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
At 4:50 p.m. the head of Gorbachev’s bodyguard interrupted the president to say that a group of people had arrived to speak with him. Gorbachev was not expecting anyone. Somewhat alarmed, he picked up a receiver to call Kryuchkov in Moscow. The line was dead. All four telephones on his desk and the internal phone were no longer working. In an outer office Anatoly Chernyaev suddenly realized that his government line, satellite link, and internal telephone were all down.
He guessed immediately what was up.
Gorbachev went to the veranda, where Raisa was reading a newspaper in the company of their thirty-four- year-old daughter, Irina, and son-in-law, Anatoly Virgansky, a surgeon. He warned them they might be arrested. “I will not give in to any kind of blackmail,” he promised Raisa.
He went back and found that Baklanov, Shenin, Boldin, Varennikov, and Plekhanov had rudely occupied his office. Baklanov did the talking. The country was facing disaster, he said. A committee of emergency was being set up. Yeltsin was under arrest or at least soon would be. The president must immediately sign the decree on the declaration of a state of emergency or resign and hand over powers to Vice President Yanayev. Then he could stay in Foros while “measures” were taken.
Gorbachev demanded to know who was on the committee and was shocked to hear that Yazov and Kryuchkov were its leaders. He tried to reason with the intruders. They could discuss and decide matters within the framework of the law, but martial law and the use of force were unacceptable, he said. With his instinct for maneuvering and compromise, he suggested a different course for the plotters: “Since a conflict of opinion has arisen between us, let us immediately convene a Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet. And let them decide. If they agree with your proposals by all means let it be done your way, but for my part I reject that and will not support it.”
The conspirators said they would brook no delay. Baklanov suggested, “You take a rest and while you are away we will do the dirty work and you will return to Moscow.” At that, Gorbachev blew up. He called the men criminals. “Go to hell, shitfaces!” he shouted. The bespectacled Varennikov, who towered over Gorbachev, could hardly disguise his contempt. “Hand in your resignation!” he barked rudely at the president. Boldin broke in, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, perhaps you don’t understand the situation… ” Gorbachev cut him off, “You’re an asshole. You should shut up!”
The Soviet president refused to authorize any declaration of martial law. Tempers cooled, and he shook the hands of the delegation as they left.
The Gorbachev family, including two grandchildren, Kseniya and Nastya, found themselves isolated by the new KGB guards around the perimeter of the dacha. Gorbachev confided to Chernyaev, “Yes, this might not end well, but you know, in this case I have faith in Yeltsin, he won’t give in to them.” Chernyaev could not help but blurt out, “These are your people, Mikhail Sergeyevich. You fostered, promoted, trusted them.” Gorbachev cursed himself for having a year before given Shenin the top job of party organizer. He had taken him to be a reformer.
Raisa could not sleep on their first night of house arrest. She was “tormented by bitterness at the betrayal of people who worked side by side with Mikhail Sergeyevich.” The treachery of Boldin was most hurtful to her. “We have been soul mates for fifteen years. He was like a family member with whom we trusted everything—our most intimate secrets.” Fearing they might be poisoned, she insisted the family eat only food delivered before the coup started.[162]
Confused, the conspirators returned to Moscow. They had hoped to intimidate the vacillating Gorbachev into signing the decree and giving their putsch legitimacy, or else step down temporarily while they got rid of his awkward rival, Boris Yeltsin. Boldin realized now that they had miscalculated. Without Gorbachev’s authority they had no mandate. He later recalled that “everything went haywire from the start.”
On Sunday evening they gathered in Pavlov’s office in the Kremlin. Yanayev was summoned to meet them. He was tipsy when he arrived. But he was no pushover. Chain-smoking and downing shots of vodka with a shaking hand, Yanayev had to be cajoled into signing the document declaring himself acting president of the Soviet Union as a result of the “illness” of President Gorbachev. He finally did so just after the chimes of the Kremlin’s Savior Tower clock sounded eleven o’clock. Kryuchkov and the other conspirators signed a decree to establish martial law for six months. Anatoly Lukyanov, whose closeness to Gorbachev deceived people into thinking he was a democrat, also arrived in Pavlov’s office. He needed no persuading to give the coup a veneer of legitimacy as congress speaker. Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, summoned back from vacation several hundred miles southwest of Moscow, arrived after midnight. He found his name on the list of committee members and crossed it off. He left for home, not to emerge again until it was all over. But he didn’t prevent Soviet embassies taking orders from the committee and disseminating its propaganda. Boldin returned to the hospital, where he was heavily sedated.
Meanwhile, Yazov issued coded telegram 8825 ordering the top military leadership to move troops into Moscow. Kryuchkov assigned a special KGB unit to place Boris Yeltsin under surveillance in preparation for his arrest.
