Yeltsin’s troubles with the Communist Party began at his graduation ceremonies from primary school. As one of the best students in the school, he had the honor of being allowed to sit on the stage. When it came his turn to give a short speech, Yeltsin grabbed the microphone and turned his ceremonial moment into an outrageous harangue. He launched into an attack on a certain homeroom teacher, a hated shrew who cursed the children, smacked them with a thick ruler, and made them clean her house. “She was a horror and I had to say what I had to say,” Yeltsin said. The parents and the staff in the audience listened for a while in shock. The principal finally jumped out of his chair and snatched away the microphone and sent Yeltsin back to his seat. The day was ruined. And what was more, instead of a diploma, Yeltsin received a “wolf’s ticket,” a certificate forbidding him from getting a high school education. At home, Yeltsin’s father came at him with the strap. It was the usual punishment. But this time, Yeltsin grabbed his old man’s arm and fended him off. No more, he said, and then went looking for retribution at the local headquarters of the Communist Party. For weeks, Yeltsin heard nothing from the local bureaucrats but rebuke. Finally, he got one official to listen to his complaints against the teacher, how she had humiliated her students. A board of inquiry was established. The teacher was fired and Yeltsin was reinstated as a student in good standing. He had won his first battle inside the “horror house” of the Soviet system.
By the middle of 1991, Yeltsin was hoping to transform himself from an executioner of the sacred cow, a political figure who made his name by attacking Ligachev, the Party, Gorbachev and all the rest, into a statesman of the “new Russia.” As Russia’s first elected president, he hoped to rebuild the bridge to Gorbachev and move into a new era in which the sovereignty of the republics would allow for greater wealth and liberty. Yeltsin knew that real power still lay elsewhere: with the army, the KGB, the police. He, like Gorbachev, had heard rumors of a coup, and while the two men negotiated a new Treaty of the Union that would give far greater powers to the republics, Yeltsin warned Gorbachev that he was surrounded by reactionaries who could eventually betray him. Yeltsin had seen what had happened in Lithuania in January and then in the Supreme Soviet when Pavlov and his sponsors made their grab for power. He had no reason to expect that these men would go quietly.
It must have been the first coup d’état in world history to have been announced in advance, and in the national press.
The first to plow the rhetorical earth were the military ideologists, the men of the lunatic fringe who saw the army as the sainted institution of the Russian empire, the bulwark of a great world power. With Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov’s blessing, Major General Viktor Filatov edited the monthly Military-Historical Journal, which featured excerpts from Mein Kampf, attacks on Sakharov, and, most prominently of all, the collected works of Karem Rush, a full-throated booster of the Soviet imperial idea. “The military,” Rush wrote, “should consider itself the backbone and sacred institution of a thousand years of statehood.” By publishing such stuff, Filatov boosted circulation from 27,000 in 1988 to 377,000 in 1990. He was a lovely man, Filatov was. He published the famous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and told The New York Times that he regarded the document “as a normal piece of literature, like the Bible or the Koran.” He was an ardent supporter of Saddam Hussein and wrote pro-Iraqi propaganda during the Gulf War. Perhaps his favorite target was the liberal press. Once, Filatov wrote, “It’s a pity we have no Beria now; if he had read today’s Ogonyok, he would have shot half [the staff] and sent the remaining rubbish to rot in a camp.” Nash Sovremenik, another journal of the nationalist right wing, seconded that emotion, declaring the army “not only has the right, but also the duty, to become extremely involved in internal affairs.”
For a long time, the country’s most important reactionaries, ministers like Yazov, Kryuchkov, and Pugo, hid behind figures like Filatov, Rush, and the editors of Nash Sovremenik. They did not risk the appearance of outright treason. But, eventually, such niceties faded. On May 9, 1991, Aleksandr Prokhanov’s paper, Dyen (“The Day”), published a roundtable discussion with some of the most hard-line figures in the military: Valentin Varennikov, the general in charge of all ground forces and the leader of the charge on Vilnius; Igor Rodionov, the general most responsible for the 1989 massacre in Tbilisi; and Oleg Baklanov, the head of the country’s military-industrial complex. Only the naive could have read what these men had to say and not come to the conclusion that they wanted nothing less than a coup d’état. Baklanov spoke with touching modesty about the military’s ability to rule the country. But rule they could, and would: “The defense industry has much greater organizational experience than, say, the newly appointed politicians who are incapable even of ensuring garbage collection on the streets of Moscow.”
If Gorbachev needed greater proof that the rhetoric of the hard-liners matched their real intentions, he got it at the end of June.
On June 20, the foreign ministers of the United States and the Soviet Union were holding talks in Berlin in preparation for a Bush-Gorbachev summit a month later in Moscow. Secretary of State James Baker and Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh had already spent a long day with each other in meetings on a wide range of issues. But when Bessmertnykh returned to his embassy in the late afternoon, Baker was on the phone saying they had to meet again.
“Jim, what’s the matter? What’s happened?” said Bessmertnykh, who spoke English fluently.
“It’s something very urgent,” Baker said. “I’d like to meet you very much.”
Bessmertnykh said that he had a meeting. Couldn’t it wait?
Baker tried to find the words to convey the gravity of the matter and yet not give away any detail on a phone line that was probably not secure.
“It’s a somewhat delicate matter,” he said. “If I go, a lot of cars will follow with guards, and there will be a lot of commotion in town. The press will be on to us. If you can, I’ll wait for you at the hotel room where I’m staying, but please let everything be quiet!”
“Is it really that urgent?” Bessmertnykh said. “I have a scheduled meeting.”
“If I were you, I would, perhaps, put off all my affairs and come over.”
In an unmarked car, Bessmertnykh rode cross town to Baker. He brought with him one of his policy advisers, a specialist from the USA-Canada Institute, but Baker said he would prefer to meet alone with Bessmertnykh.
When they were alone, Baker said, “I’ve just received a report from Washington. I understand it may come from intelligence sources. It seems that there may be an attempt to depose Gorbachev. It’s a highly delicate matter and we need to convey this information somehow. According to our information, Pavlov, Yazov, and Kryuchkov will take part in the ouster.… It’s urgent. It must be brought to Gorbachev’s attention.”
The initial report had come from Moscow’s Mayor, Gavriil Popov, who told the American ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock, that the KGB and the military were preparing a coup.
Baker asked if it was possible to call Gorbachev on a direct line from the Soviet embassy in Berlin. Bessmertnykh said that such lines were under KGB control and, therefore, useless. Baker suggested instead that they set up a direct, private meeting between Gorbachev and the American ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock. Bessmertnykh agreed.
On June 22, Gorbachev, Kryuchkov, Yazov, and the rest of the Soviet leadership took part in an annual ceremony in Moscow—laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin gates. In retrospect, it was a tableau out of a Shakespearean tragedy: the monarch surrounded by his men, his deferential advisers, his betrayers.
After the ceremony, Gorbachev held a short private meeting with Bessmertnykh.
How had the session gone with the American ambassador? the minister asked.
It had gone well, Gorbachev said. Once he had the information, he said, he had had a “tough talk” with those concerned. And that was all.
In a document dated June 20, 1991, the same day as Baker’s secret meeting with Bessmertnykh, the KGB quoted a source in Gorbachev’s “inner circle” coolly analyzing how to push Gorbachev out of power or, at least, into an increasingly conservative position. The document, uncovered later by the Russian prosecutors, said that the Bush administration held Yeltsin in disdain and considered the possibility of his ascension to supreme power as “catastrophic” for U.S.-Soviet relations. It also said that the Bush circle was beginning to wonder if Lukyanov was positioning himself as a successor to Gorbachev. The document said that the “most logical and sensible” course would be to force Gorbachev to abandon a radical course in the same way he was “persuaded” to abandon the 500 Days program. The source of the analysis was not named.
It was a season of deception. Little by little, the conspirators were undermining the authority of the president. The attempt to grab Gorbachev’s powers in parliament in June had failed, but they were still chipping away, humiliating the president in a hundred different ways.
Despite promises to the contrary, the military carried out nuclear tests in Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya without consent of the republics or national authorities. The Ministry of Defense and the general staff came close to scotching the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty that they despised so much by playing games with the rules on the counting of weapons. While Gorbachev was in Oslo to collect the Nobel Prize in June, the General Prosecutor’s Office released a report exonerating troops involved in the Vilnius violence; on the same day, troops in Lithuania set up fifteen checkpoints and made two arrests. All this assured that Gorbachev would have to answer some embarrassing questions at what would have otherwise been a triumphant press conference. While Gorbachev was trying to get himself invited to the summit of industrialized nations in London, the commander of Soviet forces in East Germany sent a letter to the German Foreign Ministry threatening to slow down troop withdrawals if Bonn did not move faster to build apartments in the Soviet Union for the returning soldiers.
With every new incident, the leading officials denied any political meaning, and each time they tugged a little on the trigger.
It was easy to look away. Despite all the ominous signals to the contrary, most of the talk in Moscow in the early summer of 1991 was reasonably optimistic. Gorbachev seemed to have shifted course once more, this time making his peace with Yeltsin and the other republican leaders. Negotiations on the Treaty of the Union appeared to be moving along without the usual disasters.
But three days after Yeltsin issued a decree barring Party cells in government institutions, and just one week before George Bush landed in town for a summit with Gorbachev, the leading paper of the reactionaries, Sovetskaya Rossiya, published a stunning appeal called “A Word to the People.” Signed by leading right-wing generals, politicians, and writers, the appeal, dated July 23, declared that Russia was in the midst of an “unprecedented tragedy”:
“Our Motherland, this country, this great state which history, Nature, and our predecessors willed us to save, is dying, breaking apart and plunging into darkness and nothingness.… What has become of us, brothers?” The language was apocalyptic, the imagery of a ship of state “sinking into nonexistence,” evil forces selling out a great power. “Our home is already burning to the ground … the bones of the people are being ground up and the backbone of Russia is snapped in two.” It even condemned the Communist Party for giving power to “frivolous and clumsy parliamentarians who have set us against each other and brought into force thousands of stillborn laws, of which only those function that enslave the people and divide the tormented body of the country into portions.… How is it that we have let people come to power who do not love their country, who kowtow to foreign patrons and seek advice and blessings abroad?”
The key signatories were General Boris Gromov, the last Soviet commander in Afghanistan and now Pugo’s deputy in the Interior Ministry; General Varennikov, again; Vasily Starodubtsev, the head of the conservative agricultural lobby; and Aleksandr Tizyakov, the head of an association of military plants. For months, Tizyakov had been carrying around documents in his briefcase outlining the shape a military coup could take. But the main author of the appeal was Aleksandr Prokhanov, the editor and novelist whose ode to Soviet empire in A Tree in the Center of Kabul led him to adopt the sobriquet “the Soviet Kipling.” He waited for the coup as if it were Christmas. “Get ready for the next wave, my friend,” he once told me. “Get ready.” Prokhanov, with likely help from two other writers and signatories, Yuri Bondarev and Valentin Rasputin, managed to capture the tone of apocalypse in every reactionary’s heart. As the critic Natalya Ivanova pointed out in a stunning essay in the monthly journal Znamya, the July 23 appeal, with its vulgar nationalism and self-pity, matched almost perfectly the language of the doomsday declarations issued on the first morning of the August coup. The conspirators envisioned a new vanguard, not of Communists, but of soldiers, priests, workers, peasants, and, of course, writers. “I also can’t help but be reminded,” she wrote, “that on the eve of the coup, the military state publishing house issued in the millions a brochure called ‘The Black Hundreds and the Red Hundreds’ which laid out in detail the program of the national party in 1906.” The nationalists of 1906, like the putschists of 1991, wanted to dissolve parliament, declare military, emergency rule, and ban all left-wing newspapers and journals. “A Word to the People” was a blatant call for a coup d’état.
“We were making no secret of what we wanted,” Prokhanov told me. “Why keep secrets? We live in a democracy, don’t we?”
Even if Gorbachev was not paying much attention to the smell of a storm, Yeltsin was. On July 29, Yeltsin went out to Gorbachev’s dacha to finish negotiations for a new Treaty of the Union. Gorbachev had already agreed to language that would give the republics far more power and make it possible for the Baltic states to become independent very quickly. Yeltsin wanted more. He wanted the power of the purse, and he made it his goal at this meeting to convince Gorbachev that the republics, and not Moscow, should have the ability to levy taxes and distribute the funds as they saw fit.
The talks went on for hours. Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Kazakh president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, went back and forth over the taxation issue so long that they had to break for dinner and then come back at it.
At one point, the two republican leaders could not hold back. Yeltsin told Gorbachev that the right-wingers in the Union leadership were doing everything they could to undercut a transition to genuine democracy and a market economy. Kryuchkov and Yazov were clearly against the Treaty of the Union, he said. Nazarbayev agreed with Yeltsin, and added two more names to the list of “resistere”: Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, and Gorbachev’s great friend of forty years, Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly Lukyanov.
These people realized that the treaty would rob them of power, Yeltsin said. In a Union led mainly by the republican leaders, Yazov and Kryuchkov must be fired and sixty or seventy Union ministries would have to be liquidated.
Gorbachev said, well, yes, of course. He was not blind, after all. “Everything will have to be reorganized, including the army and the KGB,” he said. But let’s wait until after the treaty is signed, he said. And, you know, he added, Lukyanov, Kryuchkov, and the rest are “not as bad as you think.”
At this point, Yeltsin got out of his chair and stepped out onto the balcony.
Nazarbayev and Gorbachev were dumbfounded. What was Yeltsin looking for?
“To see if anyone is eavesdropping,” he said.
Nazarbayev and Gorbachev laughed. What a card Yeltsin was. Imagine. Bugging the president and general secretary of the party. How absurd!
After all, how could a man like Anatoly Lukyanov, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, betray a friend he had known since university days? The man was a lawyer, just like Gorbachev, an amateur poet, just like Andropov, and his friendship was a matter of immortal verse.
Safeguard your conscience for your friends.
A friend seeks neither gain nor flattery.
A friend and conscience are as one
In tempest, cold, and thunder,
Safeguard your conscience for your friends!
“I love him,” Lukyanov would say of Gorbachev. “I love him, I can’t change him, though, speaking openly, I know his weaknesses, his shortcomings.… Of all the people who made perestroika, I alone stayed next to Gorbachev, the rest left, from the left and right.…”
But that was later, when Lukyanov was in jail charged with treason.
As Bush was arriving in the Soviet Union for the summit in the last few days of July, Moscow News had asked me to write a short article about the U.S. reaction to what was going on in the Soviet Union. I used the opportunity to say that as long as Gorbachev was surrounded by anti-Western reactionaries, there would be no end to Washington’s caution about providing aid and investment. “It’s a mystery to the West why Gorbachev’s circle is still stocked with so many aides and professionals so seemingly at odds with reform,” I wrote. “For every Aleksandr Yakovlev—a figure who has transformed his own vision of the world—there are, it seems, at least a dozen Pavlovs.”
I was only repeating what I had heard a thousand times, but who was listening in the Kremlin? I went around with Michael Dobbs and a couple of visiting editors to see some of Gorbachev’s closest advisers: the apparatchik-liberals like Andrei Grachev, Yevgeny Primakov, and Georgi Shakhnazarov. We asked about “A Word to the People” and other dark signs, and they explained them away. “Such is the atmosphere,” Grachev said, but he didn’t seem particularly worried, and neither did the others. In contrast, Yeltsin’s top adviser, Gennadi Burbulis, told us that Moscow resembled a “political minefield.”
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