Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (65 page)

It was not clear, however, that the bulk of Soviet citizens were ready to give up on their empire. In March 1991, Gorbachev presided over a referendum on the Union’s future. The question on the ballot paper was loaded: ‘Do you consider it necessary to preserve the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of people of all nationalities will be guaranteed in full measure?’
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Few Russians (the Baltic republics were a different case) would readily have answered ‘no’, but all the same, the overwhelming ‘yes’ vote represented a democratic victory of sorts. The states that were to form the proposed federation, however, were changing apace, and nothing doomed Gorbachev’s scheme for the continued Union as decisively as the decision to create a directly elected president for each of the new republics as part of the restructuring.

First mooted in 1989 by the Kazakh leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the move was meant to increase regional autonomy within a reformed Soviet Union.
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‘Perhaps, from the outside, such a collection of “presidents”, who in fact had no real power, appeared somewhat ridiculous,’ Yeltsin would later muse.
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But the campaign played into his hands. The creation of elected assemblies under Gorbachev had given Yeltsin a new platform, and by 1991 he was already Speaker of the Russian parliament, a body (technically responsible to the plenary Congress of People’s Deputies) that met in a building on the Moscow river called the White House. Yeltsin’s frank, populist speeches there had given him the sort of profile that exasperated voters could recognize and understand. Now he could play for a direct mandate to lead them. ‘Not all the members of Yeltsin’s entourage displayed a peace-loving mood,’ Gorbachev remembered later. ‘They had worked themselves up to fever pitch.’
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On 12 June 1991, when the votes for the Russian presidency were counted, it turned out that Yeltsin had swept the board.

The die-hards of the Soviet world stood no chance against the nationalist juggernaut. But they had never set great store by democratic methods. In the summer of 1991, while the bevy of newly elected presidents, including Yeltsin and the ingratiating Nazarbayev, were meeting with Gorbachev to discuss a new and looser future for the Union, a different set of talks, more secret, was taking place in and around Moscow. The conspiracy included senior Kremlin aides, including Gorbachev’s advisor Valery Boldin, and the heads of the armed forces, the interior ministry and the KGB. George Bush took action as soon as his agents could see a pattern in the scraps of information on their wires. The United States ambassador, Jack Matlock, broke the news to Gorbachev personally: the Americans had intelligence of a conspiracy to remove him, planned for 21 June. According to Chernyaev, Gorbachev laughed. ‘It’s a hundred percent improbable,’ he replied. ‘But I appreciate George telling me about his concern.’
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The plot, in fact, was well advanced. They called themselves the State Committee for the State of Emergency, the GKChP, and like its title their conspiracy was clumsy. On 18 August, when Gorbachev had left for an annual holiday at Foros in the Crimea, a group of senior officials gathered in Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov’s Kremlin office, armed with bottles and glasses and surrounded by a chaos of half-finished plans. Their aim was to reverse the likely fragmentation of the Union and bring back the old disciplines of Brezhnev’s time. One of their first acts was to send a delegation to negotiate with Gorbachev. Later that night, when they learned of his refusal to co-operate, some clearly wished that they had never joined the plot, but by then it was too late and the only panacea was drink. There was no going back, but the way forward called for actions more decisive than these men had ever bargained for. The Kremlin once again witnessed conspiracy, but this time it took place in an atmosphere of regret, recrimination and warm government brandy.

The two main targets of the plotters were the presidents, Gorbachev (USSR) and Yeltsin (Russia). Gorbachev was placed under KGB house-arrest in the government mansion at Foros. At the same time, special troops from the crack ‘Alpha’ military division gathered in the woods round Yeltsin’s dacha in the Moscow suburb of Arkhangel’skoe with orders for his imminent arrest. On 19 August, Muscovites woke to the sinister rumble of tanks and armoured personnel carriers. ‘The coup leaders decided to shock the city with an enormous display of military hardware and personnel,’ Yeltsin recalled.

I look at the tragedy of the coup plotters as the tragedy of a whole platoon of government bureaucrats whom the system had turned into cogs and stripped of any human traits … But it would have been far worse if that platoon of cold and robotlike Soviet bureaucrats had returned to the leadership of the country.’
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There were courageous moments everywhere. In Moscow itself, the crowds who confronted the plotters’ tanks were gambling with their very lives. In Foros, Gorbachev, too, held out for days. When the coup leaders claimed in public that the president was ill, his entourage feared for his safety: the strain certainly told on Raisa, who later suffered a brain haemorrhage. But it was Yeltsin, breaking through the armed cordon around his home and driving straight to the Russian parliament building, the White House, who garnered the greatest credit. By the time he arrived at his office, hundreds of Muscovites had already gathered to remonstrate with the tank crews outside. The Russian president slipped by them (the Kremlin is not the only government building in Moscow with a secret entrance), but outrage – and a sense of theatre – eventually drove him back outside to join the crowd. ‘I clambered onto a tank, and straightened myself up tall,’ Yeltsin recalled. ‘Perhaps I felt clearly at that moment that we were winning, that we couldn’t lose. I had a sense of utter clarity, of complete unity with the people standing around me.’
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He stood and read out an appeal to Russia’s people and then paused briefly to talk with the men in the tank that had become his platform. It was a matter of minutes outside, but the televised images and photographs became symbolic of an entire people’s victory.

The coup was the last gasp of the Soviet regime. Its leaders had launched an attack on their own people, the most overt negation of democracy, and their treachery discredited the key institutions of a failing state: the KGB, the Communist Party and the General Staff. Instead of introducing military rule, the tank crews stepped out on to pavements littered with long-stemmed red flowers. In the capital of almost every republic, popular coalitions rushed to declare their independence from the disgraced Soviet regime. Their demands were among the many things that Gorbachev was ready to rethink. From his rooms in Foros, the Soviet president resumed command of the Kremlin regiment and ordered its commandant to seal the conspirators’ offices and disconnect their phones.
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He refused to receive the plotters, too, even those who had once been his friends, resolving to create a new regime with new, untainted, men. As he put it to the reporters who were waiting when his plane landed at Moscow airport, ‘I have come back from Foros to a different country, and I myself am a different man now.’
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But that still left all the main questions moot. ‘Yes, we won,’
Izvestiya
’s correspondent commented on 23 August. ‘But our victory only gives us a chance, a possibility. Will we, and will our leaders, know how to use it?’
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*   *   *

Before the last of his supporters had dispersed from the White House, Boris Yeltsin announced that he was moving into the Kremlin. For a man whose sense of destiny was so enlarged, there really was no other choice. Whatever Gorbachev was trying to defend, Yeltsin was creating a new era. In his own view – and many shared it – he was also the saviour of Russia, the sort of person who had always based his government in Moscow’s citadel. At a time of tension and uncertainty, the old place seemed a perfect surrogate for consensus, the symbol of a nation that had yet to coalesce. Though no-one was yet sure what Russia was, the Russian flag – red, white and blue – was raised above the Kremlin walls on 24 August 1991.

At the time, the most positive interpretation of Yeltsin’s move was that he was taking control of the fortress in the name of the common man. This president was famed for riding on the bus like everybody else, after all, and even when he was not standing bravely on a tank, he was a real Russian with the manners and the appetites to match. ‘The Kremlin was the symbol of stability, duration, and determination in the political line being conducted,’ Yeltsin himself explained. ‘If reforms were to be my government line, that was the statement I was making to my opponents by moving into the Kremlin.’
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But there were other ways of reading Yeltsin’s ambitions. An impulsive and intolerant man, a political animal whose basic instincts were more authoritarian than democratic, Yeltsin seemed to hunger for a throne.
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He was also eager to make his position secure. ‘The country’s entire defence system is hooked up to the Kremlin,’ he explained. The citadel was the centre of a massive web: ‘all the coded messages from all over the world are sent here, and there is a security system for the buildings developed down to the tiniest detail.’
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As he later added, putting it in the bluntest terms, only another coup could prise a man from power once he was inside.
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The irony was that another leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was still in residence. The Communist Party might have been disgraced (and Yeltsin moved against it immediately that August, seizing its assets and closing its main offices), but the people had asked Gorbachev, in the referendum in March, to redesign the Soviet Union, and the Kremlin, still in Soviet guise, remained his official headquarters. For twelve weeks at the end of 1991, there were two presidents in the Moscow fortress, which also meant two teams of presidential aides, two types of protocol, and regular collisions between rival television crews as they raced between the press-conferences of the Russian and the Soviet heads of state.

Some institutions vanished within days. Almost at once, and to a chorus of public abuse, the Communist Party’s Central Committee was pitched out of its building on Old Square. The site, no longer sacrosanct, became 150,000 square metres’ worth of prime city-centre real estate with a market value of 137 million rubles.
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Crowds of protesters gathered every day, many demanding to see secret files, and at one point, on 29 August, a mob of two or three hundred threatened to storm the place. Only armed guards saved the bureaucrats inside.
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Chernyaev was among the last to leave. He and his team had barely three hours’ notice, and as the minutes slipped away the sea of faces in the street grew more and more menacing. Eventually, police appeared and led the officials to a basement. ‘There our guards made phone calls for a long time,’ Chernyaev wrote. The frightened group followed the policemen deeper still under the building, entering tunnels that none had ever visited before. The brightly lit
podzemka,
the underground tram, awaited. Chernyaev’s team made its escape, some time later, by coming up through a vault in the Kremlin’s Senate precinct.
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Cleared of the Party
apparat,
Old Square became the headquarters of the government of Russia. The Kremlin was reserved for presidential staff. Yeltsin’s team was based in Block 14, the former theatre on the old monastery site, and his presidential office was here as well, in full view of the Senate but not quite as grand. Gorbachev still occupied the smartest rooms, but Yeltsin’s aides moved into theirs with roguish triumph, hungry for the trappings and the benefits of power. The former occupants of Block 14, the stubborn henchmen of the Soviet age, were given only hours to leave, and many were obliged to abandon quantities of files, including what turned out to be the transcripts of every telephone conversation Yeltsin had made since he and Gorbachev had clashed in 1987.
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This sort of thing was bound to sour the atmosphere, but there were also tensions inside Yeltsin’s camp. In the political free-for-all that summer, two of the Russian president’s closest aides, Viktor Iliushin and Gennady Burbulis, spent precious days immediately after the coup locked in dispute over a Kremlin office that had recently been renovated to the coveted ‘European’ standard, complete with a small annex and a private gym.
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Yeltsin left the pair to fight: in late August, he disappeared on holiday.

His absence brought an interlude of chaos and political fudge. But in the midst of much uncertainty, some scenes that autumn could be comic. The Soviet Union’s impending break-up led to a shortage of wine in the citadel, for the Kremlin cellars had been stocked with cabernet from Soviet Moldavia (soon known as Moldova, and not Soviet), and as the last supplies of that ran out no-one could bring themselves to order a foreign alternative.
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New Kremlin staff, faced with a bank of telephones, had to call the security office to find out how they worked.
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And the personal rivalry between Yeltsin and Gorbachev was manifest. Andrei Grachev, then Gorbachev’s presidential press secretary, recalled what happened on 28 October, when Gorbachev was due to receive the Cypriot president. The Catherine Hall, where such meetings traditionally took place, had been booked in advance by Yeltsin, so Gorbachev was forced to use the studio-office that had been created in the 1980s for his television appearances. There was a piquancy, now, in the fact that the battery of photogenic telephones along the desk had never been connected to anything. Someone also noticed that one of the office doors had warped. As it swung in the draught, it creaked so loudly that the interpreters could not make out what the leaders were trying to say. A Kremlin guard had to be called to hold it shut from the outside until the session ended.
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