Down with Big Brother (71 page)

After writing several letters to old army friends, Akhromeyev went home to his government dacha. His wife, Tamara, was still in Sochi. But his daughters, Natasha and Tatyana, were at home, together with their children. Their father seemed nervous and preoccupied but self-controlled. For the first time since the coup he appeared eager to have a heart-to-heart conversation with them.

The family had dinner and then sat together on the veranda, eating a huge watermelon and listening to the breeze rustling through the tall fir trees. Natasha and Tatyana steered clear of the subject of Gorbachev, believing it would only upset their father. Instead they encouraged him to reminisce about his wartime exploits. He talked again about the epic siege of Leningrad, in which he had almost starved to death, shriveling to just eighty-five pounds, and the defeat of Hitler’s armies at Stalingrad, which he had also witnessed.

Natasha finally asked her father about the coup. “You always said that a coup was impossible. And now it’s happened, and the minister of defense even took part in it. How do you explain that?”

Akhromeyev thought a little before replying, “Even now it’s impossible for me to explain it.”
¹⁴¹

The following morning at nine Akhromeyev left for the Kremlin in his official Volga. He seemed cheerful, promising to take his granddaughter for a walk in the garden that evening. Half an hour later Natasha called to say she would pick her mother up at the airport that afternoon.

Akhromeyev made a first, bungled attempt to kill himself a few minutes after Natasha’s phone call. He tied a noose to the window frame, but the rope broke after he put his weight on it. He wrote a note at 9:45 a.m. describing what had happened. Later that morning he was seen wandering around the Kremlin corridors, apparently on his way to the canteen. At midday he called his driver at the car pool, saying he needed a car by 1:00 p.m. The driver waited and waited, but the marshal never showed up.

Shortly before 10:00 p.m. the Kremlin duty officer making his rounds of the main government building saw the door of room 19A slightly ajar. It
seemed very late for someone to be working. He pushed the door open and saw Akhromeyev’s thin, wizened body slumped over a radiator beneath a window. Around the neck of the corpse was a white nylon cord, the other end of which was attached to the metal handle of the window. A wooden chair lay off to one side. The corpse was dressed in the uniform of a marshal of the Soviet Union.
¹⁴²

The investigators found half a dozen notes on Akhromeyev’s desk. One envelope contained a fifty-ruble bill and a note to his aide, asking him to settle a bill at the Kremlin canteen for food and drink consumed during the coup. Another note asked his colleagues in the army to help his family with the funeral arrangements. There was a private letter for his wife. And there was a note that was apparently meant to serve as his political epitaph:

I cannot live when my motherland is dying and everything that I ever believed in is being destroyed. My age and my previous life give me the right to leave this life. I fought to the end.

Sergei Akhromeyev. August 24, 1991
¹⁴³

Nikolai Kruchina returned to his office in the Central Committee on the evening of Sunday, August 25, for a meeting with the building’s new administrators. He seemed calm enough as he talked about the transfer of Communist Party property to the Russian government and the social needs of a thousand or so unemployed bureaucrats. As the meeting broke up, a little after 9:00 p.m., Shakhnovsky happened to say: “And, of course, we will need to have a special discussion about the party’s finances.”
¹⁴⁴

The business manager’s face went pale. “Okay, okay, let’s talk about it tomorrow,” he said, abruptly ending the conversation. He collected some belongings from an anteroom and departed. Shakhnovsky was left with the impression of an honest, hardworking bureaucrat who had some reason to feel ashamed. Perhaps it had something to do with the use of party money to establish covert commercial structures, he thought.

Kruchina was driven to his home on Pletnev Lane in the city center, one of several luxury apartment blocks reserved for top party officials. At around 10:30 p.m. he said good night to his wife and retired to his study, saying that he had “a little work” to do. He scribbled a couple of letters and put his affairs in order.

“My conscience is clear,” he told his family, in one of the notes. “I am not a criminal. I am a coward.” He underlined the word “coward.”
¹⁴⁵

As dawn broke over Moscow, suffusing the city of gold-domed churches, crumbling tenements, and pompous “wedding cake” skyscrapers in a red
glow, he went out onto the fifth-floor balcony, climbed over the railing, and hurled himself to his death.

N
EARLY SEVENTY-FOUR YEARS
after seizing power in an armed insurrection, the Soviet Communist Party had ceased to exist. At the time of its demise it had fifteen million members. Not a single one of them put up any resistance. All it had taken to shut down the building that had served as the headquarters of a worldwide revolutionary movement were a dozen militiamen and several pounds of stamped paper. When the end came, the Communists were too exhausted and too dispirited to fight back.

Terminal exhaustion had set in after a period of “threescore years and ten,” the biblical life span of the human organism. The Communists had exhausted the land they had ruled for nearly three-quarters of a century, a land as bountiful in many ways as North America. They had exhausted their capacity to expand the frontiers of socialism. They had exhausted their own people with unfulfilled promises of an unattainable utopia. In short, they had exhausted their own great idea, an idea that had moved millions by its grandeur and simplicity, the idea of building paradise upon this earth.

The durability of communism and the speed with which it collapsed were two sides of the same coin. There came a point at which the strengths of the system—massive repression, rigid centralization, an all-embracing ideology, the obsession with military power—turned into fatal weaknesses. By ruthlessly suppressing all manifestations of nationalism and political dissent, the Bolsheviks created the conditions for the simultaneous collapse of communism and the Soviet state. When the end came, nobody was prepared to help them.

History will identify many claimants to the title of vanquisher of communism. Pope John Paul II exposed the moral failings and political isolation of Communist leaders; Andrei Sakharov emphasized the universality of human rights at a time when most of his compatriots kept silent; Lech Wałęsa led a workers’ rebellion against the workers’ state; the Afghan mujahedin proved that the Red Army was not invincible; Ronald Reagan challenged Soviet leaders to an armaments race they could not possibly win; Boris Yeltsin shattered the monolithic unity of the Soviet Communist Party; Mikhail Gorbachev allowed millions of Soviet citizens to confront their tragic past.

All these contributions were significant, but none of them was decisive. Communism was not defeated by any one individual or even a combination of individuals. In the last resort communism defeated itself.

EPILOGUE

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is ceasing its existence
.

Presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, December 1991

The people feel no mercy: You do good and no one thanks you
.

Alexander Pushkin,
Boris Godunov

SARAJEVO
September 22, 1991

B
Y THE TESTIMONY
of those who knew them, Sergei Akhromeyev and Nikolai Kruchina took their own lives because they were unable to conceive of a place for themselves in the new post-Communist order. The collapse of the party each had served loyally for more than four decades represented the collapse of all their beliefs. There were other such personal tragedies during the twilight days of communism—both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe—but they were the exceptions rather than the rule. For the most part the apparatchik class was remarkably successful in adapting to the changing times.

The archetype of the Communist-turned-nationalist was the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. By the fall of 1991 he was well on the way to achieving the goal of a Greater Serbia that he had outlined back in March, shortly after the student riots that almost toppled him from power. Serb separatists supported by Milošević had seized control of roughly 20 percent of the neighboring republic of Croatia. The Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), the largest military force in the Balkans, was rapidly turning into an exclusively Serbian army. The Croatian town of Vukovar, on the Danube, was under siege by a combined force of the JNA and Serbian militia. It was at this point that Milošević turned his attention to the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
where 1.5 million Serbs lived alongside 2 million Muslims and 800,000 Croats.

A patchwork quilt of different ethnic groups and religious traditions, straddling the centuries-old divide between Rome and Byzantium, Austro-Hungary and Turkey, Bosnia was Yugoslavia in miniature. It was also the proverbial Balkan tinderbox, waiting for the match that would ignite a much larger explosion. Everybody remembered how a few shots fired by a young Serb student in Sarajevo in June 1914 had ignited World War I. Three-quarters of a century later Bosnia no longer held the strategic importance it once did for the great powers. But it seemed destined to play a decisive role in the outcome of the Yugoslav civil war and the larger question of whether a “new world order” could be constructed on the rubble of communism.

Bosnia had managed to keep out of the fighting between Serbia and Croatia by acting as the honest broker in the conflict. For this political balancing act to work, the Bosnian Muslims had to be able to play the Croats off against the Serbs. If Croatia succeeded in breaking away from the Yugoslav federation, the precarious ethnic balance in Bosnia would be fatally disturbed. The republic would be faced with a terrible choice. It could declare its own independence, risking an armed revolt by Serb nationalists. Or it could remain inside a shrunken Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, a course of action that would be bitterly opposed by Croats and Muslims. For a glimpse of what life would be like in such a state, they had only to look across the border. At the same time as it was complaining about the mistreatment of Serbs by Croatia, the Milošević regime was denying elementary civic rights to the Albanian and Muslim minorities in Kosovo and Sandžak.

As Bosnia teetered on the edge, Milošević took a series of steps designed to ensure that he would be in a position to dictate the future course of events, whatever the Bosnian leadership decided. First, he established a political network in the republic, based on the nationalist Serbian Social Democratic Party (SDS), which had been the main instrument for provoking the rebellion in Serb-inhabited regions of Croatia. Next, he used his JNA connections to make sure that his Bosnian clients would enjoy an overwhelming advantage in weapons and ammunition over their future opponents. The Milošević government pursued a consistent, well-thought-out strategy of arming the Bosnian Serbs for the coming war from late 1990 onward. The code name for this strategy was RAM.

The existence of the RAM plan was first revealed by the federal prime
minister, Ante Markovi?, during a showdown with Milošević’s supporters in September 1991.
¹
At the time little was known about RAM, except for its name. But the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle gradually fell into place, as large consignments of weapons turned up at SDS branches and Serb-controlled police stations all over Bosnia. In some cases the weapons were handed over directly by the four JNA army corps stationed in Bosnia, whose commanders were all Serb. In other cases they were sent from Serbia. It later turned out that the Bosnian interior minister, a Muslim businessman named Alija Delimustafić, was partly aware of what was going on. He turned a blind eye to shipments of arms from Belgrade to Croatian Serbs, in return for dropoffs of flak jackets for his police force. Some of the weapons earmarked for the Croatian Serbs were retained by the Bosnian Serbs.
²

In September 1991 the Serb campaign of political and military infiltration of Bosnia moved into the open. Copying the strategy of the Croatian Serbs, the Bosnian Serbs formally declared the “autonomy” of four Serb-inhabited regions, covering roughly 60 percent of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the same time, Serbia’s ally Montenegro dispatched a force of several thousand reservists to occupy strategic positions in the hills above Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina. The Muslims and Croats responded to this mini-invasion by mobilizing their own reservists, a move denounced by SDS leaders as a prelude to “civil war.”
³
The JNA then mobilized its twenty thousand troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina, against the wishes of the republic’s collective presidency.