backing of Gorbachev’s Kremlin. Of all the republics, Russia was the only one without its own television channel. In those days Soviet television had two channels, Channel 1 for news and major events and Channel 2 for sports and cultural and educational programs. Both were broadcast throughout the Soviet Union. As the campaign got under way, the Russian parliament pressured Kravchenko to cede control of Channel 2 to the Russian government. The television chief gave in, for once without consulting Gorbachev. The president was furious and raged at Kravchenko, “How dare you help my opponents like this!”[137]
Gorbachev correctly saw that a Russian channel would not only help Yeltsin but become a propaganda tool against him. It went on air under its new masters on May 13, 1991, with fast-paced news and satirical sketches, including one of an old woman singing a song with the words “Gorbachev first banned vodka. Now he is banning food.”[138]
In advance of the June election Yeltsin chose as his running mate Alexander Rutskoy, a former combat pilot and Afghan War hero whom he described as a real tiger, a macho man who would make middle-aged matrons swoon with delight. His only problem with the deputy was that he used expletives all the time, something Yeltsin abhorred. The straight-laced provincial was intolerant of the bad habits of others. Yeltsin also detested smoking and would take a cigarette from the fingers of a smoker sitting near him—on one occasion it was Hannelore Kohl, the wife of Chancellor Kohl of Germany[139]—and stub it out.
His principal opponent was Nikolay Ryzhkov, but the humorless bureaucrat had only a record of failed economic reforms to show. The ebullient mood of the Yeltsin campaign was conveyed in an anecdote about a military helicopter pilot saying, “Welcome aboard, future president of Russia,” and Yeltsin replying, “Thank you, future general!”
Yeltsin won handily with his platform of radical economic reform and privatization in a more sovereign Russia. He received forty-six million votes compared to thirteen million for Ryzhkov and six million for the extreme nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Gorbachev’s preferred runner, Vadim Bakatin, got fewer than three million votes. Yeltsin believed he won because the other candidates represented the old failed order while he embodied a yet nonexistent country that everyone was waiting impatiently to appear. He had also shown that it was possible to be a Russian patriot while supporting greater freedom for the other republics. Their common enemy was the center, representing Soviet imperialism. And at the heart of the center was Gorbachev.
The inauguration of President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin as the first freely elected leader in Russia’s thousand-year history took place on July 10, 1991, in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, beneath a giant replica of a double-headed eagle. The pompous ceremony was designed to evoke the color and majesty of prerevolutionary Russia and boost Yeltsin’s national credentials and his political legitimacy. President Gorbachev was in attendance as the red RSFSR flag, with hammer and sickle and blue stripe, was hoisted into the azure summer sky over the building. When Yeltsin made his appearance, a fanfare of trumpets rang out, and the chimes of the Spassky Tower played the national anthem. Yeltsin had wanted a twenty-four-gun salute and a giant screen on Red Square to relay the scene to the masses, but Gorbachev, still master of the Kremlin, vetoed this as over the top. Patriarch Alexey II of Moscow and all Russia, resplendent in jeweled cloak and crown, made a sign of the cross over Yeltsin, the first occasion on which the Orthodox Church had given a Russian leader its blessing since the time of the tsars. A full chorus performed the “Glory” chorus from Glinka’s
“Great Russia is rising from its knees,” declared Yeltsin. “We shall surely transform it into a prosperous, law-based, democratic, peaceful and sovereign state.” In front of the television cameras Gorbachev reached out to shake Yeltsin’s hand. The new Russian president deliberately stayed back, forcing Gorbachev to walk towards him.
After the ceremony Gorbachev assigned Yeltsin a ceremonial office in the Kremlin. It was located in the neoclassical mansion, Building 14, erected by Stalin in the 1930s on the site of a convent and a small palace. It was a cobblestone’s throw across a narrow courtyard from the much superior two-hundred-year-old Senate Building, listed as Building 1, where Gorbachev had his own suite of presidential offices. Gorbachev joked that there were two bears inhabiting the same den.[140] That was when he thought the arrangement would endure.
Ten days later Yeltsin used his authority as elected president to make a bold move. He banned all political parties—there was only one—from organizing cells in farms, factories, colleges, military units, and state bodies on the territory of Russia. Yury Prokofyev, first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party, rushed to Gorbachev’s Kremlin office in a panic to demand he issue a decree countermanding Yeltsin. Gorbachev declined, partly to avoid a fight that would scupper the talks on a union treaty. In a single stroke, the Communist Party ceased to have a role in the Russian workplaces it had dominated for most of the century. By then Moscow had elected a radical Congress deputy, Gavriil Popov, as mayor, and the days when a party official ran the city, as Yeltsin once had, were at an end.
Observing what was going on, Gorbachev’s doctrinaire aide, Valery Boldin, concluded that by letting Yeltsin get away with it, Gorbachev had like a coward abandoned and betrayed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of which he was still general secretary. In truth the great monolith created by Lenin was a fastdiminishing political force. Membership had declined by a quarter through resignations in the previous year, and the Politburo met only every few weeks, no longer a ruling body since Gorbachev had assumed the USSR presidency and chosen to rule by presidential decree from his Kremlin office.
The prospect of a new union treaty that would weaken the Soviet Union threw the revanchist forces in the USSR Supreme Soviet into a panic. They were on the brink of losing power. There was concern that Gorbachev was planning a party congress in the autumn of 1991 to create a new party of democratic socialism. On June 17, while Gorbachev was at Novo-Ogarevo and Yeltsin was absent in Washington, a small group of Gorbachev’s disloyal ministers had made their first move to turn back the tide. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov put forward a resolution in the USSR Supreme Soviet to transfer many of Gorbachev’s powers to himself, supposedly to deal with the critical economic situation. He demanded the authority to impose a ban on strikes, mobilize students and workers to save the harvest, and end moves to a market economy.
Stunned at his audacity, the parliament went into a brief private session. Behind closed doors, KGB chief Kryuchkov warned deputies that Western intelligence agents, planted inside the Kremlin and helped by Harvard economists, were plotting to destabilize the Soviet Union. Thus alarmed, the deputies continued their debate in open session for four days in an atmosphere of growing crisis. Gorbachev was nowhere to be seen, nor did he designate anyone to oppose this threat to his authority.
At midday on the third day of debate, June 20, Mayor Popov turned up at the U.S. embassy and asked Ambassador Jack Matlock for an urgent meeting. In the embassy library, the former economics professor with distinctive mop of white hair and bristling moustache put his finger to his lips and jotted a message on Matlock’s spiral notebook in Russian: “A coup is being organized to remove Gorbachev. We must get word to Boris Nikolayevich in Washington.” Matlock took the notebook and scrawled in Russian, “Who is behind this?” Popov wrote, “Pavlov, Kryuchkov, Yazov, Lukyanov.” Anatoly Lukyanov was the slippery speaker of the Supreme Soviet and a friend of Gorbachev since university days.[141]
Matlock relayed Popov’s message to Washington using a secure telephone system called STU-3. President Bush instructed him to warn Gorbachev personally, without mentioning the source. At eight o’clock in the evening the ambassador went to the Kremlin. He found the Soviet president alone with Chernyaev and in a mellow mood. They sat at the long table in his office. Gorbachev chuckled when Matlock told him of the warning. “I have everything well in hand,” he said. “We’ll see tomorrow.” After Matlock departed, Gorbachev poked fun at American gullibility, but he stopped smiling when Chernyaev casually mentioned that he had heard a rumor about suspicious troop movements outside Moscow.
The Popov warning came as Yeltsin, on his trip to the United States, was getting the Rose Garden treatment at the White House as the elected president of Russia, though the Americans were still holding their nose. In his speech of welcome Bush managed to mention Gorbachev favorably more times than he mentioned his guest. In the Oval Office Bush told Yeltsin of Popov’s warning. He jumped at the Russian’s suggestion that they should call Gorbachev to reinforce the urgency of the warning. CIA director Robert Gates was struck by the strange picture of “the presidents of the United States and Russia calling the president of the Soviet Union from the White House to warn him of a possible coup attempt.”[142]
When Bush called Gorbachev, he inadvertently named Popov as the sourceeven worse, he did so over a line known to be monitored by the KGB. Matlock was furious when he heard. He saw this careless intimacy as a measure of how deep Bush’s infatuation with Gorbachev had gone.[143]
