protection.20 The State Committee had erred yet again; for they had put Grachev in charge of military operations in Moscow without testing his political loyalty. Grachev’s refusal to abandon Gorbachev and Yeltsin was to prove crucial. Yeltsin got into a car and raced along country roads to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet building — which was becoming known as the White House — in central Moscow. There he rallied his associates, and a crowd of tens of thousands began to gather outside. Barricades of rubble, old trucks and wire were constructed around the building.
Yeltsin’s instincts told him what to do next. Tall and bulky, he strode out from the White House at one o’clock in the afternoon and clambered on to one of the tanks of the Taman Division stationed at the side of the road. From this exposed position the Russian President announced his defiance of the State Committee. The State Committee leaders had expected that the merest show of force, with perhaps only seventy arrests in the capital, would give them victory. Most of them, including Kryuchkov and Pugo, did not want to be responsible for a great number of deaths.
Their
At the same time the Taman Tank Division besieging the building was talking to Yeltsin’s Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi. 21 Yanaev’s will cracked. At a State Committee meeting at 8 p.m. he ordered that no action should be started against the White House.22 But the State Committee again ignored him, recognizing that any failure to arrest Yeltsin would bring ruin on themselves. Commands were given for further troop movements. In the night of 20–21 August tanks moved around the Garden Ring Road of Moscow. Crowds of citizens tried to block their path; and in an incident near the White House, three young civilian men — Dmitri Komar, Ilya Krichevski and Vladimir Usov — were killed.
A violent outcome seemed inevitable as Yeltsin and his associates got ready to resist an attack on the White House. Weapons were smuggled inside. The cellist Mtsislav Rostropovich joined Yeltsin in the building, playing his instrument to stiffen morale. Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev arrived to show solidarity. They all did this in the knowledge that they might not come out alive. Crowds of Muscovites, mainly youngsters, formed a human chain around the perimeter of the White House. They had no means of apprehending that in the early hours of 21 August the State Committee’s confidence was on the point of collapse. One after another, the military commanders withheld assistance from the State Committee: even the Alpha Division, which had been ordered to storm the White House, had become uncooperative. Yazov as Minister of Defence called off the military action; and Kryuchkov — to Baklanov’s disdain — refused to seize back control from Yazov.23
By midday on 21 August the sole effective aspect of the State Committee’s activity was its maintenance of a news black-out on its decisions. In fact its leaders had decided to terminate the coup, and at 2.15 p.m. Kryuchkov and three other State Committee members along with Anatoli Lukyanov boarded a plane for the south. Their purpose was to plead their case directly with Gorbachev in Foros. Gorbachev refused to see most of them, but agreed to a brief meeting with Lukyanov. Having asked why Lukyanov had not convened the USSR Supreme Soviet in protest against the State Committee, Gorbachev called him a traitor and showed him the door.24 Yeltsin’s Vice-President Rutskoi, too, had meanwhile arrived at Foros to take custody of the various plotters. Gorbachev and his family — including Raisa, who had had a severe collapse of some kind — immediately returned to Moscow. Kryuchkov and others were put on the same plane by Rutskoi to ensure that military sympathizers of the State Committee did not take it into their heads to fire upon them.25
At four minutes after midnight on 22 August, Gorbachev stepped down from the plane at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. He came back to a changed USSR. Yet Gorbachev refused to lay blame on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union despite the evidence that many of its officials had collaborated with the ‘putsch’. He filled some of the posts of the putschists with figures who were as odious to the White House’s defenders as the putschists had been. At the funeral of Komar, Krichevski and Usov, it was Yeltsin rather than Gorbachev who captured the public mood by asking forgiveness of their bereaved mothers for not having been able to protect their sons.
On 5 September the Congress of People’s Deputies set up yet another temporary central authority, the State Council, which comprised Gorbachev and the leaders of those Soviet republics willing to remain part of the Union.26 Gorbachev’s resilience was truly remarkable: both his sense of duty and his will to retain power were unabated. But the putsch had altered the constellation of politics. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova had conducted a campaign of passive resistance to the State Committee of the Emergency Situation. Kazakhstan and Ukraine had been less forthright in opposing the Committee, but nevertheless had not co-operated with it. Only a minority of the USSR’s Soviet republics, notably Turkmenistan, had welcomed the putsch. In the RSFSR, Tatarstan under its leader Mintimer Shaimiev took a similar position; but most of the other internal autonomous republics refused to collaborate. When the putsch failed, even Turkmenistan’s President Niyazov started again to demand independence for his country.
No State Council would be able to impose central authority to the previous degree. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania appealed to the rest of the world to give them diplomatic recognition; and Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachev, had long since supported their right to complete independence. At last the West gave the three states what they wanted. Meanwhile the humbling of Gorbachev continued in Moscow. Having suffered at Gorbachev’s hands in October 1987, Yeltsin had no reason to be gentle. At any rate he had never been a gracious victor. When the two of them had appeared together at the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR on 23 August, Yeltsin ordered the Soviet President about as if he were the junior office-holder. With a peremptory gesture of his hand he rasped out that the recently- compiled list of the State Committee’s collaborators should be made public: ‘Read them out!’ A doleful Gorbachev had no choice but to release the list to the media.
No politician in twentieth-century Russia had effected so stupendous a comeback as Yeltsin. No one was as daring as he. Nor was anyone luckier. Gorbachev could easily have finished him off politically in 1987. Certainly Ligachev would have done just that. But Gorbachev, once he had defeated Yeltsin, showed a degree of magnanimity which no previous Soviet leader had exhibited towards vanquished opponents.
Good fortune had blessed Yeltsin several times in his life. Born in a tiny village in Sverdlovsk province in 1931, he nearly died at his baptism when a tipsy priest dropped him in the font. His grandmother plucked him out to stop him drowning.27 Young Boris was a rascal. Once he and his pals played with a hand-grenade they found in the woods. There was an explosion, and Boris lost two fingers of his left hand.28 Yet his personality was irrepressible. His father had been sentenced to three years of forced labour for criticizing conditions of construction-site workers in Kazan;29 but the young lad managed to keep this quiet when he entered the Urals Polytechnical Institute to train as a civil engineer. A natural athlete, he was quickly picked for the city’s volleyball team. In the vacations he travelled widely in Russia despite his poverty by climbing on to train carriage-tops and taking a free ride. He never lived life by the rules.
On graduating, he worked in the construction industry. In 1968 he switched careers, joining the Sverdlovsk Province Party Committee apparatus. Eight years later he was its first secretary, and in 1981 became a Central Committee member. Sverdlovsk (now a days known by its pre-revolutionary name, Yekaterinburg) is Russia’s fifth largest city. Yeltsin was its boisterous leader in the communist party tradition: he ranted and threatened. He broke legal and administrative procedures to achieve results for his province. He also used charm and guile. In search of finance for an underground rail-system in Sverdlovsk, he asked for an audience with Brezhnev and whispered his case into the ailing General Secretary’s ear. Sverdlovsk obtained the funds for its metro.30
It was already evident that his style had a populistic streak. In Sverdlovsk he had turned public ceremonies into carnivals. Whole families walked in parade on the October Revolution anniversary and Yeltsin addressed them on the city’s main square. One year on the eve of the anniversary, when his car swerved into a ditch sixty kilometres from Sverdlovsk, he bounded over the fields to the nearest village and commandeered a tractor and a drunken tractor-driver to get them to the morning parade on time.31 On his transfer to the capital in 1985 he was already an audacious crowd-pleaser. His anti-corruption campaign in Moscow made him an object of
