The Dead Hand

smuggle them out. The cassette was reassembled so it would not show that it had been taken apart.

In Moscow on Monday morning at 8 A.M., Colonel Viktor Boldyrev, commander of the division in the General Staff that oversaw the nuclear system, was ordered by his superiors to bring the chemodanchik and the nuclear suitcase duty officers back to Moscow. Boldyrev replied that there was no way to communicate with them. The lines were still down.

In Foros, at 9 A.M., the next regular shift of duty officers for the nuclear suitcase showed up at Gorbachev’s gate. They had been isolated at the military lodge and had no idea what had happened. At the gate, they were informed their passes were no longer valid. A radio played broadcasts from the GKChP. After an hour, they were told to go back.

Boldyrev finally got through to Foros, with help from the KGB, and instructed all the duty officers to return to Moscow with the nuclear suitcase. That afternoon, at 2 P.M., the officers gathered up their equipment—including the president’s Cheget and the portfolio with the codes—and boarded a jeep for the airfield. They flew back to Moscow on Gorbachev’s plane, the one that was supposed to bring him to the Kremlin for a ceremony signing the new union treaty on Tuesday. The duty officers were met in Moscow by representatives of the General Staff, who took the suitcase.²⁵

Yeltsin had been elected president of the Russian republic, the largest of the internal Soviet republics, in June. Combative and iron willed, he rallied the people of Moscow against the plotters. At his dacha on the morning of August 19, Yeltsin and a few allies wrote a statement of resistance. Then he donned a bulletproof vest under his suit, and sped into town. Tanks were rolling toward the nineteen-story building on the banks of the Moscow River known as the Russian White House, where Yeltsin had his offices. Yeltsin walked out of the White House toward a mass of people who had come to defend the building. As journalist Michael Dobbs recalled, “A roar went up from the crowd when they spotted the towering figure of the Russian president striding purposefully down the ceremonial steps in front of the White House.” Yeltsin climbed up Tank No. 110 of the Taman Division and read out his statement. “The use of force is absolutely unacceptable,” he declared. “We are absolutely sure that our compatriots will not permit the tyranny and lawlessness of the putschists, who have lost all sense of shame and honor, to be confirmed. We appeal to military personnel to display their high sense of civil courage and refuse to participate in the reactionary coup.”²⁶

The coup attempt collapsed Wednesday, August 21. Tanks and troops were poised for action on the streets of Moscow, but the KGB’s crack special forces troops, who were supposed to attack the White House, refused to do so.

Gorbachev lost control of the nuclear suitcase, but the nuclear commanders in the military kept their cool. At least one of the three who would have to launch an attack, Air Force General Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, was openly against the putsch. He recalled in his memoir that he told Yazov that the other two commanders-in-chief, of the rocket forces and the naval forces, also backed him. Most likely, they would not have followed any orders from the clownish coup plotters.²⁷ Yarynich, who knew well the workings of nuclear command and control, was inside the defense ministry during the days of the coup. “The vast number of people in the military were awaiting positive changes in the country, sympathized with the changes, and did not fall into a panic,” he said. “The military understood the danger of rocking the boat in this storm, and did everything to prevent the boat from keeling over.”²⁸

As Gorbachev flew triumphantly back to Moscow, Chernyaev recalled a sense of euphoria on the plane. But when Gorbachev landed at Vnukovo Airport at 2 A.M., August 22, it became clear the tension had taken a terrible toll on his family. On the last day in Foros, Raisa had suffered a small stroke. In the car from the airport, Gorbachev’s daughter Irina suffered a nervous breakdown, throwing herself on the seat in wracking sobs as her husband, Anatoly, tried to console her.

“I have come back from Foros to another country, and I myself am a different man now,” Gorbachev declared. But Gorbachev did not realize how deeply the country had been transformed in those three days. The old system—the party and state that shaped his life and that he had led to glasnost and perestroika—was now dead. Gorbachev later admitted, “At the time I was not yet fully aware of the extent of the tragedy.” Perhaps shell-shocked or preoccupied with his family’s trauma, Gorbachev fumbled. He did not go directly to the White House, where crowds were waiting, nor to the huge victory demonstration the next day. He was unaware of how people had changed, wanting a complete break with the old system. Gorbachev told a press conference August 22 that the Communist Party remained a “progressive force,” despite the betrayal of its bosses. Two days later, under pressure from Yeltsin, he retreated, resigning as general secretary of the party and calling for dissolution of the Central Committee. Yeltsin suspended actions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was still president, but the country was rapidly disintegrating as the republics asserted independence, some before and some after the coup attempt.²⁹

Chernyaev was working in the offices of the Central Committee on Old Square one day right after the coup when he heard the public address system urgently instruct everyone to leave immediately. He ignored the announcement and worked on for several hours. Then, when he reached the door to leave, he saw crowds outside. For his personal safety, he was evacuated through an underground tunnel to the Kremlin. The offices of the Central Committee were turned over to the Moscow city government as thousands cheered. The party heaved its last breath.

———

Sergei Akhromeyev, who had come to those same Central Committee offices six years earlier and promised to work with Gorbachev, who had been through so much with Gorbachev on arms control, pulling troops out of Afghanistan, revising the military doctrine and negotiating at Reykjavik, was despondent. He did not know about the coup attempt in advance, but once it began, he flew back to Moscow from his vacation and helped prepare the military for the assault on the White House that never came. Akhromeyev was not one of the original coup plotters, but he gave them an assist. After the putsch collapsed, Akhromeyev hanged himself by a white nylon cord in his Kremlin office. He left a note on his desk.

I cannot live when my motherland is dying and everything that I ever believed in is being destroyed. My age and previous life give me the right to leave this life. I fought to the end.³⁰

————— PART ————— THREE

————— 17 ————— A GREAT UNRAVELING

A day after the failed coup, Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, squeezed his way through a crowd on the streets of Moscow. He had flown there from a conference in Budapest after receiving a phone call from Andrei Kokoshin, deputy director of the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada. They had known each other for years, and there was urgency in Kokoshin’s voice. Kokoshin wanted Nunn to come to Moscow immediately. Kokoshin “said there were big things happening in Russia,” Nunn recalled. “He said Russia about four times. Always before it had been the Soviet Union. The bells went off in my head.” In Moscow, Kokoshin picked up Nunn in his cramped little car and they drove directly to the White House. Yeltsin’s supporters thronged streets still strewn with stone slabs and construction debris hastily erected as barricades against the tanks. Kokoshin introduced Nunn to several people he described as the new leaders of Russia. The next day, Kokoshin took Nunn to listen to the debates in parliament about the breakup of the Soviet Union. When Nunn left the building, he pushed his way through a crush of people. There was an atmosphere of intense excitement. “A new country was being created,” he recalled. The crowd was shouting, “Down with the Soviet Union!”