The Last Empire (24 page)

When Yeltsin raised the question of ministerial appointments with Gorbachev during their tête-à-tête on August 23, the Soviet president tried to play for time. Responding to Yeltsin's demand for Moiseev's dismissal, he said, “I'll think of how I can correct it.”

Yeltsin refused to leave his office: “No, I won't leave until you do it in my presence. Have Moiseev come here right away and send him into retirement.” Yeltsin's hand was strengthened when he received a note through his bodyguards that Moiseev had ordered the destruction of documents pertaining to the Defense Ministry's involvement in the coup. The note bore the name and telephone number of the officer in charge of shredding the papers. Yeltsin ordered that the number be called and then handed the telephone receiver to Gorbachev: “Order the senior lieutenant to stop destroying documents. Let him put everything under guard.” Gorbachev followed what amounted to an order. He did likewise when Yeltsin insisted on calling in Moiseev.
“Explain to him that he is no longer a minister,” he told the Soviet president. The humiliated Gorbachev followed Yeltsin's order.
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The new minister of defense, appointed on Yeltsin's recommendation, was Air Marshal Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, who had opposed the coup and made his position known to Yeltsin and his entourage. Yeltsin now had his man in charge of the Soviet military. He also negotiated the appointment of Vadim Bakatin, a Gorbachev ally who had supported Yeltsin during the coup, as the new KGB chief. Furthermore, Yeltsin insisted on the removal of Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, the Soviet foreign minister, who had reported himself ill while the coup was in progress. Also dismissed was the acting minister of internal affairs whom Gorbachev had appointed the previous day. “I had told him that the coup had taught us a bitter lesson and therefore I had to insist that he not make any personnel decisions without first obtaining my consent,” recalled Yeltsin, describing his conversation with Gorbachev about ministerial appointments. “He looked at me intently, with the expression of a person backed into a corner.” It was a countercoup indeed. Yeltsin was forcing Gorbachev to appoint either his own people or those he considered well disposed to him personally. The appointments of Shaposhnikov and Bakatin would turn out to be crucial in the months leading up to the disintegration of the USSR.
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Gorbachev was clearly in retreat. He was confused, and his position was undermined by accusations that he himself had been behind the coup. On August 22, when correspondents of the Moscow daily
Argumenty i fakty
(
Arguments and Facts
) hit the streets of the capital to ask passersby what they thought of the president of the USSR, the subtext of the question was perfectly obvious: Did people believe that Gorbachev was behind the coup? One of the four people interviewed that day did not trust Gorbachev, another trusted him, and the other two gave him the benefit of the doubt but did not trust him completely—after all, those leading the coup had been his own protégés. What Yeltsin was saying about his new ministerial appointees or senior officials in the Central Committee might well be true: having spent the three critical days of the coup in isolation, Gorbachev was now in no position to check facts or disprove allegations. Recalling his first ministerial appointments, Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs, “Such errors were due to the lack of information. Much would be
disclosed only months later and certain issues have not been fully clarified to this day.”
¹⁰

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
returned to Moscow determined to regain his position not only as president but also as head of the party. At the televised press conference on the evening of his return, he declared himself an adherent of the socialist idea; castigated his close aide and an intellectual father of perestroika, Aleksandr Yakovlev, for abandoning the party; and proclaimed his determination to continue the renewal of the party on a democratic basis. In July he had forced a new party program on the Central Committee that would reform the Communist Party along European social democratic lines. Now, with the hard-liners on the run after the defeat of the coup, he believed that the reform could be carried out successfully.

In his memoirs, Gorbachev explained his logic at the time as follows: “The break-up of the party was inevitable at a certain stage, because of the different ideological and political tension in its membership. I advocated proceeding by democratic means: convening a congress in November and making an amicable divide. According to some opinion polls, the version of the program adopted by me and my followers was favored by nearly a third of the party members.” The party Gorbachev envisioned could have up to 5 million members. But he soon found himself with no party at all. His opponents used their power over the street to shut down the activities of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
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Major popular demonstrations began in Moscow on the day of Gorbachev's return, August 22. In the course of that day, the crowds swelled with liberal supporters of the democratic revolution, most of whom had not dared to show up during the acute stage of the conflict, as well as with city youth in search of adventure and excitement. Liquor was freely available, making the crowds more unruly. Those managing the crowds came from the Moscow city administration—all ardent supporters of Yeltsin during the coup. They succeeded in preventing the increasingly aggressive throng from storming the KGB buildings, which were protected by sharpshooters, by offering an alternative: the removal of the monument to “Iron Felix”—the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky—that dominated Lubianka Square in front of KGB headquarters. The ploy worked.
¹²

American embassy staffers who reached the KGB building late in the afternoon got the best view of the scene. When one of them told the demonstrators that he was an American, he was thrust through the crowd toward the center of the square so that he could see the whole event from the first row. At first the demonstrators wanted to pull the statue down with a truck. But then the Moscow authorities asked the crowd to wait for cranes to arrive, explaining that the statue was too heavy. If it toppled, it could crash through the ground into the Moscow subway system. The warning worked, and the statue was removed a few hours later with Krupp cranes.

“Finally,” reported the American diplomats to Washington, “just before midnight, the final bolts were cut, and the cranes were moved into position to lift the statue from its base. When the statue was lifted from the pedestal the crowd broke into cheers and began chanting ‘Down with the KGB,' ‘Russia,' and ‘Executioner.' All three KGB buildings were dark throughout the event. Whenever an office light was turned on the crowd began pointing and shouting until it went out. People in the crowd remarked, ‘They are afraid of us.'” The night came to an end without riots or major incidents.
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Then came the morning of August 23. Yeltsin's lieutenants seemed to be in control of the crowds and were in no hurry to send the demonstrators home, realizing their political importance for the moment. They warned the crowds that the hard-liners were preparing a new attack on the White House. Marshal Shaposhnikov, who would be appointed minister of defense in a few hours, reacted to the rumor by placing the air force on high alert. Meanwhile, a crowd gathered around a police station on Petrovka Square, and the boldest began to climb the iron fence around the building. A riot was in the making, with a possible seizure of weapons. Moreover, there was no supreme authority in charge of the police: the minister of the interior, Boris Pugo, had committed suicide; his replacement, appointed by Gorbachev, had been rejected by Yeltsin; and Yeltsin's appointee had not yet been approved by Gorbachev and the republican leaders. The situation might well have gotten out of hand.
¹⁴

The Moscow city authorities, who had opposed the coup and enjoyed great trust among Muscovites, took charge of the situation, as they had done the previous night. Their solution was to divert the masses toward the Communist Party headquarters, located a few
kilometers away from the Petrovka police station. “The mayor needs your help. Everyone to the Central Committee,” said one of the city officials to the crowd. Many were unhappy to be thwarted when they had almost gotten their hands on the policemen and their weapons, but a good part of the crowd of Muscovites, used to seeing the party as the source and main symbol of power, obeyed the official's call.

While the earlier targets of the crowd's rage—the KGB and the police—had been directly and visibly implicated in the coup, the party, whose leadership had never publicly declared its attitude, was a still larger prize. The protesters were rebelling not just against the coup authorities but against the party-run state itself. Antiparty slogans had mobilized Muscovites to take part in meetings and demonstrations over the previous few years, and now they worked just as the city authorities hoped they would. The crowds moved in the direction of the Old Square—the complex of buildings belonging to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

That day, while Gorbachev and Yeltsin bargained for ministerial positions at the Kremlin, real power in the country and the capital rested with Gennadii Burbulis, a forty-six-year-old grandson of Latvian immigrants who had grown up in Yeltsin's native Sverdlovsk. A former university professor of Marxist political economy and, since the beginning of perestroika, a democratic organizer and an anticommunist to boot, Burbulis had recently been appointed by Yeltsin to the post of secretary of state, the second-highest office in the Russian hierarchy. This gave him control over the presidential administration and a good part of the government. On August 23, Burbulis was running Russian affairs from an office in the White House. He communicated with Yeltsin, then in session with Gorbachev and republican leaders at the Kremlin, through notes passed to the Russian president by his bodyguards. It was he who told Yeltsin about the shredding of documents at the Defense Ministry, giving him grounds to demand the dismissal of Gorbachev's appointee to the ministry.

Now Burbulis applied the same tactic—accusations of shredding documents and covering up participation in the coup—to undercut Gorbachev in his own sphere and shut down the operations of the Communist Party, where neither Yeltsin, who had left the party
several years before, nor the republican leaders had any real influence. Burbulis sent Gorbachev (then in session with Yeltsin) a note claiming that party officials were shredding documents implicating them in the coup and demanded permission for a temporary shutdown of the Central Committee premises. Shredding was indeed going on, although the machines broke down when party apparatchiks, eager to destroy all traces of their participation in the coup, failed to remove paper clips. Apparently in an attempt to appease Yeltsin, Gorbachev signed the memo, thereby authorizing the closure of the Central Committee buildings. His fate as head of the party was now sealed, and his position as president was weaker than ever before.

Moscow city officials rushed to the party headquarters with the paper signed by Gorbachev, demanding that the confused and frightened party apparatchiks close their offices and go home. The crowds besieging the building echoed that demand. When Nikolai Kruchina, the head of the Central Committee staff, told the Moscow officials that he could not just shut down the operations of the entire Central Committee, they pointed to the window and the crowds outside: “They will tear everyone inside here to pieces, unless you go quietly,” barked one of the officials at Kruchina. “Stop playing the fool. Do as you're told!” The senior party official, visibly shaken, turned red. There were not enough KGB guards to put up effective resistance. So Kruchina gave up and ordered his deputy to lead the Moscow city representatives to the civil defense announcement system in the building. “By agreement with the president, in view of recent events, a decision has been made to seal the building. You have one hour in which to leave. You may take your personal belongings with you, but everything else is to be left behind,” went the announcement.

The crowds were jubilant. As the party apparatchiks started to leave the building, the city officials appealed to the demonstrators not to “give any pretext to those who would like to sow any disorder here.” “Shame! Shame!” chanted the Muscovites as thousands of party employees left the building in utmost humiliation. The Moscow city party secretary, Yurii Prokofiev, who on the last day of the coup had demanded that the plotters give him a pistol so that he could shoot himself, was verbally abused and even kicked but was then taken under police protection and driven away in a taxi. The demonstrators,
who searched officials as they left the building, showed off their loot—smoked fish and sausages that some party officials had tried to smuggle out, these being delicacies hard to come by at the time.
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THE SHUTDOWN OF PARTY
headquarters in downtown Moscow coincided with Gorbachev's greatest public disaster of his long political career. In the afternoon, he met with a group of deputies to the Russian parliament in what was supposed to be an informal setting. In fact, it was broadcast on television. He began by thanking the Russian parliament and Yeltsin personally for standing up to the coup. He revealed that he had signed a decree promoting Aleksandr Rutskoi, a colonel at the time of the coup, to the rank of general. To appease Yeltsin, Gorbachev read aloud an excerpt from the minutes of a cabinet meeting of August 19, at which all but two of his ministers had supported the coup.

But the Soviet president was also eager to save what remained of his power. He called on the Russian deputies to help him salvage the Union: “Today, after emerging from this crisis, the Russians must act together with all the other supreme soviets of the other republics and the peoples of the other republics. Otherwise they would not be Russians.” The allusion was to the traditional imperial role of the Russians in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. None of this sat well with the deputies, who took Gorbachev's appeal to act in conjunction with other republics as an attempt to check Russia's drive toward democracy and market reform by harnessing it to the Union bandwagon. The deputies bombarded Gorbachev with questions about his own complicity in the coup and demanded that the Communist Party, his real power base, be declared a criminal organization. Gorbachev went on the defensive. “This is just another way of carrying on a crusade or religious war at the present time,” he told the deputies. “Socialism, as I understand it, is a type of conviction which people have and we are not the only ones who have it but it exists in other countries, not only today but at other times.”