Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  As Yeltsin got into his car, his daughter said, “Papa, keep calm. Everything depends on you.”

  After following the convoy part of the way to the city to make sure Yeltsin got past the tanks, Sobchak and his driver peeled off for Sheremetyevo Airport to wait for the first flight home to Leningrad. When he got to the waiting lounge, Sobchak saw three bodyguards coming at him. For a moment, he thought he was finished. To the contrary. They were bodyguards from the Russian KGB there to make sure that the mayor caught his plane.

  By 9:00 A.M., tanks surrounded Moscow City Hall. Soldiers had taken down the Russian tricolor and replaced it with the red Soviet flag. Tanks were taking positions in all the key points of the city: the TV and radio stations, newspaper offices, Lenin Hills, the White House. A journalist called General Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the commander of the air force. Shaposhnikov had listened to Yazov’s commands and explanations of the coup, but he made no secret to the reporter that he was revolted by what had happened. “Let the sons of bitches comment on what they are going to do with the country,” he said.

  While Yazov worked at the Ministry of Defense and Kryuchkov at Lubyanka, Yanayev sat in his Kremlin office wondering what it was he was supposed to do.

  Yuri Golik, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet committee on legislation, got through the gates of the Kremlin without any problem and went immediately to see Yanayev.

  “Is it a putsch?” Golik asked.

  “It’s a putsch,” said Yanayev.

  Later, Vadim Bakatin, a member of Gorbachev’s Defense Council, also came to see Yanayev. Bakatin, like Golik, was loyal to Gorbachev, and he demanded an explanation. Before he could even work up his temper, Bakatin noticed what bad shape Yanayev was in.

  “I’ve been here since four o’clock in the morning,” Yanayev said, pacing, smoking, excitable, bags under his eyes. “I don’t know myself what is going on. They came and tried to persuade me for two hours. I didn’t agree, but they finally persuaded me.”

  “Who came?”

  “They came.”

  The Kazakh leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, called Yanayev, who seemed to be in a daze, drunken or otherwise. “He didn’t seem to know what was going on,” Nazarbayev told reporters in Alma-Ata, the Kazakh capital, “or why I was calling or even who I was.”

  Yanayev’s desk was stacked with unread documents, many of them months old. Usually he let his aides do all his serious work for him; among those aides was Sergei Bobkov, the son of Filipp Bobkov, Kryuchkov’s trusted deputy at the KGB. But while Yanayev was foggy at times, obsessed with love affairs and the bottle, he kept on his desk one document that made it clear that the coup itself was more serious than he was, that the real powers behind it—Kryuchkov, Baklanov, Boldin, and Yazov—knew their history and the methods of the old regime.

  REGARDING CERTAIN AXIOMS

  OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SITUATION

  1. We must not lose the initiative and enter into any kind of negotiations with the public. We have often ended up doing this in an attempt to preserve a democratic facade. As a result, society gradually becomes accustomed to the idea that they can argue with the authorities—and this is the first step toward the next battle.

  2. One must not allow even the first manifestations of disloyalty: meetings, hunger strikes, petitions, and information about them. On the contrary, they become, as it were, a permitted form of opposition, after which even more active forms will follow. If you want to proceed with a minimal amount of bloodshed, suppress contradictions at the very beginning.

  3. Do not be ashamed of resorting to clearly expressed populism. This is the law of winning support from the masses. Immediately introduce economic measures that are understandable to all—lowering of prices, easing up on alcohol laws, etc.—and the appearance of even a limited variety of products in popular demand. In this situation do not think of economic integrity, the inflation rate, or other consequences.

  4. One must not delay in informing the populace about all the details of the crimes of one’s political opponent. At first they will avidly search for information. Exactly at this point one must bring down an information storm of exposure, the revelation of guilty groups and syndicates, corruption, and so forth. On other days the information about one’s opponent should be given in an ironically humorous key.… The information must be graphic and as simple as possible.

  5. One must not crack the whip with direct threats; better to start rumors about the strictness of the regime and the control of discipline in production and life, as if there were systematic raids on stores, places of relaxation, and others.

  6. One must not be slow in dealing with personnel decisions and reassignments. The population should know who is being punished and for what evident reasons; who is answering to whom for what; and to whom the population should turn with its problems.

  Before going to the Washington Post bureau on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where she was working as a translator, Masha Lipman watched the bland declaration of a state of emergency. As she stared at the television her first thoughts were of her children, her six-year-old daughter, Anya, and her sixteen-year-old son, Grisha. She was terrified. Suddenly, these years of promise seemed betrayed. After years of thinking the problem through, Masha and Seriozha had decided against emigration. They’d cast their lot with Moscow. Now all she could think was “Will Anya be indoctrinated as we were? Is it all coming back? Will we emigrate? Should we? Can we?”

  Nadezhda Kudinova, a seamstress at a parachute factory on the edge of town, arrived at work. On the way, she had heard some vague rumors on the bus that the newscasters were announcing that Gorbachev had resigned for “health reasons” and that Yanayev and some unpronounceable committee—the “GKChP”—had taken power. It all seemed so vague and unreal. The factory director immediately gathered all the workers and insisted that they all stand by the Emergency Committee, that what the country needed now was stability and discipline in the workplace.

  Kudinova looked out the window. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear. On the radio, the announcers repeated the decrees of the committee, over and over again. She and her friends began talking about what they could do, whom to support. At the factory, opinion was split down the middle. Half were outraged. Half thought that maybe life would be better now without Gorbachev. Maybe there would be food in the stores for a change.

  Kudinova thought to herself that the workers who were taking sides with the committee were counting on a passive country. As the day went on and she heard that Yeltsin had begun organizing the resistance at the White House, Kudinova brightened. “Maybe I should start writing some leaflets,” she thought. On her way home, she saw the tanks, she saw how the tanks had chewed up the road, a violation. She saw the crowd beginning to gather at the White House, and she made a decision. She would protect the president she had voted for just two months before. She had no thought of Mikhail Gorbachev. She went to the White House for Yeltsin, for an independent Russia. It wasn’t about Gorbachev, she thought. Gorbachev had gotten what he deserved.

  Yeltsin arrived at the White House at around 10:00 A.M. He and Ruslan Khasbulatov, the chairman of the parliament, and Ivan Silayev, the Russian prime minister, drafted an appeal, “To the Citizens of Russia,” denouncing the putsch as a “reactionary unconstitutional coup d’état” and calling for a nationwide strike. Khasbulatov and Vice President Aleksander Rutskoi, a war hero in Afghanistan, began broadcasts from a makeshift radio station inside the parliament building, the White House. Vladimir Bokser, a young pro-democracy politician, organized a phone network of activists to come to defend the White House. Yeltsin dispatched his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, to Paris to seek Western support and establish a Russian government abroad if the resistance was crushed.

  “By eleven the depression in the city was beginning to lift just slightly,” said Masha Lipman’s husband, Seriozha Ivanov. “People riding in the trolleys were laughing at the tanks, mocking them.” Children climbed on the tanks and asked the young soldi
ers how to drive; pretty young women teased the recruits and said that maybe they should all go home and do something more interesting than sitting around on a tank.

  Then, just after noon, Yeltsin walked down the front steps of the White House and clambered up on a T-72—Tank No. 110 of the Taman Guards. It was an indelible image that would set the tone for the next three days. As a small crowd of demonstrators and reporters listened, Yeltsin’s voice boomed out. “Citizens of Russia,” he began. “… The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power.… We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’état.… Accordingly, we proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee to be illegal.… We appeal to citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists and demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.”

  Then Konstantin Kobets, a retired general now appointed Russian defense minister by Yeltsin, climbed aboard and addressed not only the citizens, but the soldiers of Russia. “I am the defense minister of Russia,” he said, “and not a hand will be raised against the people or the duly elected president of Russia.” Kobets had led a battalion during the Prague invasion in 1968, and he said he was not about to repeat his mistakes. He would organize the military resistance and try to convince the officers and troops that they could not, as soldiers or citizens, follow the commands of a junta.

  Yeltsin had been criticized in recent months for flirting too much with the military. He had spent much of his campaign in places like the Tula military bases and, over the objections of many radicals in the parliament, made Rutskoi his vice president. Now he was counting on that relationship to pay dividends. Rutskoi responded instantly and went on the radio: “Comrades! I, an officer of the Soviet armed forces, a colonel, a Hero of the Soviet Union who has walked the battle-torn roads of Afghanistan and knows the horrors of war, call on you, my brother officers, soldiers, and sailors, not to act against your own people, against your fathers, brothers, and sisters.”

  Outside the White House, the first demonstrators cheered as the gunners in ten tanks of the Taman Guards turned the barrels of their guns away from the parliament. The attackers were now ready to defend the White House.

  Private Chugunov sat in his tank, parked in the Lenin Hills. At first there was real fear, he said. People shook their fists and shouted, “Don’t shoot your own people! Turn against your officers!” He saw women crying, people brought them food to eat, flowers to stick in their guns, leaflets from the White House, Yeltsin’s appeal to the military to obey their oath to the people.

  The soldiers unloaded their AK-47s and kept them out of sight. “Why don’t we make a U-turn and go home?” they began to say to one another. Chugunov and his friends felt ashamed, and they told the crowds around them they would do nothing to disgrace the names of their fathers, they would not shoot at their own people.

  At noon Yeltsin went on the radio: “Soldiers and officers of the army, the KGB, and the troops of the Interior Ministry! Countrymen! The country is faced with the threat of terror. At this difficult hour of decision remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against the people. You can erect a throne of bayonets but you cannot sit on it for long. The days of the conspirators are numbered.… Clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over Russia, but this night will not be eternal and our long-suffering people will find freedom once again, and for good. Soldiers, I believe at this tragic hour you will make the right decision. The honor of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people.”

  At the White House, a retired lieutenant from the Taman Guards—“Baskakov is my name, here is my tattoo”—took command of Civil Defense Unit No. 34. He was proud to see that it was his boys who were the first to come over to the side of the resistance. Baskakov had quit the Communist Party the year before and he felt that it was his duty “as a Christian” to come to the barricades. He never said a word to his family, just walked out the door and took the metro to the White House. Baskakov’s men, a ragtag outfit of Afghan vets, took command of entrance 22 of the parliament, where key figures, like Shevardnadze and Popov, were going in and out.

  Baskakov’s men spotted snipers in the windows of the Hotel Mir across the street and near the American embassy. For years, American diplomats had assumed that the KGB used the hotel as a lookout point on the embassy. Baskakov’s troops were pathetically armed with black-market pistols, knives, billy clubs, an occasional machine gun. If there was an attack, they’d be cannon fodder, and they knew it. Everyone knew it. It was that combined sense of heroism and fatalism, especially among the kids who had joined the resistance units, that moved Baskakov. “I used to be critical of the young,” he said. “But there were bikers, the Rockers, going on reconnaissance missions on their motorcycles across the barricades, giving us news about the troop movements. The young girls that people call prostitutes, they were there giving us food and drink.”

  The defenders of the White House came slowly: first a few thousand, then ten thousand. By the end of the day there would be around twenty-five thousand. With advice from the military men, they began building barricades, gnarled heaps of scrap: construction rods, concrete blocks, rusted bathtubs, bricks, tree trunks, even cobblestones from a small bridge nearby that had been the site of an anti-czarist uprising in 1905. The strike leader, Anatoly Malikhin, showed up wearing a United Mine Workers Union T-shirt (“United We Stand, Divided We Fall”). He went inside and quickly strapped on a machine gun. Somehow, he said, he had had the feeling it would come to this when the first mines went out on strike two years before.

  At the airport in Leningrad, Sobchak’s aides were there to meet him. They told him that the Leningrad regional military commander, Viktor Samsonov, had already been on television to announce that the Emergency Committee had taken power from Gorbachev and that a state of emergency had begun. So far, there were no troops into the city. Sobchak told his driver to take him straight to the city’s central military command at top speed. Once he was there, Sobchak left his guards downstairs.

  “I saw that they were bewildered and confused, and right away I didn’t let them open their mouths,” Sobchak recounted. “I told them if they moved one finger they would be tried the way the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg. I scolded Samsonov: ‘General, remember Tbilisi? You were the only one there who acted as a reasonable man. You remained in the shadows. What are you doing now? You are involved in this gang. This committee is illegal.’

  “Why is it illegal?” Samsonov said. “I have an order. I have this coded cable. I can’t show it to you. It’s a secret.”

  Sobchak pressed, telling Samsonov to remember how the generals in Tbilisi in April 1989 had also exceeded orders and turned a peaceful demonstration into a bloodbath.

  “Why do you raise your voice?” Boris Gidaspov, the Leningrad Party chief, shouted.

  “Shut up!” Sobchak said. “Don’t you realize that with your presence you are liquidating your own Party?”

  For the rest of the meeting, Gidaspov whimpered in his chair, a beaten dog.

  Samsonov faced a choice. Yazov and Kryuchkov had appealed to his commitment to empire and discipline. Sobchak, who had the support of the city, appealed to his conscience, his commitment to history. The choice was what the past six years had been all about. And the general found it almost easy. He backed off and ordered his men to stay out of the city. Leningrad, now St. Petersburg again, was saved.

  That evening, Sobchak went on the local television show Fakt and referred to the conspirators as “former” ministers and as “citizens,” the way a Russian prosecutor would refer to the accused.

  Samsonov kept getting calls from the conspirators, but he held fast. Sobchak was pleased. “General,” he said, “can’t you see how these people are just nothing? They will not hold on to power long even if they are able to seize it!”

  The leaders of the junta had already failed miserably to follow the prescriptions of
Lenin or Jaruzelski. Nearly everyone on their arrest lists was still free and working with the resistance. The editors of a group of liberal papers, including Moscow News, had already begun planning a joint underground paper to be called Obshchaya Gazeta—“The Common Newspaper”—and the editors at Nezavisimaya Gazeta were also putting together a samizdat edition. Opposition radio stations, particularly the Echo of Moscow, would go off the air for a few hours and then return. Telephone, fax, and telex lines at the bureaus of foreign news organizations worked flawlessly. CNN, the BBC, Radio Liberty, and the Voice of America pumped out continuous coverage. Reporters commandeered phone lines inside the White House and called out their reports without a hitch.

  At the offices of the key Soviet newspapers, the situation was more complicated. The junta had ordered the shutdown of all the main liberal papers and used the high-circulation Party and government papers to do nothing more than publish their decrees and spurious reports on how normal the situation was, how calm. Sovetskaya Rossiya was enthusiastically cooperative, some of the others less so. At Izvestia, there was a war.

  Izvestia was one of the most paradoxical institutions in the country. On the one hand, its editor, Nikolai Yefimov, was a shameless sycophant. His patron was the parliament’s chairman, Anatoly Lukyanov. Yefimov was only too happy to fulfill the demands of his betters: about half the paper’s staff of thirty foreign correspondents were KGB operatives. Although official government censors no longer sat in the editorial offices, Yefimov was more than able to handle the job himself. He was always quick to kill stories that he thought might damage or insult precisely the men now leading the coup d’état. On the other hand, the paper was brimming with talent. Mikhail Berger published some of the sharpest economic pieces in the country. Andrei Illesh wrote a series of articles on the shootdown of Korean Airlines 007 that was more revealing and critical of the Soviet leadership than anything published in the West. The better reporters and editors, the honest ones, despised Yefimov. They thought they had the talent and the resources to report the news far better than even the young renegades over at Nezavisimaya Gazeta. If they only could.