Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (15 page)

It was nominally headed by the next in line of succession—Vice-President Yanaev—though some had hoped the lead would go to the supposedly more resolute prime minister, Valentin Pavlov. After signing on as the country’s new leader, Yanaev went home to drink. Pavlov also took to drinking, and then summoned medical assistance.
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Troop deployments were poorly coordinated among the various ministries involved, but also timid. The chief of Soviet ground forces flew to Ukraine, where there were 700,000 Soviet troops and officers sworn to loyalty to the high command in Moscow. The general suggested introducing martial law in the Ukrainian republic, the prerogative of republican legislatures, but the chairman of the Ukrainian parliament said it was not necessary, and the commander simply departed for Moscow.
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Russian President Yeltsin managed to fly from Kazakhstan the morning 99

waiting for the end of the world of the putsch (19 August), land at the main government airport in Moscow, drive to his dacha, and then—although KGB troops had surrounded his dacha—ride from there with a small guard to the ‘White House’, site of the Russian republic government. At this richly symbolic site, the Russian leader rallied a core of defiant officials and civilians, and issued decrees that countermanded those of the putschists. Crack commandos positioned outside the Russian White House never received a firm order to storm the lightly guarded building. Their officers entered into contact with Yeltsin.
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Perhaps nothing did more to undermine the ‘gang of eight’ than the fact that they organized a televised press conference—and submitted to unscripted questions.

Yanaev fumbled and appeared to be drunk. Not only Pavlov, but Yazov and Kryuchkov were absent. Failing to use the state media effectively, the Committee also allowed Western TV journalists to operate freely. At Soviet television, some staff defiantly showed footage of the street resistance in Moscow and Leningrad, letting the whole country see what the various layers of the KGB, military establishment, ministries, and party machine already knew from CNN. Not even key telephones were cut off. From inside the Russian White House, the ‘chief ’ of Yeltsin’s newly created Russian republic KGB ‘was on the telephone nonstop, talking with commanders in the Moscow military district, with MVD forces, with KGB units’, according to one eyewitness. ‘He was telling everyone roughly the same thing: I’m calling at Yeltsin’s behest, don’t get 100

waiting for the end of the world tangled up in this business, keep your men and materiel out of it.’ The general whom Yeltsin appointed as the Russian republic ‘defence minister’ did the same.
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One Russian commentator has noted that ‘the second echelon of power stood aside’.
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So did most of the first, despite their sympathies with the goal of saving the Union.

Nikolai Leonov, the KGB’s chief analyst, writes that ‘among the senior generals there was . . . disquiet, indecisiveness, disorder’, adding that he knew the putsch was doomed the minute he saw its televised press conference.
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Another high-ranking KGB official remarked bitterly: ‘cowardly geezers who were good for nothing got together, and I fell in with them like a chicken into the plucker.’
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The Committee’s secret list of individuals to be incarcerated counted seventy names, mostly the high-profile ‘democrats’ whom the putschists despised. In the event, just five people were taken into custody.
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(About 5,000 arrests had been carried out in
one night
of the Polish regime’s 1981 crackdown against Solidarity.) For those inclined to emphasize the ‘ruthlessness’ of the plotters, consider that Yanaev had been using Beria’s old Kremlin office, and Pavlov had been using Stalin’s.

As late as Sunday 18 August, Defence Minister Yazov, when asked by the conspirators about the next step, had exploded, ‘We have absolutely no plan.’ Kryuchkov is said to have interjected, ‘What are you saying, we have a plan.’

Yet Yazov recalled that, ‘I knew that we had no plan, aside from the elementary talking points that had been read aloud . . . on Saturday.’
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Twice the 68-year-old Yazov had 101

waiting for the end of the world been wounded at the meat-grinder front against the Nazis. His first wife had died of cancer; his second was crippled by a car accident in May 1991. By that time, Yazov had served more than five decades in the Soviet Armed Forces, only to watch Eastern Europe slip away and the Union unravel. On 19 August the nuclear suitcase with the codes for launching the Soviet doomsday arsenal was removed from Gorbachev and brought to the defence ministry, which already had the companion suitcase. Despondency or rage could have led Yazov and the General Staff to push some pretty large buttons.
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Instead, early on 21 August, Yazov convened the high command and they collectively ordered all troops back to the barracks.

Undone, the putschists decided to fly to the Crimea and seek an audience with the one important person they had detained though not harmed—Gorbachev. Even the instigator of the plot, Kryuchkov, chose not to seek asylum in a friendly country but to join the group on its supplication flight. The veteran KGB general had been deeply involved in the bloody crackdown in Hungary in 1956 and the decade-long slaughterhouse of Afghanistan. But he had always been a deputy. In the wee small hours of 22 August, he was brought back from the Crimea on the Soviet president’s plane, and arrested in Moscow by Russian republic officials. From prison, Kryuchkov begged for an audience with Gorbachev, writing, ‘Mikhail Sergeevich! What an enormous feeling of shame—heavy, crushing, relentless, it’s a permanent torment. When you were incommuni-102

waiting for the end of the world cado, I thought, how rough for you, for Raisa Maksi-movna, the family, and I came to horror, despair.’
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At a press conference following his return to Moscow, Gorbachev thanked the Russian president for securing his release and, to the astonishment of everyone, defended the Communist Party. Yeltsin soon publicly embarrassed him with evidence of the party’s complicity in the putsch, and decreed an end to the party’s existence. Because the Soviet parliament had failed to return from summer recess and condemn the putsch, the Soviet president saw no alternative but to force it to disband. Witch-hunts and demoralization paralysed the Soviet executive branch, including the KGB and the defence ministry, where ‘bedlam’ prevailed.
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Gorbachev, with Yeltsin’s prodding, recognized the independence of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The putsch, rather than save the Union, radically accelerated its demise.

National trees in the Union landslide

Street resistance to the putsch was greatest in Leningrad, but it was Yeltsin’s mounting of a hostile tank in Moscow to address a crowd of resisters and news cameras that gave rise to the comforting myth of the triumph of ‘democrats’

over Communists. This is a partial truth concealing a much larger one. Well before the putsch, press freedom and competitive elections had become regular features of political life. The Communist Party’s monopoly had 103

waiting for the end of the world ended, and the move to the market was willy-nilly underway. Of course, Gorbachev resisted a full embrace of the market and stubbornly clung to the Communist Party.
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But those who condemn the Soviet leader for his reluctance to let go forget that a critical aspect of his commitment to reformed socialism was hesitation to employ the full force of the USSR’s repressive-military machine. Gorbachev’s move to the right in November 1990 resulted from his own disorientation as well as KGB

and military pressures. Yet his temporizing, including his repeated instructions for these groups to prepare plans for martial law,
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paralysed them until the summer of 1991, by which time the Russian republic, and a Russian president, had become authoritative sources of allegiance for the central Soviet elite.

Initially, Yeltsin had played the Russian card against Gorbachev without intending to break up the Union. So did the Communist Party conservatives who formed a Russian republic Communist Party in June 1990. These opponents of Yeltsin supported Russia’s declaration of sovereignty, which passed overwhelmingly, as a way to undermine Gorbachev, and in their minds, to save the Union. Even Yeltsin’s drive to create a Russian presidency in 1991 envisioned using the new office not to displace the Soviet president but to force Gorbachev to follow his lead. Of course, the new institutions—the Russian legislature and presidency, though not the Russian Communist Party—fatally undermined the Union. And, as Yeltsin’s success in fortifying alternative Russian republic 104

waiting for the end of the world institutions became manifest, his constituency
at the top
expanded beyond a small group of naïve, inexperienced ‘democrats’ to officials of the USSR state, who saw a chance either to preserve or to increase their power.
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A similar, and equally decisive, evolution took place in Ukraine. In mid-1990, Leonid Kravchuk, who was about to become the Ukrainian parliament leader, announced his support for the Union Treaty, commenting that ‘to live outside the Soviet Union, means to lose a great deal, if not everything’. By the autumn of 1990, however, after Ukrainian students had gone on a hunger strike for independence—an act that helped bring down the inept Ukrainian government—Kravchuk began insisting that any ties to Moscow would have to be in accordance with Ukraine’s declaration of sovereignty. In November 1990

he concluded a bilateral agreement with Russia that recognized each republic’s sovereignty. When, in the spring of 1991, the second draft of the Union Treaty came under discussion, Kravchuk, by then eyeing a run for a new Ukrainian presidency, rejected it outright. And the more he seemed capable of claiming the nationalist turf from the small but vocal nationalist groups, the more the upper strata of the survival-minded Ukrainian elite closed ranks behind him.
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That the Union’s demise was ‘national in form, opportunist in content’ was equally evident in Kazakhstan.

In June 1989 Nursultan Nazarbaev became Kazakh party chief, and in April 1990 he was elected chairman of the Kazakhstan Supreme Soviet. Later that year, Nazarbaev 105

waiting for the end of the world was nominated for the post of USSR Vice-President, but he demurred. Along with his supporters in the Kazakhstan elite, he manipulated nationalism to consolidate power in the republic, yet, even during his campaign for the new Kazakh presidency in late 1991, Nazarbaev resisted calls for complete independence. True, the irrepressible problems created by the disarray in the planned economy as well as the increasing dysfunction of Union ministries compelled even reluctant republican leaders to assume ever-greater responsibilities for economic crisis management, communications, customs, and many other duties.

But ‘up until the very last minute’, one scholar has concluded, ‘almost all of Central Asia’s leaders maintained hope that the Union could be saved’, at least in some guise.
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Thus, it was not nationalism
per se
, but the structure of the Soviet state—fifteen national republics—that proved fatal to the USSR, primarily because nothing was done to prevent that structure’s use and misuse. ‘Reform’ involved intentional devolution of authority to the republics, but that process was radicalized by the decision not to inter-vene in 1989 in Eastern Europe and by Russia’s assault against the Union. Even so, the dissolution of the Union was not inevitable. In India during the 1980s and 1990s the central authorities killed many thousands of separatists in the name of preserving the integrity of the state, at little or no cost to the country’s democratic reputation.
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The Indian government consistently issued unambiguous signals about what lines could not be crossed, and used 106

waiting for the end of the world force against secessionist movements that crossed them.

The Soviet leadership under Gorbachev not only failed to draw clear lines, but also unintentionally spread nationalism itself. The
irresolute
spilling of blood, in Georgia in 1989 and Lithuania in early 1991, served as a formidable weapon in the hands of separatists, helping them recruit ‘nationalists’ among those who had been undecided, while placing Moscow on the defensive and demoralizing the KGB and army.

It was the central elite, rather than the independence movements of the periphery, that cashiered the Union.

Had the putschists been effective, they would surely have rallied many of the middle and upper layers of the vast Soviet elite to the cause of preserving at least the core of the Union. But their blatantly botched crackdown instead widened the divisions in the elite that Yeltsin had opened up by his Russian presidential campaign, alongside the Union president, and by declaring the existence of a separate ‘Russian republic military command’ and a separate ‘Russian republic KGB’. After the failed putsch, Yeltsin arrested some fifteen officials and compelled Gorbachev to remove others for suspected complicity. But many hundreds of thousands of USSR officers and officials made their way to safety in the Russian Federation. Thus, the larger truth about 1991 was that the ‘triumph’ of democracy involved a bid for power by Russian republic officials, joined at various points by patriots and opportunists from the all-Union elite—a process paralleled in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other national components of the Union.

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waiting for the end of the world Anyone who has been caught in a landslide knows the value of a large tree that suddenly comes into view and is solidly rooted. Some caught on right away, others later.

Counter-putsch

Every republic that had yet to declare independence did so either during or not long after the putsch—except Russia, which was manœuvring to become the legal heir to the Union, while also keeping alive the possibility of some inter-republican arrangements. Yeltsin advanced Russia’s hostile takeover of Soviet institutions, yet he and several other republic heads continued to negotiate with Gorbachev. None of the ‘agreements’ reached at the sessions, however, was honoured outside the room. Then, in late September, Yeltsin, apparently ill, disappeared for seventeen days ‘on vacation’. He returned in a decisive mood, appointing a 35-year-old economics professor, Yegor Gaidar, to lead the Russian government. To overcome the deadlock over the destroyed planned economy, amid warnings of a looming famine, Gaidar pressed for a Russian leap to the market independent of the indecisive Union Treaty negotiations or the conflicting policies of other republics. Among his first acts, he simply informed the USSR Planning Commission that it was under Russian jurisdiction and ordered that it plan steep reductions in arms production for 1992—and the functionaries obeyed.