Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

Problems piled up one after the other. In its best tradition, the USSR Procuracy held that those guilty of the event in Vilnius were the victims themselves. For reasons that became fully understandable only after the August 1991 coup, Soviet troops continued to hold the television center in Vilnius. Joint patrols by the militia and the army were ordered. Tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh flared. The duo of Vladimir Kriuchkov and Boris Pugo did nothing to improve the lot of prisoners. Pamyat’, the hypernationalist organization created by the KGB and encouraged from above, grew increasingly out of control, and the anti-Semitism that it whipped up took on threatening proportions.

  Nevertheless, in early 1991, consultations began in our department with representatives from the Moscow embassies of CSCE member states. We presented foreign diplomats with our vision of what the Moscow document might look like based on the ideas we had been developing. Concretely, the following partial text was proposed: “The participating states will be guided by international laws on human rights, conducting their policies in accordance with the highest ideals of morality and humanism. Confirming their adherence to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states, the participating states declare that this principle cannot serve as a basis for limiting human rights or for restricting the free flow of information, including information regarding human rights. They likewise affirm the primary importance of cooperation contained in the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe for further progress in observing human rights.”

  Efforts to implement these measures domestically—that is, the democratization of the Soviet Union—proceeded in parallel. The USSR’s failure by this time to carry out a series of obligations it had already assumed made it significantly more difficult to convene the Moscow conference. A particularly pointed question concerned the approval of the second reading of the USSR law “On Departure from the USSR and Reentry into the USSR of Citizens of the USSR.” The matter of restoring Soviet citizenship to all those who had been unlawfully deprived of it was of prime importance. Nor was the obligation fulfilled to publish within one year after the conclusion of the Vienna conference, and make easily accessible, all laws and regulations governing travel within state borders. Moreover, a cunning trap existed: there was some risk that the documents would be legalized after their actual publication.

  The question of the USSR’s participation in the UN’s Optional Protocol to the International Treaty on Civil and Political Rights was unresolved until the last moment. We succeeded in gaining the Supreme Soviet’s ratification of the act of adherence to the protocol at its session in the spring of 1991. All the reservations of the USSR regarding the International Convention on Ending All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, and Humiliating Forms of Treatment and Punishment had to be removed, and the procedures envisaged in Article 41 of the International Treaty on Civil and Political Rights had to be recognized.

  We succeeded in securing a decision to draft a law guaranteeing the right of Soviet citizens to freedom of travel and to choose their place of residence within the borders of the territory of the USSR. It became clear that a step-by-step approach to removing the previous restrictions was warranted. I saw this, however, as an unjustified concession to the old-style ministries on the part of the Foreign Ministry. We even succeeded in including a point in the presidential directive about the need to draft a law that “envisaged punishing persons guilty of committing torture and other cruel, inhumane, and humiliating acts.”

  The sharpest struggle developed around the preparation and promulgation of so-called parallel measures undertaken by public organizations.

  Immediately after the collapse of the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev, the question arose of what to do about the Moscow conference—that is, whether to convene it on schedule or to delay it. Many influential and previously uncompromising supporters of the conference believed that it would be impossible to convene the conference in post-coup Moscow. Specifically, everyone was afraid that another group of anti-Gorbachev plotters within the State Emergency Committee would take over. There were no doubts concerning their existence.9

  It became increasingly difficult to defend the expediency, and even the necessity, of holding the conference on schedule. Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s assistant, informed the president of who was for it and who was against it and why. There was dissension within his closest circle and likewise in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our family was also split on this matter. My father, who was the greatest authority on European affairs, believed that the conference had to be postponed. We called each other several times each day, presenting new arguments to each other. I heard that Gorbachev was very amused when he was shown the list of supporters and opponents of holding the conference at the appointed time, and my father and I were in diametrically opposite columns. (At that time I was working in Gorbachev’s secretariat, which I discuss in chapter 2.) At the critical moment apparently there were more votes against. Nevertheless, the president decided in favor of going ahead.

  Just before the opening of the conference, the Committee of European Foreign Ministers admitted three newly independent states: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. For these states it spelled the end of the shameful 1939 agreements between Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov.

  Many were struck both by the fact that Sergei Kovalev, a leading human rights defender, was appointed cochairman of the Soviet delegation and by the tone of his speeches. One of the Western diplomats shared his impressions with me. “I always have the feeling that an earthquake will occur on the spot, the ceiling will collapse, and the KGB will burst into the room and arrest Mr. Kovalev in this very hall. The democratic breakthrough in your country cannot but shake things up.”

  On October 4 the chairman’s gavel came down, signifying adoption of the Moscow document. This was the culmination of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Gorbachev and his associates envisioned that the Moscow conference would clear away obstructions in the USSR’s adherence to internationally recognized standards of human rights. That the international and domestic triumph of Gorbachev and his associates in the field of human rights was the final success of his policy of reforming society along liberal lines was perhaps inevitable.

  While engaged in this work I did not ponder the abstract philosophical aspect of the possibility of transforming evil into its opposite. Unfortunately, neither did many other people. We destroyed a man-made hell and tried to replace it with a new, humane, and democratic reality. It seems to me that, on the whole, the operation to excise the malignant growth in human civilization went well. But had we understood from the outset that the cancer could not transform itself into healthy cells, we would have acted much more effectively.

  To decree democracy and human rights from above, something unprecedented in history, was no simple matter. Nor was it a manifestation of totalitarianism.

  2

  The August 1991 Coup

  The Breaking Point

  There is an unusual entry in my personal file: Released from position on the staff of the President of the USSR due to the staff’s disbandment. This entry appeared in December 1991 as the logical consequence of processes that converged in the August coup d’état and contributed greatly to the disintegration of the USSR.

  The coup was an authentic breaking point in Russian history. Let us recall its context. Everyone knew that the vast country was falling apart, that the existing government was unable to rule this gigantic territory inhabited by so many different ethnicities with their many national characteristics, traditions, and faiths. Various reasons were suggested. Supporters of reform viewed the Soviet regime as completely nonviable; orthodox communists blamed all the disasters on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.

  The economic collapse was already so obvious at the beginning of perestroika that even the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU, packed with reactionaries, supported some liberalization of the Soviet economy. Between 1986 and
1988, measures were adopted that permitted individual labor activity and the formation of cooperatives to produce and sell everyday consumer goods. These measures were insufficient, however, and constant shortages developed, including shortages of food and other daily necessities.

  Everyone sensed that the existing order was changing. In the territory of the USSR Gorbachev aimed to establish a democratic government based upon law. His actions threatened the sacrosanct power of the nomenklatura, or the “privileged elite” of the Soviet Union, and transforming the state structure of the USSR meant that many of the country’s leaders would be replaced. In the State Committee on the State of Emergency (hereafter State Emergency Committee), the formal name for those leading the coup against Gorbachev, some members saw their actions as a simple matter of self-preservation.

  At the time of the coup I was working on President Gorbachev’s staff. I came by that position somewhat accidentally as the result of an earlier assignment when Gorbachev happened to take notice of me. In the early fall of 1986, I had been summoned by Deputy Minister Anatoly Adamishin, who assigned a difficult speechwriting task to three colleagues and me: devise a new policy and embody it in a speech that Gorbachev would deliver at the international forum For a Nuclear-Free World, for the Survival of Humanity. My schedule alone allowed me to focus wholly on the assignment. I took up paper and pen and wrote down thoughts that were quite heretical for that time. Gorbachev liked the draft and wanted to know who had written it. That was the background to the invitation I received early in the fall of 1990 to join the president’s staff. (For a long time, KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov personally blocked my transfer to the staff, and it was not until the following summer that progress was made.)

  Not long before the planned signing of a new union treaty for the USSR, Gorbachev left Moscow to vacation in the Crimean resort town of Foros on the Black Sea. Almost all of his colleagues also went on holiday. I remained in Moscow, since several questions connected to the upcoming Moscow conference remained to be resolved, and the president’s speech had to be drafted. On the Thursday before the coup, I sent a draft of the speech along with some other materials to Foros. (The couriers who took them there were arrested on the orders of the plotters.)

  A day earlier I had spoken with Anatoly Chernyaev on a secure phone from Gorbachev’s reception room. He wanted to know if the speech would be ready on time. I was interested in something else. Would they intervene to clean up the political mess resulting both from the actions of self-styled anonymous “national saviors” and from Gorbachev’s “turn to the right” in such matters as political appointments? Despite Chernyaev’s vacillations, we were able to reach agreement on the main points; moreover, in the best tradition, we decided to present the proposal to the president without submitting it for anyone else’s approval. (To be sure, I simply ignored Chernyaev’s instruction to contact Politburo member and Secretary of the Central Committee Alexander Dzasokhov, an unpleasant man whom I did not trust.)

  I spent the three days of the coup just steps from its epicenter, in Gorbachev’s suite of offices on the third, or presidential, floor of the Kremlin. The floor was almost empty since my colleagues were on vacation. The plotters were meeting one floor below in the office of the prime minister.

  On the first day of the coup my name was deleted from the list of officials on the president’s staff. On the third day of the coup, August 21, several colleagues from Gorbachev’s press office showed up, headed by my longtime acquaintance Vitaly Ignatenko, then Gorbachev’s press secretary. He whispered to me that I should leave the Kremlin immediately since the cannons located in the Tainicheskii garden were aimed at our building, and he expected an imminent attack via our floor and the arrest of the State Emergency Committee. I don’t know whether the cannons were really there, but no one stormed the building and, as far as I know, no one intended to.

  I witnessed many strange things during and after the coup. For example, why did the plotters not arrest the leaders of the democratic reforms, including Alexander Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnadze, and Boris Yeltsin? Why wasn’t the Russian White House attacked? Why did Gorbachev’s colleagues, including those vacationing in the Crimea, all return to Moscow simultaneously, but none of them thought to visit the president either to try to help him or, at the least, to ascertain if he really was under arrest? How were the plotters able to hold a press conference with the participation of Yevgeny Primakov, Vadim Bakatin, Arkady Vol’sky, Georgy Shakhnazarov, and Ignatenko? (Let us note that two of them soon headed the special services, and it is quite likely that some others were in league with the plotters as well.) Why on August 21 did they allow the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic to convene a session that inevitably would condemn the coup? How could the plotters have allowed a delegation of the Supreme Soviet of Russia, headed by Vice President of the RSFSR Alexander Rutskoi and Prime Minister Ivan Silaev, to fly to Foros where Gorbachev was being held?

  On August 22, the morning after the coup collapsed, I encountered a strange phenomenon right after showing up for work. Standing near the elevator I was waiting for was an anxious colleague from the Kremlin commandant’s office, listening to a loudly squawking walkie-talkie. At first I paid no attention to him. Soon shouts could be heard from both the walkie-talkie and above: “They’re bringing him! They’re bringing him!” Apologetically, the guard asked me to wait in the corridor and closed the door behind me after I complied. Literally a minute later he invited me back to the elevator and explained what had just happened.

  The evening before, all the plotters had been arrested, apart from Gennady Yanaev, who somehow had managed to hide. In the morning he was found drunk and asleep in his own office. Naturally, the KGB could not “lose” Yanaev, who, prior to the coup, was the second-ranking person in the state and the man whom the State Emergency Committee had proclaimed president. What was the point of this game?

  Many of the stranger aspects of the coup could be explained by the fact that the members of the new “Soviet leadership” were heavy drinkers. Officials in the Kremlin guard told me that Kriuchkov and Oleg Baklanov were the only ones who had stayed sober. However, a “but” is in order here: The plotters were not really acting on their own; the most powerful agencies in the USSR were behind them, including the KGB, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Why did they fail to act when a political decision had been taken? For example, after the State Emergency Committee documents were published, no additional orders from on high were needed to block the appearance of any additional information that would have discredited the plotters. Nonetheless, such information appeared even on television’s Channel One.

  Either the entire coercive apparatus was dysfunctional, which is difficult to believe, or one must admit another possibility—the assertion that the coup failed may not be entirely accurate. To put it mildly, the peculiar aspects of those August days may actually have been part of some sort of plot hatched by the plotters or, more likely, at least by the second level down of the State Emergency Committee. Much was said about this at the time and then, implausibly, quickly “forgotten.”

  The plotters quickly covered their traces, including physically eliminating persons in the know. On August 22 Minister of Internal Affairs Boris Pugo supposedly committed suicide after first shooting his wife. The public sobbed sentimentally. On August 24 Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s military adviser, is alleged to have hanged himself. The public was hysterical: what a worthy, honest, and respected man he was! Almost nobody asked why a military man, who possessed his own weapon, did not shoot but rather hanged himself and succeeded only on the second attempt. On August 26 Nikolai Kruchina, who managed the finances of the Central Committee of the CPSU, either fell from the balcony of his fifth-floor apartment, committed suicide, or, most likely, was killed.

  On every level the political life of the country was convulsed in hysteria. Those who say otherwise were either out of the loop or determined to disto
rt the truth. All things considered, there were persons, including well-known “democrats,” who knew what would unfold and how it would all end.

  After the coup failed, a strange, almost unnatural emptiness prevailed in the presidential quarters of the Kremlin. Only a few officials of the president’s secretariat remained on the job. After Gorbachev’s return to Moscow, none of my colleagues, either from the foreign affairs group headed by Anatoly Chernyaev or from other subdivisions of the president’s secretariat, deigned to return from leave and go back to work. Therefore, I was at everyone’s beck and call and involved in everything that the boss did, from discharging the duties of secretary, including answering phone calls, to making decisions on matters that were obviously far from my areas of competence, including what and what not to report to the president, whom to let in to see him, and so forth. There was also a dearth of technical support personnel. Gorbachev’s secretaries had to run up and down the endless Kremlin corridors so often that by the second day after the coup they changed from wearing shoes to wearing slippers.

  There was good reason for the strained, high-tension atmosphere during the first days following the coup amid fears of revenge by the closest associates of the State Emergency Committee. The coup seemed like a bad comic operetta, with the plotters being incredibly inept, but many powerful persons who had remained in the shadows were implicated in the attempted coup. Thus, Gorbachev’s personal guards would not allow even persons with the highest-level official security badges to access “the summit,” as they called the president’s offices. After all, the plotters had been in possession of such badges. Therefore, the guards checked people against lists. When, for the first time after the coup, I had to report something urgently to Gorbachev, I wrote a short note to Chernyaev, who was with the president at the time, and took it to the president’s reception room. The secretary obviously panicked, as I had not met him before, and without my knowing it he pressed the alarm signal. Guards immediately stormed into the reception room. It was quite a spectacle. I never thought that so many weapons would be pointed at me.