billion, plummeted to his death from his seventh-floor apartment. It was also called a suicide. His predecessor Georgy Pavlov died the same way six weeks later. They took many of the secrets of the fate of the party’s enormous wealth with them.
On his first full day back, President Gorbachev stumbled again. He decided not to show up at a large demonstration on Thursday morning outside the White House to which he had been invited to celebrate the defeat of the coup. Shevardnadze despaired at yet another blunder. Chernyaev reminded Gorbachev several times that he was expected outside the White House, but the freed hostage “spurned the joyful, popular celebration.” The result was that when Gorbachev’s name was mentioned at the demonstration, there were boos and calls of “Resign!”
Gorbachev decided instead to hold a press conference in the foreign ministry press center, where eight hundred national and foreign journalists and officials gave him a standing ovation. This was more to his liking. Astonishingly he defended the Communist Party as still capable of renewal, despite the complicity of its top cadres in the attempted coup. To Chernyaev this was yet another appalling misjudgment that “swept away the wave of sympathy and human compassion that you saw among ordinary people, on the street, on the first days after the putsch.” Interpreting for Gorbachev, Pavel Palazchenko thought to himself, “This will cost him dearly.” He commented to an English-speaking colleague, “The party’s over.” Afterwards Alexander Yakovlev told Gorbachev bluntly, “The party’s dead. Why can’t you see that? Talking about its renewal is senseless. It’s like offering first aid to a corpse.”[170]
On Friday, August 23, Gorbachev sought to make amends for failing to acknowledge the role of the White House deputies in defending democracy. At 11 a.m. he called the speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, to say he wished to speak to the Russian parliament. He could be there by twelve.
The large auditorium and the balconies filled up instantly. Gorbachev was applauded when he came to the podium, but as he attempted to defend members of the government who had supported the junta, there were roars of indignation.[171] Yeltsin, six inches taller in height, loomed up beside him and with a flourish produced a transcript of a meeting of Gorbachev’s cabinet attended by about sixty senior and junior ministers and chaired by Prime Minister Pavlov on the first day of the coup.
Gorbachev protested he had not read it. “Read it now,” commanded Yeltsin, towering over the red-faced Soviet president. Gorbachev did so obediently. It revealed that almost the entire cabinet had betrayed him, whether through conviction or cowardice. One after another they had backed the emergency committee. Yeltsin produced Decree Number 79 suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party, which he ostentatiously signed in front of the assembly. As Gorbachev stuttered, “Boris Nikolayevich, Boris Nikolayevich… I don’t know what you’re signing there… ” Yeltsin snapped, “I have signed it.”
The scene of Yeltsin’s bullying, relayed throughout the world, revealed that Gorbachev was no longer master in the “other country” to which he had returned. “I think he may have had it,” remarked George Bush after he saw Yeltsin “rubbing Gorbachev’s nose in the dirt” on television.
As Yeltsin gloated with what Gorbachev regarded as “sadistic pleasure,” the Soviet president suffered interrogation for over an hour from excited deputies. One rushed to the microphone to declare hysterically that all communists must be swept from the country with a broom. Gorbachev snapped back: “Even Stalin’s sick brain did not breed such ideas!” He saw in their eyes no pity and much hatred.
At 1:30 p.m. Khasbulatov whispered to Yeltsin, “Time we ended this.”
“Why?” asked the Russian president, no doubt recalling his own humiliations orchestrated by Gorbachev at party meetings.
“I can’t help feeling sorry for him,” replied Khasbulatov.
Yeltsin smiled and rose to bring the session to a close. He invited Gorbachev to lunch with him and Khasbulatov in his office. Though he was seething, Gorbachev still had to show his rival his appreciation for the defeat of the coup and his safe return to Moscow. With some emotion he related to them how he had heard Khasbulatov on BBC calling the plotters “criminals” and had told Raisa that if Russia rose up, they would surely regain their freedom.
“What was Raisa Maximovna’s reply?” asked Khasbulatov quickly. “She said she never would have thought that we would be saved by Yeltsin and his associates,” said Gorbachev.
When he left, Gorbachev’s limousine was delayed for half an hour by hundreds of Yeltsin supporters blocking the way, booing and jeering. The crowds later besieged Communist Party headquarters on Old Square, from which party apparatchiks were frantically taking papers, televisions, fax machines, copiers, and telephone handsets. The throng moved to the Lubyanka, where the fourteen-ton statue of the founder of the Bolshevik secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was toppled from its pedestal with the help of a crane supplied by Mayor Popov.
Yeltsin gave a radio interview in which he criticized Gorbachev for surrounding himself with a dirty circle of hard-liners in the run-up to the coup. “You cannot absolve him of any guilt in the plot,” he said. “Who chose the officials? He did. Who confirmed them? He did. He was betrayed by his closest people.” He asserted his supremacy over Gorbachev by dictating whom he should appoint to replace the arrested comrades. Shaposhnikov, the jovial air force marshal with bushy eyebrows, thick jet-black hair, and grey moustache who had threatened to bomb the plotters, replaced Yazov. Former interior minister Vadim Bakatin moved into Kryuchkov’s office in KGB headquarters, where he horrified the top brass by giving the Americans a blueprint of the listening devices the KGB had planted in a new U.S. embassy building in Moscow.
Gorbachev would later defend his actions by explaining that if the coup had happened a year earlier, it might have succeeded, but he had been stringing the hard-liners along to camouflage his concessions until there was no turning back. The Soviet president found it more difficult, however, to shake off the charge that he had encouraged the plotters by his behavior in January, when he claimed to know nothing about the bloody military actions in Vilnius but never sought to punish those responsible. The emergency committee had reason to believe he would have done them the same favor, after it had carried out the dirty work and then brought him back to Moscow.
On August 24, 1991, finally facing up to the fact that “the party’s over,” Gorbachev resigned as the sixth and last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the all-powerful organization that had been founded by Lenin and led by Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Though he remained president of the Soviet Union, he conceded that the party that elevated him to his post could not be reformed. He signed over the party’s vast holdings to the USSR Supreme Soviet, which voted to ban all party activities. All across the Soviet Union communist officials frantically burned and shredded documents that might incriminate them.
One important reason for the failure of the coup was the speed with which information spread about what was happening. The coup leaders had summoned television chief Leonid Kravchenko in the early hours of Monday morning to prepare the broadcast of the declaration of the state of emergency and impose tight control on news. But every editor and senior official in television headquarters at Gosteleradio, the state television and radio company, could watch CNN in their office. As the day went on, they learned from the American network and from their own reporters on the streets of the mounting resistance at the White House.
People around the country who had rigged up an aerial knew that the putsch was being opposed. Ekaterina Genieva, director of the Library of Foreign Literature, who used the facilities of her building near Taganskaya Square to bring out an anticoup news sheet, acknowledged that from the start “we knew what was happening in our country from the Western media.” “This was a hugely important story and time for CNN,” said Eason Jordan, then CNN international editor. “In a sense, CNN was a major factor in ensuring the Soviet coup failed.” CNN’s bureau was almost across the street from the Russian White House, and when Yeltsin made his dramatic stand on a tank, the pictures were sent via satellite to Atlanta, beamed back to Soviet television at Ostankino, and sent by microwave to the network’s subscribers in the Kremlin, the foreign ministry, and several hotels. Televisions around Moscow center could pick up the microwave relay.
On the morning of the coup, media analyst Lydia Polskaya pushed the button for the fourth channel where she could normally get CNN and was stunned to find the Americans reporting as usual. Nursultan Nazarbayev watched CNN round the clock from his office in Alma-Ata and was able to judge quickly that the junta did not merit his support. U.S. secretary of state James Baker acknowledged that the White House used CNN as the fastest source available to get its message of support for Yeltsin to Moscow. “Praised be information technology! Praised be CNN,” wrote Eduard Shevardnadze in
