Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (24 page)

In 1989 CNN became the first non-Soviet broadcaster to be allowed to beam its news programs into Moscow. Initially it was only available in the exclusive Savoy Hotel for viewing by foreign guests, but amateur Russian engineers found they could rig up an aerial to get the network’s signal on their home television screens. In the days before the internet and the mobile phone, this had a considerable impact on how Russians saw events in their own country, and made censorship of news almost impossible.

They almost missed out on the drama of the last day of the Soviet Union. Only when CNN executives got wind that ABC’s Ted Koppel had secured unique access to the Kremlin to film Gorbachev’s last days were they jolted into action. In Atlanta CNN president Tom Johnson decided to throw all the station’s resources into battle with its rival. A former publisher of the
Los Angeles Times,
Johnson took over the CNN presidency the previous year and established a reputation for being ferociously competitive. He set out for Moscow on December 18, taking with him Stuart (Stu) Loory, a former CNN Moscow bureau chief who could speak Russian, to lobby for the first interview with Boris Yeltsin as the new leader of Russia and the final interview with Gorbachev as leader of the USSR, though they were not even absolutely sure a transition would happen.

Johnson called on the Russian information minister to make his case for the Yeltsin interview. He cited to Poltoranin their exclusive coverage from Baghdad and showed the information minister the latest color global satellite distribution map, emphasizing that no other news organization on the planet could reach as many nations. Poltoranin snapped, “I know that!” Taken aback, Johnson proposed that they would link the interview with Yeltsin to Russian television to ensure it got shown across the country. “The entire spirit of the talks became very friendly after that,” he recalled. Johnson was brought to meet Yeltsin, who agreed to an exclusive interview on the day, though precisely when that would be Yeltsin could not tell him. He gave the Russian president a copy of
Seven Days That Shook the World,
a CNN book on the failed August coup.

It helped that CNN was a known quantity in Moscow, explained bureau chief Steve Hurst. “We were in the offices of serious players day and night.”

The company started bringing people to Moscow from all over the world. Charlie Caudill, senior CNN producer in charge of live coverage, flew in from Atlanta to head the biggest crew ever assembled for a single foreign television event up to that time. The group of seventy-five included executives, producers, directors, interviewers, camera operators, sound operators, managers, and interpreters. Unit manager Frida Ghitis arrived in Moscow to find that the bureau staff had already spent weeks “begging for interviews from Yeltsin and Gorbachev” and strategically placing boxes of chocolate and bottles of whiskey in the hands of their aides. “There was great pressure to beat the competition,” she remembered, “and Koppel’s name came up with some frequency.”

The large CNN team then wait for the day of Gorbachev’s resignation. “We were nervous that Gorbachev would resign ahead of schedule or that other networks would outflank us,” said Loory. On the afternoon of December 24 there is a false alarm. Everyone swings into action. “So now we are rolling to the Kremlin with five or six trucks with cameras and equipment,” recalled Caudill. “The lights were out at the Kremlin. Tom hands his business card to the guard at the gate. The guard has no idea what is going on.” In fact nothing is happening, and the convoy of CNN vehicles and thirty-four staff turns round and goes back the way it came. With everyone far from home, Johnson decides to host a Christmas Eve party in the hotel. He asks Frida Ghitis to find him a Santa Claus hat. A Russian helper is unable to find the right material in the stores. Even the seamstresses at the Bolshoi Theater and the Moscow Circus cannot help. Ghitis spots a picture in a newspaper of a Norwegian Santa Claus delivering presents to children in a Moscow orphanage. “In the end we bought the hat from the Norwegian Mister Claus,” she said. “The party of course was a bust, in spite of Johnson’s lovely hat and matching white beard. Just as it got under way we learned that everything would happen next day, and everyone was much too busy preparing for the two interviews.”

Now that the interview with Yeltsin is about to take place, Charlie Caudill is checking with Russian officials that all the arrangements in the White House are in place and that the simultaneous translation will work smoothly. He asks Yeltsin’s aide which ear he would prefer for the earpiece. The aide replies, “He’s deaf in one ear.” “Which ear?” “I don’t know.” “Ask him!” “No, I will not ask the president of Russia which ear!” Caudill turns to the CNN technician, who can speak Russian, “When Yeltsin sits down, whisper in his ear, ‘Nice to meet you.’ If he smiles, it is the correct ear.”

The moment arrives. Escorted by Johnson, Yeltsin makes a majestic appearance, slowly descending a wide carpeted staircase, immaculate in suit and shiny black shoes, his mane of silver hair perfectly in place, showing no sign that he “sweats buckets” before going on television.
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He parades along a red runner on the polished parquet floor to where three upholstered drawing room chairs with gold brocade are arranged for Steve Hurst and Claire Shipman to conduct the interview. The technician murmurs a greeting as Yeltsin sits and the earpiece is fitted on his left side. He smiles. They have guessed the correct ear. The Russian president lost the hearing on his right side as a result of untreated otitis, an inflammation of the inner ear, when he was a youth.

Johnson, who once worked for President Lyndon B. Johnson, is struck by how much Yeltsin resembles his former boss in that he is “very strong, powerful, forceful, a real giant of a man.” Shipman finds the Russian president in ebullient form. “He was on his game, really in his prime, very aware of his power and incredibly confident, but not crowing in an obvious way. He had a gleam in his eye, and a mischievous look. I felt he was impatient to get there.” Hurst remembers Yeltsin as being “very excited, very much on edge, not at all sure of what would happen next.”

Yeltsin uses the interview to reassure viewers abroad that the breakup of the Soviet Union does not mean nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands. He urges the world not to worry about it. There will not be a single second after Gorbachev makes his resignation announcement that the nuclear codes will go astray, he says. “We will do all we can to prevent the nuclear button from being used—ever.”

He professes empathy with his defeated rival. “Today is a difficult day for Mikhail Sergeyevich,” he says graciously, when asked what mistakes Gorbachev made. “Because I have a lot of respect for him personally and we are trying to be civilized people and we are trying to make it into a civilized state today, I don’t want to focus on those mistakes.”

Instead he scolds the international community for not extending more aid to Russia in its hour of need. “There has been a lot of talk, but there has been no specific assistance,” he says. Perhaps this is because willing nations do not know to what postal address they should send humanitarian assistance. “Now everything is clear, and the addressees are known.” Living standards will decline for at least another year, he warns, and the world must help Russia to shed its “nightmarish totalitarian inheritance.”

Yeltsin chides U.S. secretary of state James Baker for waiting until he left Russia after a fact-finding visit the previous week to express pessimism about the survival chances of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which will replace the Soviet Union, though everyone, including the Russian president, knows the CIS is little more than a fig leaf for the divorce.

“Mr. Baker, when he and I had a four-and-a-half-hour meeting here in Moscow, never told me that, so those who doubt the success of the commonwealth should beware and not be so pessimistic. The people here are weary of pessimism, and the share of pessimism is too much for the people to handle. Now they need some belief, finally.”

He ends the interview beaming and wishing everyone, “Happy Christmas!”

The proceedings are recorded by a broad-faced man with a short haircut standing at a discreet distance with a heavy film camera on his shoulder. Yeltsin’s personal cameraman, Alexander Kuznetsov, has the task of recording the Russian president’s daily activities. He sees his role as providing footage of Yeltsin that will be sufficiently flattering so that “Naina is satisfied and his daughters will not be making faces in front of the television.” He is secretly an admirer of Gorbachev and was in negotiations with Andrey Grachev to work for the Soviet president until he received a more tempting offer from Yeltsin. He did not mention this when he was being hired, as “Yeltsin couldn’t stand Gorbachev.”

The job of recording the colorful Russian president’s life and times, he reflects, puts him “in the front row of the political theatre of the time, enjoying the performance of the best actor at the end of the second millennium.” Nevertheless, in Kuznetsov’s opinion, “It is Gorbachev’s name that will be written in history in gold writing—and Yeltsin’s only in capital letters.”
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CHAPTER 17

PERFIDIOUSNESS, LAWLESSNESS, INFAMY

On Saturday, August 17, 1991, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov invited a small number of highly placed party members to join him for a steam bath in a secret KGB guest house at the end of Moscow’s Leninsky Prospekt. They included Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov; Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov; President Gorbachev’s chief of staff, Valery Boldin; and two other senior party officials, Oleg Baklanov and Oleg Shenin.
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Wrapped in towels, they made small talk. Kryuchkov told them of an intelligence report that seemed to show Gorbachev kowtowing to America. It wasn’t until they had dressed and were drinking vodka and Scotch whisky at a trestle table in the garden that Kryuchkov revealed the reason they all had been invited.

The country was facing total chaos, he said. Gorbachev was not acting adequately. He had intelligence that Gorbachev planned to fire the prime minister and other members of government, including himself, after the ceremonial signing of the new union treaty on the following Tuesday. The treaty would mean the end of the USSR and could not be tolerated. If Gorbachev would not lead them, and if they could not control him, he would have to be forced to leave the scene.

It was time to make a move, he went on. Gorbachev was due to return from his Black Sea vacation on Monday. They would send a delegation to Foros tomorrow, Sunday, and ask the president to join them in declaring a state of emergency. If he refused, they would invite him to resign. They would set up an emergency committee and do what was needed themselves.

All went along with the plan. Yazov offered to provide a military plane to fly to Foros. In the meantime he would bring troops into Moscow to demonstrate to the populace where power lay. The defense minister smirked at Boldin. He joked that when Gorbachev saw that his chief of staff was involved, he would say, “Et tu Brute?” Boldin was hardly in a mood for humor, however. He was ill with a liver ailment and had been on an IV drip in the hospital for a week, but he had signed himself out because the country was disintegrating and “I simply had to set my personal considerations aside.”

The plotters were told by Kryuchkov that Interior Minister Boris Pugo was an instigator of the plan and he was also confident that Vice President Gennady Yanayev would cooperate once he was informed. He was also sure they could handle any resistance from the general population. Two hundred and fifty thousand pairs of handcuffs had been ordered from a factory in Pskov, and Lefortovo prison made ready for an influx of detainees.

The coup got under way the next day, Sunday, August 18, with the house arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev. A military plane provided by Yazov landed at the Belbek military base near Foros at 5 p.m. after a two-hour flight from Moscow. On board were Baklanov, Shenin, Boldin, and another enthusiastic putschist, General Valentin Varennikov. The four men represented the pillars of the Soviet establishment. Baklanov, with broad earnest face and furrowed brow, was head of the Soviet Union’s military-industrial complex. Shenin, prematurely bald with large domed forehead, was the Politburo member responsible for party organization. Boldin, besides being Gorbachev’s chief of staff, was a senior member of the Central Committee. Varennikov, in large rimless glasses with a thin moustache and lank hair combed over in Hitler style, was commander of Soviet land forces.

The delegation was driven by KGB officers in two Zil limousines to the state dacha with marble walls and orange-tiled roof, where the Gorbachevs were spending the last day of their two-week summer vacation. They were joined inside the compound gate by another plotter, General Yury Plekhanov, the stolid unsmiling head of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, who represented a fifth pillar of Soviet power, the security organs. Plekhanov deployed new guards around the perimeter of the dacha, ordered the head of Gorbachev’s security to return to Moscow and put men with automatic weapons outside the garage so none of Gorbachev’s party could get to the cars or use the radio telephones in the automobiles.

The president was in his second-floor office dressed in shorts and a pullover, reading the text of the speech he would give to launch the new Union in Moscow in two days’ time. In it he had written a warning: “If we turn back now, our children will never forgive us such ignorance and irresponsibility.”

In a guesthouse on the dacha compound, Colonel Vladimir Kirillov, one of the two plainclothes officers in charge of the nuclear suitcase, was watching television when the screen went blank. An emergency light on the
chemodanchik
started blinking. This was it—a nuclear alert! He picked up his radio telephone with a direct link to government communications. He was told there had been an accident and not to worry. At 4:32 p.m. he lost contact with his controller in Moscow, KGB general Viktor Boldyrev. General Varennikov appeared at the door. “How are your communications?” he asked. “There aren’t any,” replied the colonel. “That’s how it should be,” said Varennikov. He assured him that contacts would be restored within twenty-four hours.
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