began to feel a guilty sense of shame towards Russia, towards the land of their fathers, its villages depopulated, its churches in ruins, the village blacksmith silent, a country which had changed almost out of recognition, abandoned and forgotten, as one of them remarked, ‘by me and people like me’.1 They had sympathised with their great-grandfathers, the officers of the old Tsarist army who had been forced to choose sides in the civil war. Now, as civil war seemed to loom once again, they found themselves having to face a similar choice. Should they go with the new regimes of Gorbachev and Yeltsin? Or should they do what they could to preserve what was best in the Soviet regime?
They found themselves drawn willy-nilly into the increasingly confused and violent politics within the Soviet Union itself. The 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment had been one of the first to enter Afghanistan and one of the last to leave. Now it was sent to Kirovabad in Azerbaijan, where there were no barracks, no motor park, no accommodation, and no money. In early April 1989, a mere two months after leaving Afghanistan, the regiment was sent urgently to Tblisi to take part in the brutal suppression of an anti-government demonstration. Nineteen civilian demonstrators were killed by soldiers using a noxious riot-control gas and wielding sharpened entrenching tools. Most of the dead were women and girls. The ultimate responsibility for the action was obscure, but most of the soldiers laid the blame on Gorbachev himself. Moscow, however, blamed the local Georgian politicians and the local military commanders. General Rodionov, the commander of the Caucasus Military District, who had been a distinguished commander of the 40th Army, was sacked and sent off to become principal of the General Staff College.2 Nine months later, in January 1990, two hundred demonstrators were killed by the army in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Among those involved were a number of senior officers who had served in Afghanistan.
In September 1990 the Soviet government agreed on the reunification of Germany. In the eyes of many officers this was a betrayal of the victory against Hitler and a sell-out by Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and the other ‘liberals’ who were now running the Soviet government. By then the withdrawal from Eastern Europe had already begun. In autumn 1989 a British general visited a tank division in the Ukraine which was due to be disbanded. The major general commanding the division said to him in front of his brother officers: ‘Some people are beginning to say that the whole army is being thrown on the scrap heap… [pause] I agree with them.’3 Over the next couple of years nearly 500,000 soldiers and their families were withdrawn from the German Democratic Republic and the countries of Eastern Europe. The soldiers returned to poverty-stricken chaos. Many officers had nowhere to live, and had to survive with their families in tents and packing cases. The muttering among the soldiers was becoming increasingly audible. Senior officers were beginning to advise their sons not to follow them in the profession.
The Party had always been determined to keep the army non-political by sacking (or, under Stalin, by shooting) any general they suspected of ‘Bonapartism’; and by allowing them a priority share of the country’s economic resources for the design and mass production of weapons to match those of the other superpower, the United States of America. Now things began to take an increasingly sinister turn as the army started to slip from the control of the politicians. By the autumn of 1990 Gorbachev was being noisily attacked in public and in private by the two ‘black colonels’, Alksnis and Petrushenko, who regularly accused him of outright treachery and got away with it. Party members wrote in to denounce him for betraying Eastern Europe and destroying the Soviet armed forces. In December 1990 fifty-three prominent personalities, including General Varennikov, who after Afghanistan had been appointed Commander of the Ground Forces, General Moiseev, the Chief of Staff, and Admiral Chernavin, the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, called publicly for a state of emergency and presidential rule in conflict zones if constitutional methods proved ineffective. At the turn of the year twenty senior officers, including Akhromeev, by now a marshal, privately presented Gorbachev with an ultimatum setting out their grievances and demands.4
All this was unprecedented: the military had never before intervened so openly in politics. But in January 1991 things moved from words to action. Thirteen people demonstrating in favour of national independence were killed by special forces troops in Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. The circumstances remained obscure. It was not clear how much, if anything, Gorbachev knew or approved of the action in advance. But among those who were involved in its planning and execution was General Varennikov.
The methods Gorbachev used to get out of Afghanistan and to pursue a more general reform may well have been the only ones likely to be effective. It was largely thanks to Gorbachev that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rebirth of Russia were accomplished with comparatively little bloodshed. But the generals never forgave him for what they saw as the treachery which had led to the destruction of a great power. They firmly regarded him and his associates as traitors pure and simple. In his memoirs, Varennikov accuses Gorbachev of cowardice, demagogy, indecisiveness, ignorance of military and economic reality, and hostility towards the armed forces and the defence industry. He and his fellow senior officers came to believe that Gorbachev was an outright traitor.5 These extreme views may have borne little relation to the facts. But what many officers saw as Gorbachev’s lack of understanding or sympathy for the fighting men and his failure to treat them with the respect they believed they had earned in Afghanistan reflected a political reality, which was to dog Gorbachev for the remainder of his time in office.
By now Varennikov and other senior officers had had enough, and became actively involved in the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991.6 On 17 August, the day before the coup itself, Varennikov attended a meeting called by Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, to discuss what needed to be done to save the Soviet Union from political and economic collapse. Varennikov and others then flew down to the Crimea to see Gorbachev, who was on holiday there. When Varennikov told Gorbachev that, if he was not capable of running the country, he should draw the appropriate conclusion, the meeting broke up. Varennikov always regretted that no one had the necessary guts to remove Gorbachev on the spot. He himself went on to Kiev, where he tried to persuade the Ukrainian leaders to impose a state of emergency and to issue a warning that military force would be used to put down any attempt by local nationalists to exploit the situation. He failed, and much bloodshed was no doubt averted thereby.
The next day the plotters declared a national state of emergency and moved troops into Moscow. General Lyakhovski helped draw up plans for an assault on the White House, the seat of the Russian government and its defiant president, Boris Yeltsin.7 But the coup split both the army and the KGB: many officers of both organisations were appalled by the way their former colleagues had taken arms against a legitimate government. Among the defenders of the White House were Colonel Rutskoi, the Afghan veteran decorated after being shot down over Pakistan, and veterans from the special forces in their characteristic blue and white striped T-shirts. The defenders had no more than a handful of weapons, and the assault, if it had come, would have been over very quickly. But the order was never issued and the coup collapsed. It was the Afgantsy who efficiently marshalled the funeral procession for the three young men—one of them himself a decorated Afghan veteran—who were killed in a muddled shoot-out on the second night of the coup.
The generals too were riven by internal disagreements, and during the coup some of them found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades. The most tragic was Marshal Akhromeev. A man of high intelligence and integrity, with an ironic sense of humour, he was caught between two fires. No longer entirely trusted by his colleagues because he had done his best to serve Gorbachev as military adviser, sufficiently appalled by what was happening to his beloved military to sign the secret protest to Gorbachev at the end of 1990, he hanged himself on the collapse of the coup. Varennikov himself was arrested for his part in the coup and charged with treason. Yeltsin amnestied the plotters in February 1994. Varennikov refused to accept the amnesty, claiming that he had committed no treason: he had been defending the Soviet Union, which was the legitimate state at that time. He insisted on a trial and was acquitted.
The generals did not forgive Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, any more than they forgave Gorbachev. They gritted their teeth and stormed the White House on his orders during the parliamentary rebellion of October 1993. The official figures for casualties were 187 dead and 437 wounded. Unofficial sources put the dead as high as two thousand. It was the deadliest street fighting in Moscow since 1917. The orgy of political and official corruption and profiteering which accompanied Yeltsin’s economic reforms turned many of the generals against the whole idea
