The Last Empire (26 page)

On the evening of Sunday, August 25, one day after Gorbachev stepped down as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and signed a decree on the transfer of party property, and the day on which Yeltsin signed his own decree seizing that property, Nikolai Kruchina, the sixty-three-year-old chief of staff of the Central Committee, went to his old office to discuss the property transfer with representatives of the Moscow government. The meeting, which ended soon after 9:00 p.m., did not go well for Kruchina. Normally a friendly individual, he surprised his KGB guard when, on his return from the Central Committee, he did not greet him as usual. Looking depressed and withdrawn, Kruchina went to his fifth-floor apartment in an exclusive building in downtown Moscow. He bade his wife goodnight and told her that he still needed to do some work. Soon after 5:00 a.m. on August 26, Kruchina stepped onto his balcony and jumped to his death.

Kruchina committed suicide not because he was disillusioned with the ideals of the Communist Party or the actions of its leaders and members but because he felt that he had broken his oath of loyalty to his boss and, judging by what we know today, was afraid of an investigation into the party's finances. The meeting that put Kruchina into a mood of depression on the evening of August 25 ended on a very worrisome note for him: as the man responsible for party finances, he had signed almost every major document authorizing secret transfers of party funds to business ventures both at home and abroad. When Vasilii Shakhnovsky, the Moscow city official who met with Kruchina that evening, told him, “We'll need to have a special discussion about party finances,” the party's chief of staff went pale. He abruptly ended the conversation, promising to return to the subject the next day. For him, that day never came.

Party finances were the one thing that the chief of the party staff was not prepared to discuss with Russian officials. As later investigations showed, some of the party money had been transferred abroad, according to memos signed by Kruchina, for “good” communist causes, including clandestine support for communist parties and movements all over the world, from the United States to Afghanistan. But most of the transfers went to the new commercial banks and shady enterprises created by party apparatchiks and their business cronies during the last two years of Gorbachev's rule. Having
been maneuvered out of office, the party officials were seeking to convert their political power into financial resources. This strategy offered them a comfortable life outside the party apparatus and saved the country from a prolonged and potentially bloody struggle with the numerous and well-entrenched ruling class, which otherwise would have had everything to lose and nothing to gain from the transition. Still, the process was not bloodless. Kruchina became one of its first victims.
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8

INDEPENDENT UKRAINE

N
O ONE COULD TELL HOW MANY PEOPLE
there were: thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand. The Ukrainian parliamentary deputies making their way through the crowds to the parliament building were in no position to count. It was the sunny Saturday morning of August 24, the day on which Yeltsin upstaged Gorbachev at the funeral for the defenders of the White House and on which the Soviet leader stepped down as head of the Communist Party. What would happen in Kyiv that day would send a shock wave around the Soviet Union considerably greater than the one set off by that day's events in Moscow. The second Soviet republic would declare its complete independence from the Union.

The Kyivan crowds had not gathered in the city's downtown on August 24 to defend parliament, as had been the case in Moscow a few days earlier, but to condemn the communist parliamentary majority for its covert support of the coup. The previous day Yeltsin had signed a decree banning the Communist Party of Russia in full view not only of the confused Gorbachev but also of millions of excited television viewers all over the Soviet Union. Many of those gathered in Kyiv believed that the same should be done in Ukraine. The leaflets that summoned them called the Communist Party a “criminal and anticonstitutional organization whose activities must be brought to an end.” The people responded. Many brought along blue-and-yellow
national flags and placards calling for a Nuremberg-style trial for the Communist Party.
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The fate of the party was not their only concern; otherwise people would have gathered at the building of the Ukrainian party's Central Committee, only a few blocks from parliament. They did not do so because it was no longer in the party's power to grant or revoke what they wanted. Carrying placards that read “Ukraine is leaving the USSR,” they demanded independence for their country. Only parliament could deliver that. The crowds, consisting largely of supporters of Ukrainian opposition parties, were in a resolute mood. Only a few weeks earlier, many of those on parliament square had lined the streets of Kyiv to welcome President George Bush to the Ukrainian capital. At that time they had carried placards with the same demand: now, however, they were directed not toward an American visitor whom they implicitly trusted but toward their own domestic nemesis—the communist apparatchiks, whom they did not trust at all.

John Stepanchuk, the acting consul general of the United States in Kyiv, who had been directly involved in preparations for Bush's visit and was now in charge of the consulate there, had difficulty making his way through the crowds at the parliament building that morning. “There were thousands of people surrounding it, angry people,” he remembered later. “Angry at the Communists, angry at everything. They were just gathered there. They thought I was a Communist because I was dressed in a suit. So one woman started pulling my jacket calling ‘
hanba
,' ‘shame.' They thought I was one of the guilty.” The communist majority inside the parliament building suddenly found itself a besieged minority. Stepanchuk, seated in a diplomatic booth, “could see that the Communists were all glued to the window watching these crowds come closer and closer, wondering if they would ever leave the building alive.” The communist members of parliament “were all nervous, and smoking, walking around. This was the atmosphere of tension. It was known, of course, that Kravchuk would make a speech, but no one knew how far he would go.”

Leonid Kravchuk, the silver-haired Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, who had made a positive impression on President Bush a few weeks earlier and then seemed to be in full control of the
institution, was now clearly on the defensive. Not only the Communist Party but also his own behavior during the coup was now being questioned and put on trial. His own fate—the outcome of that day in parliament, outside its walls, and all over the country—would depend on the attitude Kravchuk adopted. With the crowds outside parliament chanting, “Shame on Kravchuk,” the Speaker was fighting for his political life.
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WHAT HAPPENED IN MOSCOW
on August 18, 1991, caught Leonid Kravchuk by surprise. It presented a major challenge to his grip on power in Ukraine and to the movement for Ukrainian sovereignty with which he had closely associated his name and his political fortunes. On the morning of August 19, he learned about the overthrow of Gorbachev from his main political rival, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Stanislav Hurenko, who called Kravchuk at his suburban residence to summon him to Central Committee headquarters. There was to be a meeting with the Emergency Committee's strongman, the tough-talking General Valentin Varennikov, who had arrived in Kyiv after his encounter with Gorbachev in the Crimea.

Kravchuk refused. “I immediately grasped where power was now moving,” he remembered later. “I said: ‘Stanislav Ivanovych, the point is that the state is embodied in the Supreme Soviet, and I am the head of the Supreme Soviet. If Varennikov wants to meet, then we shall meet in my office at the Supreme Soviet.'” Hurenko had to agree. This represented Kravchuk's first, modest victory over his rival. Just one year earlier, the fifty-five-year-old Hurenko, as first secretary of the Central Committee, had been considered a step above Kravchuk in the republican hierarchy. But with Ukraine declaring sovereignty in the summer of 1990, the role of parliament and its Speaker, traditionally known as the head of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, had grown enormously, making Kravchuk the republic's principal figure. This was now the trend in all the Union republics, although it was not so pronounced in Central Asia, where local heads of party Central Committees also became Speakers of parliament.

Kravchuk later remembered that while waiting for Hurenko and Varennikov to arrive, he felt defenseless: no military or police units reported to the head of parliament, and the only force he had at his disposal consisted of three guards with handguns. Varennikov's
sudden arrival in Kyiv showed how ephemeral was the power of the head of a republic that had declared its sovereignty and set its own laws above those of the Union. Kravchuk had no doubt that he was being faced with a coup. Gorbachev's alleged illness was a sham: Kravchuk had seen him in the Crimea a few weeks earlier. On the evening he visited Gorbachev in Foros, they had polished off a 0.75-liter bottle of lemon vodka with the help of Gorbachev's son-in-law. Kravchuk did not conceal his skepticism about the Emergency Committee's claim with regard to Gorbachev's poor health from anyone with whom he chanced to speak, and later that day he mentioned the bottle of vodka at a meeting with World War II veterans. Finally the guests arrived, with Hurenko preceding Varennikov and his entourage.
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The host and his guests sat around the long table—military on one side, civilians on the other, Varennikov directly across from Kravchuk. Varennikov was the first to speak. “Gorbachev is ill; power in the country has gone over to a newly created agency, the Emergency Committee on the Extraordinary Situation,” he said, according to a participant in the meeting. “From 4:00 a.m. on August 19, in the interests of public safety, a state of emergency has been declared in Moscow in connection with the deterioration of the situation in the capital and the danger of disturbances. I have come to Kyiv in order to sort out the situation directly and, if necessary, to recommend the declaration of a state of emergency in at least a number of regions of Ukraine.” Varennikov specified Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, and one of the cities in the western region of Volhynia.

The civilians on the other side of the table reacted as if shell-shocked. There was complete silence for at least a minute. Hurenko showed no emotion. The silence was finally broken by Kravchuk, who seemed poised and confident without being aggressive. “We know you, Valentin Ivanovich, as the USSR deputy minister of defense, a respected individual, but you have shown us no credentials,” said Kravchuk in response. “Besides, we have not yet received any instructions from Moscow. And, finally, the most important point: the declaration of a state of emergency throughout Ukraine or in a particular region is a matter for the Supreme Soviet—that is what the law requires. We are informed that the situation both in Kyiv and in the regions is fairly calm, requiring no extraordinary measures.”
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Varennikov had come to Ukraine because the plotters in Moscow were apprehensive about Rukh—the pro-independence alliance of Ukraine's opposition parties—and its possible actions against the coup in Kyiv and western Ukraine. “There is no Soviet power in western Ukraine; it's all Rukh,” declared Varennikov. “It is imperative to declare a state of emergency in the western oblasts. Strikes are to be stopped. All parties except the CPSU are to be shut down, along with their papers; meetings are to be stopped and dispersed. You are to take extraordinary measures so that people do not think you are following the previous course. . . . The army is in full battle readiness, and we will take every measure, including bloodshed.” Kravchuk insisted that there was no need for a state of emergency. If the general thought there was, he could go to western Ukraine and see for himself that calm prevailed there.
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Varennikov changed his line. “You are a man of authority; a great deal depends on you, and I am asking you personally,” he said to Kravchuk, “that you, first of all, make an appearance on television, then on radio, and appeal to the people to remain calm, taking account of what has already been proclaimed.” After Hurenko and the others left Kravchuk's office, leaving him one-on-one with the general, Kravchuk asked him as an old acquaintance (they had attended the same meetings of the Central Committee in Kyiv when Varennikov served in Ukraine), “Valentin Ivanovich, once you succeed, are you going to bring back the old system?” He had in mind the pre-perestroika political order and relations between the center and the republics. The general responded in the affirmative: “We have no other choice.” This answer spoke volumes to Kravchuk. As he remembered later, he realized at that moment that a victory for the Emergency Committee would not mean keeping things as they were but would actually lead to turning back the clock, perhaps all the way back to the times of mass persecution.

The putschists would have nothing to lose, and their victory would mean not only the end of Kravchuk's political career but also his possible imprisonment. Unlike Hurenko, Kravchuk was in no position to gain anything politically by siding with the coup, but neither was he prepared to rebel like Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. His strategy was different: to do everything in his power to avoid giving the military a pretext to introduce a state of emergency in Ukraine.
“Presentiment suggested to me,” remembered Kravchuk later, “that it was necessary to gain time, to avoid any unnecessary moves, and all would be well.” It was a wait-and-see attitude for which he would later be severely and justly criticized.
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