Eyewitness (40 page)

While he stewed, the cabinet in which he had for so long stubbornly placed his faith was tripping over itself in confusion. Yanaev was getting drunker by the hour and by the time some of Gorbachev’s old allies got to him in the Kremlin, three hours after the State Committee was declared, he was completely disorientated – and apologetic. He’d been roped into the whole affair he told them. The Prime Minister, Valentin Pavlov, wasn’t in much better shape. He’d long suffered from anxiety but now he was overwhelmed by the enormity of what he’d undertaken. He too was drunk but had the sense to go home sick, where he tucked himself into bed, unable to do anything – not even watch the chaos.

That left Defence Minister Yazov and K.G.B. chief Kruchkov as the brains behind the operation.

*

The ABC’s phones weren’t disconnected, which was good news. Surely no serious coup plotters could have overlooked the important detail of ensuring only their version of events left the country? In fact not only were the phone lines not disconnected, they seemed to improve in quality – a phenomenon not of my imagination but observed also by the few other foreign correspondents who’d remained in the city over the holiday period. So good were the lines that just about every producer at the ABC was ringing for an account of what was going on. In the end, it was impossible to give them any news because their demands had stopped me from getting to the city centre to see things for myself. Finally I asked Kerrie to call them off. I thought of racing back up to my apartment to get out of my pyjamas but in the end I didn’t have time. Just as I was about to walk out of the office, Sasha, my K.G.B. friend, turned up.

He’d decided to take Oleg Kalugin’s advice and wasn’t prepared to take part in Kruchkov’s coup, nor did he want to be at home when the phone call came for him to report for duty at K.G.B. headquarters. ‘I’ll drive you around Moscow,’ he said, which, under the circumstances, was a brave offer on his part and one I couldn’t refuse, particularly as his K.G.B. pass would get me to places I’d have been otherwise barred from. But first we wanted to make sure our coterie of friends was safe. Masha and her husband Rob were away. Natasha was at her home in Belye Stolby not far from Moscow. As we discussed whom to call first, Zhenya arrived with a young man I hadn’t met. His name was Nikolai and he was in his second year of military service. Nikolai was in Moscow on leave and didn’t want to have to go to battle for the GKChP. ‘Can I stay in your apartment?’ he asked.

I didn’t know what to do. As I ran through the possible consequences, Natasha called to see whether I was alright and whether I needed any help. ‘What will I do, Natasha? I have this young boy with me who doesn’t want to answer Yazov’s call for soldiers to return from leave. What am I going to do?’

‘If this is a serious coup,’ she said, ‘and they begin rounding up correspondents and find a defector in your apartment, so what? There won’t be enough room in the jails for you, my friend. They’ll deport you.’ Nikolai stayed.

On our way to the city centre we stopped to pick up Max, who’d also rung offering help. The three of us made our way to town. Perhaps not everyone had heard the news, perhaps they didn’t think the tanks on the streets meant serious business, perhaps they simply were too tired of all the politics to give a damn, but that morning as we drove to the Kremlin, past the Russian parliament, the people we saw seemed relaxed. With their mandatory plastic carry-bags in hand in case they came across a good buy on their travels, they strolled along, looking nonchalantly at the APCs and the soldiers atop them armed with rifles. A few protesters had gathered outside the parliament but hardly enough to constitute resistance, which was probably a good thing because Kruchkov and Yazov, on the morning of Day 1 of this very strange coup, were still serious about their actions and might have used force to quell any protests.

But in the hour it took to drive through the traffic and the tanks from the parliament to Manezh Square near the Kremlin (which are separated by no more than a ten-minute walk), Yeltsin had set up resistance headquarters at the parliamentary building and written an appeal to the people which was being broadcast on Moscow’s independent radio station. Echo Moscow had been calling on people all morning to come to the parliamentary building and it seemed they’d been slowly answering its request, because by the time we reached the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin had mounted a tank back at the parliamentary building and in a booming voice told a sizeable crowd that ‘the legally elected president of the country has been removed from power. We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’état. We appeal to all citizens of Russia to turn back the putschists and demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.’ My Russian friends were leaping with joy.

‘They didn’t think to take Yeltsin!’ crowed Max. (In fact the putschists had organised to have Yeltsin arrested, but the usual Soviet combination of inertia and incompetence meant the order was never carried out.)

Whether the thousands of people who answered Yeltsin’s call came to defend the Russian president they’d just elected or whether they came in Gorbachev’s defence, I’m not sure. Certainly that first day of the coup at Manezh Square, it was Gorbachev the people were screaming for. If Gorbachev was too sick to rule and had abdicated power to the GKChP then why were there tanks on the streets? This was no constitutional abdication. This was a coup and everyone knew it. ‘Where’s the proof that Gorbachev is sick?’ people asked the troops. Why was there no medical certificate or message from Gorbachev to confirm that he had handed power to the hardliners?

As the tanks stood motionless in their columns, the crowd swelled and women and men of all ages clambered towards the young soldiers who manned them. ‘Go home to your mothers,’ one woman begged. Another grabbed at the arm of a young guard and asked him to look her in the eye: ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ she asked him. He shook his head. ‘Then go back to your barracks like a noble Soviet soldier and leave us in peace.’ An old man was waving a photograph of Gorbachev at one young soldier: ‘Where is he, you fool? If you follow blindly, you’ll end up blinded, just like Gorbachev. But remember, you’ve been free for six years now. Turn your tank away – and go get Gorbachev!’

The stand-off seemed to go on for hours, but in fact it was only 30 minutes or so before the tanks and APCs began to move ever so slowly. Suddenly the crowd became hysterical.
‘Noo ladno, spokoyno,’
[‘OK, be calm’] the commander of the tank I was nearest bellowed to the crowd. All I could think was that times had changed.

‘Can I jump up?’ I asked the tank commander. He offered me his hand, pulling me on board where he and his subordinates were listening to Radio Echo. Somehow I felt safe, knowing that they were listening to the voice of resistance. Yeltsin was calling on troops to ‘throw down your bayonets’. Clouds of terror and dictatorship were gathering over Russia, he told them, ‘do not take part’. And these troops were listening.

The commander slung his rifle over his back and propped himself next to me, watching intently as I recorded Yeltsin over the little portable radio sitting on the edge of the tank’s circular hatch. He was a very ordinary young Russian. We started chatting quietly as around us the chanting grew louder and louder. He told me he came from Leningrad, that he had no idea if his parents knew what was happening in Moscow and that he had no idea whether his commanders agreed that
perestroika
had led nowhere as the putschists claimed. I asked if I could record our conversation. After all, here I was, sitting on a tank near the Kremlin, talking to its commander as though he were one of my friends. Surely he wouldn’t mind if I turned on my tape recorder. And he didn’t. He wasn’t at all coy or fearful of being interviewed in a situation which was meant to be frightening, threatening. He wanted to talk.

‘Do you know who’s behind the coup?’ I asked him.

‘Only from what Yeltsin’s been saying,’ he replied.

‘When did you first hear anything about occupying Moscow?’

‘This morning at 3 a.m. when they woke us and gave us our orders to come here.’

‘And did they tell you why?’

‘They said Gorbachev was sick and a committee was taking over.’

‘Did that sound right to you?’

‘I didn’t think about it really. But Yeltsin says it’s not true. Do you know anything?’

‘Have you asked where Gorbachev is?’

‘No.’

‘What did your commanders tell you was the purpose of this exercise?’

‘They told us nothing at all, other than the fact that we had to preserve calm in Moscow.’

‘If they asked you to shoot to preserve the peace, will you?’

He stopped and thought, then looked at me. ‘You know, I’m Russian, just like all of them,’ he said, nodding his head towards the swarm of people who now surrounded the tanks. ‘I think I’d rather go to jail for treason than shoot at my own people.’

Before I could ask another question, his walkie-talkie began blaring a message I couldn’t decipher. He politely asked me whether I wouldn’t mind jumping off his tank. ‘Another minute if you wouldn’t mind,’ I said as, still in my pyjamas, I began recording what I was seeing from this vantage point.

*

The declarations of the GKChP had it that tanks and APCs had also occupied Leningrad. The author David Marr was holidaying there, enjoying the bookshops of Nevsky Prospekt when the GKChP seized power. While I was in the city centre, he’d phoned Moscow several times looking for me, to offer help.

‘Are there tanks on the streets there?’ I asked him when we finally spoke.

‘Not that I can see,’ he said. But that’s not what was being reported on the news cables and by Yeltsin’s team who had put out a document claiming that the Defence Minister had issued orders to his deputy ministers across the USSR, to the commanders of military groups from the Baltics to Siberia and to the chiefs of directorates to follow the edicts of the GKChP and to quash all resistance. That meant that tanks would be needed everywhere, not just in the capital.

David’s mission in Leningrad was to find those tanks. But he circled the city several times and there were none, another small detail the plotters had overlooked in their drunken, confused haze. Leningrad, with its liberal mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, would also have been expected to mount resistance.

I managed to sneak a call to Natasha between filing stories to Sydney. Her opinion was that the coup would soon be over. ‘As soon as Nazarbayev [in Kazakhstan] and all the other leaders throw their weight behind Yeltsin, that’ll be the end of it.’

But resistance, I argued, was not a word in the Soviet vocabulary. Subservience yes. Submission yes. But not resistance. ‘We’ve come a long way,’ said Natasha.

The reaction of the republican leaders to the GKChP indicated they had a long way yet to go. They had watched Anatoly Lukyanov, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, declare that the Union treaty they had been about to sign was unconstitutional and that the parliament would ratify the GKChP and the state of emergency, and they remained neutral, refusing to condemn the coup, refusing to offer Yeltsin support in calling for workers across the country to strike and bring this hideous committee to its knees. Of course the Baltic leaders vowed to resist come what may. But that wouldn’t be enough. Perhaps the non- Baltic republican leaders, as they later claimed, were engaging a clever diplomatic tactic, but it looked pretty much like lack of courage. They could have demanded evidence of Gorbachev’s whereabouts and his state of health at the very least.

There was, however, plenty of courage to be found elsewhere. In the Kuzbass coal-mining region of Siberia, workers went out on strike. In the huge military–industrial complexes of Gorky, workers called meetings on the shop floor and walked off the job. Throughout the day, region after region across Russia reported that they’d refuse to obey the GKChP’s decrees and its orders to keep working.

In Moscow, as the tanks continued to roll into the city centre the news slowly sank in and more and more people walked out of their offices and institutes, out of their plants and factories and went to the Russian parliament. By late afternoon, as the putschists were preparing to hold their first media conference, protesters were stopping tanks as they tried to cross the bridge across the Moscow River which led to the parliament. They had commandeered state buses and parked them across the city’s side-streets to stop troop movements. They had brought razor-wire fencing and old tyres from their suburbs which they used to erect barricades around ‘resistance headquarters’.

Kruchkov, the brains of the GKChP, had banked on people showing respect for the re-emergence of Soviet order. He was wrong. To have any hope of succeeding, Kruchkov and his only sober colleague in the GKChP leadership, Defence Minister Yazov, would need to use force. Instead, they committed another cardinal sin in the putschists’ litany. The orders the tank commanders were receiving as they encountered obstacle after obstacle on their manoeuvres around Moscow were to ‘stay calm’. Perhaps Kruchkov and Yazov too had learnt a thing or two from the post-Stalinist gospel according to Gorbachev.

That afternoon, the coup began to look like a nonsense. As more and more army units arrived in Moscow, Yeltsin swore in a ‘war cabinet’ and assumed the office of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces in Russia. After all, no-one knew where Gorbachev was and the troops on the streets couldn’t be asked to obey Yeltsin unless he was their commander. No sooner had Yeltsin assumed his new powers, than eight of the APCs parked outside the parliamentary building went to his side. It was a turning point.

*

At ‘plotters’ headquarters’ there was anything but order. In fact there was complete disorder. The Defence Minister Dmitri Yazov and K.G.B. chief Kruchkov were arguing. The others were drunk.

It was the rift between the two arms of force in the Soviet Union which was the most serious, though not entirely unexpected, setback to the putschists’ cause. Logically, Defence Minister Yazov needed in Yeltsin’s words, ‘a real fully fledged full-throated putsch that would once again force the world to believe in the might of the Soviet tank’. The K.G.B. chief Kruchkov needed ‘as clean and as sophisticated a transfer of power as possible to ensure respect and compliance’. But neither was possible for the same reasons – the people had resisted and the troops were divided.
Perestroika
had changed people and the biggest failure of both men left carrying the GKChP burden was that they failed to realise this. Instead, they argued with each other about what to do next.