THE plot was hatched at a bathhouse in downtown
Moscow. At midmorning on Saturday, Aug. 17, 1991, the head of the
K.G.B., Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, summoned five senior Soviet officials for
a highly secretive meeting that he told them would be vital for the
future of the U.S.S.R.
Wrapped in towels in the
steam room, and later while cooling down over vodka and Scotch, the
half-dozen die-hard Communist apparatchiks outlined a plan to overthrow
the Soviet government. For the Soviet spymaster, the prime minister,
defense minister and the other paunchy, half-naked co-conspirators, the
stakes could not have been higher. And they had to act quickly.
The
country was in a shambles, and the chaos of democracy and nationalism
threatened to destroy it entirely, the K.G.B. chief warned. The Baltic
states had already moved toward independence and something had to be
done to silence Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, the noisy, newly elected
president of the Russian republic, whose belligerent, man-of-the-people
style made him by far the most popular politician in the country, mainly
because of his attacks on the privileges of the Communist Party elite.
Likewise,
the coup plotters insisted, the weak and spineless Soviet president and
party boss, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, had to go. He had proposed signing a
new treaty that would turn the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a
looser federation of autonomous states, most of which intended to turn
their backs on socialism. The treaty would mean the end of the U.S.S.R.,
and that could not be tolerated.
A plan was hastily formulated. One group of
conspirators flew to Crimea, where Mr. Gorbachev was on vacation, with
the goal of forcing him to abandon the treaty or resign. If he refused, a
regiment of K.G.B. troops would hold him captive indefinitely at his
seaside villa. The others would stay in Moscow, ready to take over the
levers of power and use force to assert their authority if challenged.
A
list was drawn up of the names of 200 people who would be immediately
arrested, the first of whom was Yeltsin. The Lefortovo prison in Moscow
was emptied in preparation for new prisoners, and 250,000 pairs of
handcuffs were ordered to be sent to Moscow from a factory in Pskov.
Not
one of the conspirators counseled caution or seemed to consider the law
of unintended consequences: within a few days their ill-prepared coup
attempt would bring forward all that they feared most. Their “patriotic
action” would once and for all remove their beloved U.S.S.R. from the
map.
The coup was a fiasco from the start. Mr.
Gorbachev refused to resign or to shun the treaty. At dawn on Aug. 19,
Muscovites woke to the announcement on radio and TV that an Emergency
Committee had been formed to govern the country. Then, for several
hours, the state-controlled airwaves went dead — except for a continuous
loop of “Swan Lake” that played for hours. Most Muscovites were
unaffected by the coup; their principal memories of it are the sound of
Tchaikovsky.
The drama was confined to one small
area — around the White House in Moscow, home of Russia’s Parliament —
and lasted a few hours. The bungling putschists failed to arrest any of
their targets or to control communications, and soldiers refused to fire
on the crowds outside the White House.
To his own
amazement, Yeltsin was not apprehended at the start of the operation.
Indeed, the central image of the August coup is of a brave and vigorous
Yeltsin climbing onto a tank to make a defiant statement denouncing the
plotters. And he retained a telephone line enabling him to coordinate
his support. This stirring scene was foolishly allowed to be shown on TV
that evening, turning the obscure Yeltsin into a figure of world
significance overnight.
The joke swiftly went
around Moscow that you knew Communism must be through in Russia when the
Bolsheviks couldn’t even mount a proper coup. At a news conference that
evening, the nominal head of the Emergency Committee, the Soviet vice
president, Gennadi I. Yanayev, was seen in public for the first time. A
gray 53-year-old bureaucrat with nicotine-stained fingers and a shiny
suit, he was visibly drunk. When he told the lie that Mr. Gorbachev was
ill, his hands shook and his hairpiece began to slip.
For
all the tragedy and farce of those three August days, the world has
plenty for which to thank the incompetent conspirators who hastened the
fall of an empire. Less than a week after the coup fizzled, two of its
leaders killed themselves, the others were in jail and the Communist
Party they sought to save was banned. Yeltsin, the party’s principal
assassin, was the most powerful man in the country.
For
a generation, the failure of Soviet Communism had been evident for all
to see. The great experiment that once bred idealism ended in food lines
and prison camps. Marx believed that man could be made perfect;
Communists found that people had an irritating way of refusing to be
perfected.
Yet despite the revolutions in Eastern
Europe in 1989, hardly anyone in the summer of 1991 predicted that the
U.S.S.R. itself would fall apart by the end of the year. It might have
limped on for decades, as the Ottoman Empire did in the late 19th
century, dying slowly amid civil wars. Yet the second most powerful
country in the world simply withered away, not in the classical Marxist
sense, but it literally ceased to exist. And the manner of its going was
one of the best things. The Soviet people destroyed the Soviet Union,
not outsiders, and not through violent conflict.
BUT
what followed has not been a democratic idyll. Despite the putsch’s
failure, some Soviet residue remains — a “coup culture” that breeds a
winner-take-all view of politics. In Russia today, there is no concept
of a loyal opposition, no separation of powers, no mass participation in
political life and a news media that is far from free.
There
was a fleeting opportunity for liberal democracy and genuine free
markets to emerge in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. But
Yeltsin did little to develop civil society, the rule of law, the
emergence of viable political parties or a modernized economy after the
failed 1991 coup. A few people became very rich, adopting methods
reminiscent of, but even more ruthless than, the 19th-century robber
barons in the United States. But a middle class with a stake in how the
country is run barely exists.
Yeltsin’s corrupt cronyism encouraged a gangster
capitalism from which Russia is still suffering. But the few years that
he and Mr. Gorbachev led the country together seem today a halcyon
period for freedom in Russia.
Yeltsin’s handpicked
successor, Vladimir V. Putin, reversed the few fledgling democratic
reforms that had been made, turning Russia into a country that merely
goes through the motions of democracy every few years while power
remains concentrated in the same hands. Mr. Putin replaced a one-party
state with a one-clique state of people around him — a pattern
replicated elsewhere in the former Soviet Union — financed almost
entirely by booming oil and gas revenues.
Today,
he is one of the few to lament the Soviet Union’s passing. Mr. Putin,
who in 1991 was a middle-ranking intelligence officer in St. Petersburg,
left the K.G.B. during the coup. To him the collapse of the U.S.S.R.
was “a major geopolitical disaster of the century.”
But
for the millions who had to endure life under the Soviet yoke — born in
bloodshed and kept alive for decades through intimidation — its end was
long overdue.
Still,years later, as Mr.
Putin’s continuing influence and popularity attest, the traditional
Russian ideal of a strongman in the Kremlin remains. And depressing as
it is, if dire economic times come again, a coup d’état still seems as
likely a way as any for political change to occur in Russia or many
former Soviet states. The Bolsheviks may have disappeared for good when
Yeltsin climbed atop a tank in August 1991, but the legacy of
authoritarian rule lingers.
Written By VICTOR SEBESTYEN
Victor Sebestyen is a Hungarian-born journalist and the author of “Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.”
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