroopers commanded by General Aleksandr Lebed, who were the first to arrive at the White House on August 19, declared themselves Soviets, one of the defenders responded, “What the hell is Soviet?” Iain Elliott, a reporter for the US-funded Radio Liberty, later described a scene that he witnessed on the streets of Moscow. A drunken man, “ripping open his shirt and thrusting his naked chest against the muzzle of a Kalashnikov in the hands of a nervous teenager . . . shouted: ‘You won’t shoot us, will you? After all, we’re Russian and you’re Russian.’” Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, who stayed in the cordon around the White House on the night of August 20, later remembered that those who declared themselves “for Russia” were considered “ours” and allowed to pass. On the same evening, General Grachev, who was still vacillating between the two sides, had told Yeltsin’s messenger to convey to the president of Russia that “he was a Russian and would never allow the army to spill the blood of its own people.”10
Yet blood would indeed soon be spilled. The first shots were fired at midnight. On the square in front of the White House, Michael Hetzer, the editor of the Guardian, a Moscow weekly produced for the benefit of the foreign community and expatriates, noted the time: it was 12:00 a.m. on August 21. News spread immediately among the White House defenders that tanks were circling to attack the parliament from the embankment of the Moskva River. “At 12:10 a.m. more shots could be heard over the hill on the Ring Road,” wrote Hetzer a few days later in his newspaper. “This time the sound, fast and regular, was unmistakably automatic gunfire. ‘They’re coming!’ one woman cried. ‘The bastards are coming.’ Later there was another burst of gunfire and then several terrific explosions.”11
General Valentin Varennikov, who had confronted Gorbachev in Foros on the evening of August 18, was now back in Moscow after a short stopover in Ukraine and was prepared to confront Yeltsin. He dispatched troop carriers toward the White House and was busily arranging the landing of commandos on the roof of the Russian parliament building. The first shots were fired by soldiers of the Taman division, who were passing the White House on Varennikov’s orders to take up positions near the Soviet Foreign Ministry in preparation for the assault. As the armored troop carriers entered the underpass beneath Kalinin Avenue, they were suddenly ambushed by defenders of the White House, who thought that the assault had already begun. The exit from the underpass was blocked by trolley buses. Although the lead carrier made it through the barricade, the others were trapped in the narrow tunnel.
The defenders of the White House, some of them veterans of Afghanistan, knew what had to be done to incapacitate the armored vehicles. They threw pieces of fabric onto the narrow observation openings, blocking the drivers’ view. The young and inexperienced soldiers, feeling trapped, began to rotate their gun turrets in an effort to dislodge the attackers. The soldiers were soon assaulted with Molotov cocktails that set the vehicles ablaze. Soldiers from the burning troop carriers jumped out, shooting into the air. Their bullets hit armor plate and the walls of the underpass, ricocheting into the crowd. One soldier burned his hands as he tried to put out the flames on his uniform, but the others escaped unharmed. They left three lifeless bodies on the pavement: an Afghan veteran, his skull crushed by a troop carrier, and two more defenders killed by bullets. Many others were wounded.12
Marshal Yazov learned of the first casualties after his return from the meeting of the Emergency Committee, where he suspected that Gennadii Yanaev and others were hedging their bets. Now it seemed that everyone was free and clear but Yazov. It was his people, the military, not KGB or police units, who had opened fire on ordinary Russian citizens. After grimly listening to the report on developments at the White House, Yazov ordered his deputy, “Give the command to stop!” The news that the army would take no part in the planned assault on the White House was met with disbelief by Kriuchkov. Those gathered in his office in the early hours of the morning of August 21 accused the military of cowardice. But some were actually relieved: these included senior officers charged with carrying out the attack, who might have ended up bearing personal responsibility for casualties. The commander of the Interior Ministry forces declared that if the army was not participating, neither would his troops.13
The KGB commandos were also refusing to storm the White House. The all-powerful espionage organization was crumbling under Kriuchkov’s feet. If one trusts claims made later by Vladimir Putin, the future president of Russia, that day the KGB chief received an unexpected call from St. Petersburg. Mayor Anatolii Sobchak, who supported Yeltsin, asked what had happened to the letter of resignation submitted a year earlier by his deputy, the thirty-eight-year-old KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin. That day Putin allegedly submitted his second letter of resignation. His allegiance was to Sobchak, not to the coup leaders. As Putin recalled later, he respected Kriuchkov, but “when I saw the criminals on the screen, I understood immediately that it was all over: they were done for.”
Some of Putin’s biographers question his claim to have submitted the letter during the coup, suggesting that he did so later, once the coup had collapsed. During the decisive days of August, his critics say, Putin was playing a wait-and-see game, trying to figure out which way the pendulum would swing. Even if Putin’s critics are right, his behavior during the coup was not exactly what Kriuchkov expected of his subordinates. Too many KGB officers were sitting on the proverbial fence, waiting to see whether the coup would succeed. Putin shared the plotters’ goal of saving the country but not their outdated methods. “In the days of the putsch all the ideals and goals that I had on going to work in the KGB collapsed,” confided the future president of Russia in an interview that he gave eight years later.14
Faced with defections on all fronts, Kriuchkov had no choice but to call off the assault. “Well, the operation has to be canceled,” he told his subordinates. By that time a heavy rain prevented a helicopter landing on the roof of the White House, and the last-ditch attempt to send commandos in plainclothes to the White House had been foiled by the vigilance of the defenders of the Russian parliament. Kriuchkov finally ordered that telephone lines to the building be cut: a prolonged siege of the White House was now on the agenda.
But around 8:00 a.m., Yazov called his commanders and ordered a complete withdrawal of troops from Moscow. This came as a major surprise to Kriuchkov and the other members of the Emergency Committee. The plotters descended on the Ministry of Defense, trying to convince Yazov to change his order. He was accused of cowardice and treason, but his answer remained the same: shooting people was no solution. If the army stayed in Moscow, said Yazov, there would be new clashes, and if even one tank was set on fire, with forty shells inside it, there would be a major disaster. Yazov told his co-conspirators that he was not about to become another Pinochet—the Chilean dictator known in the Soviet Union as a symbol of martial law and tyranny.15
NEWS OF THE WITHDRAWAL OF TROOPS from Moscow soon reached the exhausted defenders of the White House, causing jubilation in their ranks. Earlier that night, on hearing the first shots, Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, had rushed to the doctor’s office to awaken the Russian president, who was asleep in his clothes. It did not take him long to get up and follow Korzhakov into an elevator and then into the garage. Yeltsin’s first thought was, “That’s it. The storming had begun.” The aides put a bulletproof vest on him and seated him in the back of the presidential limousine.
Korzhakov ordered that the gate be opened. They were going to the American embassy across the square. By that time the Americans had been warned and were keeping their embassy gates open. Korzhakov’s people made a gap in the barricades to let the limousine through. A few short minutes, and Yeltsin would be in the safety of the American embassy. But before the car could start, the president came fully awake. “Where are we heading?” he asked his bodyguard.
“What do you mean, where?” answered the surprised Korzhakov. “T
o the American embassy. Two hundred meters, and we’re there.”
“What embassy?” responded the no less surprised Yeltsin. “No, we don’t need any embassy; let’s turn back.”
Korzhakov ordered the driver to wait. Yeltsin’s “fine,” which he had given Korzhakov a few hours earlier, was now reversed—and, as was often the case with Yeltsin, reversed in the most dramatic way and at the last possible moment.
Yeltsin’s political instinct took primacy over the instinct for survival. Whatever the risk of arrest or death during the assault on the White House, he wanted to survive politically. That could not be achieved by hiding in the American embassy. “It would mean I had gotten myself to a safe place but had left them under the gun,” remembered Yeltsin later. He was also sensitive to Russian national pride, which he had mobilized so skillfully in the months leading up to the coup. “Despite our respect for the Americans, people in our country don’t like it when foreigners take too active a hand in our affairs,” wrote Yeltsin in his memoirs. That was certainly an understatement. Many of his voters still thought in Cold War terms, seeing the United States as their country’s main adversary. The years of Gorbachev’s perestroika had done relatively little to dispel such sentiments, while the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe and economic troubles at home only added to resentment of the rich West in general and the United States in particular.
Yeltsin would spend the night in the basement of the White House, listening to occasional automatic gunfire outside and waiting for the assault to begin. He was joined in the White House basement by the democratic leaders of Moscow. There was the mayor, Gavriil Popov, and his deputy, Yurii Luzhkov. The deputy mayor came along with his pregnant young wife, who brought home-cooked food and a sense of calm that was in short supply in the besieged building.16
At 5:00 a.m., when the curfew was lifted by the military authorities in Moscow, the American chargé d’affaires, Jim Collins, got a chance to survey the previous night’s battlefield. “The half-dozen BMP’s which had become trapped in the Kalinin [[Avenue]] underpass after midnight had surrendered to the RSFSR forces,” wrote the diplomat to Washington. An unidentified source inside Yeltsin’s White House (the name is blacked out in the text of the embassy report released by the US archives) called the embassy after 6:00 a.m. to report that paratroopers heading for the White House had stopped after Russian officials approached their commander.
News of the army’s retreat was confirmed around 8:00 a.m. by a fax forwarded to the embassy by the Russian information service. According to the fax, the military authorities in Moscow had ordered the withdrawal of troops at “full speed.” One of the senior commanders stated that the military would not attempt to seize the White House “tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.” The coup seemed to be fizzling. The crowd that Collins had seen near Yeltsin’s White House around 5:00 a.m. was shrinking as many of the defenders left for home. Collins told the American personnel who had spent the tumultuous night in the embassy’s office building that it was safe to go back to their living quarters.17
While news of the troop withdrawal came as a complete surprise to most of the White House defenders, there are indications that Yeltsin and people around him learned of it earlier. It is known that at some point Kriuchkov, the KGB chief, personally called Yeltsin to inform him that the assault had been called off. Besides, Yeltsin apparently knew more about the plotters and their plans than they supposed. A few years after the events at the Russian White House, an American official told the Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh that President Bush had ordered American intercepts of telephone communications between the plot leaders and Soviet military commanders to be shared with Yeltsin.
“The Minister of Defense and the KGB chief were using the most secure lines to reach the military commanders,” wrote Hersh, quoting his source. “We told Yeltsin in real time what the communications were. The bulk of the theater commanders weren’t taking the calls.” According to Hersh, a communications specialist was sent from the American embassy to Yeltsin’s White House to set up secure communications with the Soviet military commanders. “Yeltsin was able to warn them to steer clear,” said Hersh’s unnamed source.18
Neither Bush nor members of his administration mentioned the transfer of intelligence to Yeltsin in their memoirs. If it actually happened, then it contravened a law signed by the president four days before the coup that made it illegal to authorize covert operations in foreign countries without informing the Senate. With most intelligence-related materials of the Bush administration still classified and unavailable for research, one can only speculate whether such sensitive information, revealing American capacity to eavesdrop on the most secret communications of the Russian military brass, was indeed transferred to Yeltsin and, if so, whether it influenced his behavior and the outcome of the coup. There is no hint of secret deals in the transcripts of Bush’s telephone conversations with Yeltsin.
On August 21, Bush reached Yeltsin by phone from his compound in Kennebunkport, to which he had returned after his short visit to Washington. It was 8:30 a.m. in Maine and 3:30 p.m. in Moscow. As Bush later recalled, Yeltsin sounded more confident than he had the previous day. He had survived the night and, in the words of Robert Gates, had turned into “a key figure as never before.” Bush asked the Russian president whether he could do anything at that point to assist him: “We are anxious to do anything helpful, not counterproductive. Do you have any suggestions?” Yeltsin had no additional requests: “Unfortunately, other than propagandizing our plight and moral support and statements I can’t see anything for you, technical or any other way, to help us at this point.” Referring to his plans to arrest the plotters, Yeltsin said, “I can’t give you the details about it over this phone.” Bush replied, “I understand.”19
The Russian president’s main worry now was not a possible assault on the White House but the political maneuvering of his opponents. He told Bush that a Russian delegation had been sent to the Crimea along with two of Gorbachev’s loyal aides to meet with the imprisoned president. “Unfortunately,” continued Yeltsin, “forty minutes before our group departed, 5 of the junta including Yazov flew out before us. What they want to do is intercept Gorbachev and either force him to sign a paper or take him to points unknown. What I’m trying to do is work with Kravchuk [[head of Ukraine]] to intercept them and have them land in Simferopol in the Crimea and not let them get to him [[Gorbachev]] first.” Yeltsin also reported that his opponents were lobbying members of the USSR Supreme Soviet, which would go into session on August 26, to provide legal foundations for the actions of the Emergency Committee. The coup, it appeared from Yeltsin’s analysis, might fail militarily but succeed politically. The key figure deciding the fate of the coup might again be Mikhail Gorbachev.
In the previous few days, Yeltsin had managed to expose the illegality of the coup and establish his own legitimacy by demanding Gorbachev’s release. As far as he and those around him were concerned, it was a gamble. Many in Yeltsin’s entourage still believed that Gorbachev was not a victim of the plotters but the instigator and puppet master of the coup. What would happen if the plotters got to Gorbachev first and convinced him to join them? The Russian delegation had to head them off. Yeltsin sent his vice president, General Aleksandr Rutskoi, with a group of officers armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles to the Crimea. He also wanted the commander of the Soviet air force, Air Marshal Shaposhnikov, who had supported him throughout the coup, to divert the plotters’ airplane from its route or force it to land and allow the Russian plane to arrive first. But Shaposhnikov was powerless, as no one but the head of the General Staff could order the presidential plane to land.
For the plotters and their opponents alike, the position that Gorbachev would take under the new circumstances was of paramount importance. Those who managed to “save” Gorbachev first would determine the success or failure of the coup and the political—perhaps even physical—survival of the main players on th
e Soviet political stage. “Now there are three aircraft flying in that direction, trying to get there first,” said Yeltsin to President Bush about the planes racing to the Crimea. The third plane belonged to the Speaker of the Soviet parliament, Anatolii Lukianov, who had backed the coup but was now eager to show his independence from the plotters. In Washington, James Baker received a report that James Collins of the US embassy in Moscow had tried to fly to the Crimea with Rutskoi but was late for the departure.20
MEANWHILE, SHORTLY AFTER 1:00 p.m. Moscow time, Marshal Yazov hugged his wife, Emma, and headed for the airport. He was finally ready to follow the advice she had given on the first day of the coup: to abandon the plotters and go talk to Gorbachev. When Yazov told members of the Emergency Committee that he was not only ordering the troops out of Moscow but also going to the Crimea to see Gorbachev, Kriuchkov tried to stop him. This attempt failed, and the KGB chief changed his mind and said that he would go along. Kriuchkov wanted to be the first to talk to the president they had betrayed and make an alliance with him against their now even more powerful and threatening rival, the president of Russia. During the flight they learned that Yeltsin had ordered their arrest. Gorbachev was now their only hope. Kriuchkov told his colleagues, “Gorbachev can’t be so stupid as not to understand that without us he is nothing.”21
Late in the afternoon, a procession of limousines carrying Kriuchkov, Yazov, and a number of Gorbachev’s former aides approached the Soviet president’s compound in Foros. Like the delegation that had come three days earlier, this one was accompanied by the head of the KGB bodyguard department, General Yurii Plekhanov. At about 5:00 p.m. the gates of the heavily guarded compound opened to admit the visitors from Moscow. But then something unexpected happened. Two of Gorbachev’s bodyguards, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, suddenly emerged from nearby bushes and ordered the cars to stop. General Plekhanov jumped out of his car and ordered them to let the vehicles pass: “What, aren’t you letting the head of security through?” But the guards did not react. They would follow only Mikhail Gorbachev’s orders. Raisa Gorbacheva, disturbed by the noise from the driveway, came out of her bedroom. The entrance to Gorbachev’s office was blocked by one of his guards. “Will you allow no one to pass here?” she asked in an exhausted tone. “No one else will come through here,” came the answer.
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