That Sunday evening Yeltsin was in Alma-Ata, almost two thousand miles from Moscow, meeting Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. He delayed his scheduled departure to partake of a sumptuous dinner with Kazakh folk music and “colorfully dressed girls whirling around,” during which he amused everyone by playfully performing with wooden spoons on the head of an assistant, Yury Zaiganov. Well fortified, Yeltsin left just after 8 p.m. local time for the long flight back to Moscow. When he arrived there, he was driven straight to his dacha at Arkhangelskoye. No one stopped him.
Shortly after six o’clock next morning, he was shaken awake by his daughter Tanya, who flew into the room shouting, “Papa! Get up! There’s a coup!”
Millions of people in Russia would never forget what they were doing when they heard the dawn proclamation on radio and television that Monday, August 19, 1991, that suddenly reintroduced fear into their lives. Sitting in his undershirt, Yeltsin watched Yury Petrov, state television’s star announcer, broadcast a statement by an emergency committee that Gorbachev was ill, that Vice President Yanayev had assumed the duties of the president, and that martial law existed in the USSR. The announcer said that the action of political movements was to be halted, illegally held arms were to be handed in, meetings and demonstrations were banned, and the mass media was to come under emergency control. After the announcement Tchaikovsky’s
Most of the Russian leadership lived close to the Yeltsin residence, and they began arriving in a panic at his dacha. Alexander Korzhakov turned up as Ruslan Khasbulatov, the speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet, came racing across from the dacha next door. They found Yeltsin slumped in an armchair, hung over and stunned. His top aides, Gennady Burbulis, Ivan Silayev, Mikhail Poltoranin, and Viktor Yaroshenko, all came in and congregated around him. Moscow’s popular deputy mayor, Yury Luzhkov, turned up, promised to organize resistance, and left. Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of the former Leningrad (which two months earlier had reverted to the name St. Petersburg) who happened to be in Moscow that day, arrived and vowed to rally opposition in Russia’s second city. Then he, too, departed, saying, “May God help us!”
Yeltsin called Pavel Grachev, commander of the paratroops, whom he had recently befriended, to ask what was going on. The forty-three-year-old general was moving troops around as ordered, but he promised to send a squad to the dacha to ensure Yeltsin’s safety. Perhaps the plotters did not have the total loyalty of the military.
By 9 a.m. Yeltsin had recovered sufficiently to dictate an appeal to the people of Russia to resist the “cynical attempt at a right-wing coup.” The fax machine was still working in the dacha, and within an hour the appeal was being circulated by leaflet throughout Moscow and broadcast on radio stations around the world. Gorbachev, isolated in Foros, heard about the embryonic resistance on a tiny Sony radio that he usually listened to while shaving.
The Russian president decided to make a run for the Russian White House. “Listen, there are tanks out there,” Naina protested. “What’s the point of you going?” He replied, “They won’t stop me.” As always his women made sure Yeltsin was presentable before he left. Tanya straightened his jacket so that his bulletproof vest was not noticeable. “Your head is still unprotected, and your head is the main thing,” cried Naina.
Yeltsin and Korzhakov decided to go directly to the White House in a convoy of official vehicles with a Russian flag of white, blue, and red fluttering from the bonnet of the black Chaika carrying the Russian president. Their departure was watched by a small KGB surveillance division under Commander Karpukhin that had been ordered to take up position in the woods around. Karpukhin would testify later that he had orders to arrest Yeltsin but that he let him drive away. But Kryuchkov had delayed issuing orders to arrest people on a list of eighty democrats singled out for detention, including Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev. He preferred to try at first to cow the opposition and not appear heavyhanded. It was one of many misjudgments that doomed the coup from the outset.
With Yeltsin squeezed between bodyguards in the back, the Chaika barreled unimpeded past tanks churning up Kutuzovsky Prospekt and then raced across Novo-Arbatsky Bridge and into the underground car park of the White House, arriving at around 10 a.m. In his office he found that all telephone lines had been cut but one: It had been installed the day before the coup and was not yet registered. Yeltsin was able to call allies in Russia and around the Soviet Union.
Outside the White House armored vehicles from the Tamanskaya motorized infantry division took up position but without orders of any kind. The division chief of staff, Major Yevdokimov, said he had no intention of harming any of the young men and middle-aged women who had started milling around outside the White House, furious at the idea that Yeltsin might be arrested.
Shortly after midday Yeltsin came out, flanked by bodyguards armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and climbed aboard a T-72 tank. He read his statement to about two hundred supporters, raising his voice over the sound of the heavy military vehicles rumbling past. He called for a general strike and opposition to the “right-wing, reactionary unconstitutional coup.”
After he hurried back into the White House, the crowd began to pile up concrete slabs and metal rods to form barricades. By late afternoon the numbers had swelled to several thousand.
The coup had already begun to falter. Around the city, tank crews were fraternizing with pedestrians. Pavlov’s nerves were failing him, and he started drinking large whiskeys. Yazov found him “absolutely plastered” in the Kremlin, and he had to be carried out to his car and driven home. He was in no state to take part in the televised press conference of the emergency committee, held at 5 p.m. in the foreign ministry press center.
That Monday evening, television viewers saw the committee for the first time—six men in grey-blue suits, sitting at a table on a stage with a pasty-faced Yanayev in the middle. His nicotine-stained fingers trembling, Yanayev justified their action on the grounds that normal life had become impossible. He lied that Gorbachev was “undergoing treatment” for illness. There was derisive laughter when an Italian journalist asked if they had consulted General Pinochet on how to stage a coup. The Russian and foreign reporters there managed to inform millions of viewers what state television had been withholding by asking questions about Yeltsin’s strike call and the resistance building up at the White House.
That night the Russian president bedded down in the doctor’s surgery on the third floor of the White House, where the windows faced the inner courtyard. His family were spirited from the dacha for safety in an unmarked van with curtained windows to a two-bedroom apartment in the suburb of Kuntsevo belonging to one of his bodyguards.
By Tuesday morning, August 20, George Bush, who initially had stopped short of condemning the coup committee—on Scowcroft’s advice he had called their action extraconstitutional rather than illegitimate so as not to burn their bridges with the coup leaders—had got a better idea of what was happening. He managed to get through to Yeltsin. “Boris, my friend,” cried the U.S. president. Yeltsin was overwhelmed. “I am
From a balcony at the Russian White House, protected by lead shields held by Korzhakov and another bodyguard, Yeltsin read out a second statement. In it he called on soldiers and police to disobey the orders of Yazov and Pugo but not to seek confrontation.
In St. Petersburg Mayor Sobchak confronted troop commanders and persuaded them not to enter the city. At his side opposing the putsch was his special assistant, KGB officer Vladimir Putin. “Sobchak and I practically moved into the city council,” Putin recounted years later. “We drove to the Kirov Factory and to other plants to speak to the workers. But we were nervous. We even passed out pistols, though I left my service revolver in the safe. People everywhere supported us.”[164]
Putin was concerned that his behavior as a KGB officer could be considered a crime of office if the plotters won. He expressed this fear to his boss, and Sobchak called Kryuchkov on his behalf. Astonishingly the mayor was able to get the chief organizer of the putsch on the phone to discuss such a matter of minor consequence given the scale of events—that Putin was resigning from the KGB forthwith.
Kryuchkov by now seemed to realize his mistake in not securing the arrest of Yeltsin. Public opposition was consolidating around the Russian president. The emergency committee was falling apart. Pavlov and Bessmertnykh had disappeared. Yanayev was drinking himself into a stupor. The defenders of the White House now included many high-profile personalities, including Politburo veteran Alexander Yakovlev, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner. Shevardnadze was also there, asking aloud if Gorbachev himself was implicated in the coup. At five o’clock in the morning Yeltsin remembered it was his
