The critical year 1991 arrives. It begins with bloody events in Vilno and Riga. Troops from the KBG attack an unarmed demonstration in Vilno with tanks — more than a dozen people die; dozens more are wounded. The Lithuanians encircle their Parliament building with concrete barricades. The interior, when I enter it, calls to mind a fortified castle under siege. Sandbags in the windows, everywhere young armed volunteers keeping guard — they are expecting an attack at any moment. President Landsbergis, tense but composed, is among them, giving them courage. In Riga and in Tallinn, as in Vilno, concrete barricades protect the buildings of the newly declared national parliaments. The most imposing barricades are in Tallinn. To reach the Parliament, one must walk through corridors built to resemble the labyrinth of Minos.
Who is responsible for the blood spilled in Vilno and in Riga? ask the democrats in Moscow as they point to Kriuchkov, the chief of the KGB, and Pugo, the minister of internal affairs. But Gorbachev doesn’t dismiss them. Does he lack the strength? Does he not know what to do?
In the summer he goes with his family on vacation to the Crimea.
His entire entourage, with Vice-president Yanayev at the forefront, moves to attack. On August 19, a three-day coup begins. Tanks surround the so-called White House — the seat of the government and of the Parliament of the Russian Federation, as well as the office of its president, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin condemns the conspirators and organizes a defense of the White House.
The coup is suppressed and its leaders are imprisoned. It is revealed later that the tank corps sent out to battle for control over the nuclear superpower had been given nothing to eat for two days. Many of them did not have boots — they were wearing sneakers. The women helping to defend the White House took pity on them, went off to their homes, and brought them back something to eat. The fortified tank corps assured the compassionate ladies that they would not fire — and they kept their promise. Several days later, the Moscow press reported that when the coup was beginning, the mother of its leader, Yanayev, was lying in the Kremlin hospital. At the news of the revolt, which would give power to her son, the hospital’s patients dragged themselves out of their beds and went to the old woman to give her their most heartfelt congratulations. When the revolt failed and Yanayev was arrested, these same patients again dragged themselves out of their beds, but this time they went to the director of the hospital, categorically demanding the expulsion of the old woman.
Gorbachev returns from the Crimea. On Sunday, August 25, the funeral of the three Russian victims of the latest events takes place. A million people converge on the Kremlin, where the procession begins, to pay their respects. I hear someone’s faraway voice, reaching me from a loudspeaker. People in the crowd are talking; no one is paying any attention.
“Who is that speaking?” I ask.
“Gorbachev,” someone answers, and keeps on talking.
No one is listening to Gorbachev any longer; he has ceased to interest people.
• • •
HISTORY IS MADE before our eyes, at every moment, every hour. I am witness during this funeral to the birth of a new class. As we are standing on Kalinin Prospekt waiting for the front of the funeral procession, a tall young man in a shabby oilcloth coat walks up to the crowd and cries: “Defenders of the White House, step forward!”
Silence. No one moves. But after several more requests, a student — judging by his appearance — emerges from the crowd. A moment later, someone else. Before long, a large group of these defenders has gathered. The man in the oilcloth coat soon realizes that the volunteers are starting to form a crowd of their own, so he stops the recruiting. He begins to write down the last names of those who have stepped forth and tells them to come to a meeting on the following Tuesday. They will form an organization, or the movement of the Defenders of the White House. They will receive badges and identification cards. Some years from now they will become ministers, generals, ambassadors.
AFTER THE AUGUST coup Gorbachev resigns as secretary-general of the CPSU. Soon thereafter, Yeltsin dissolves and illegalizes the Communist Party. I am in Kiev at the time. The massive building of the Ukrainian CP is glaringly deserted. Two policemen stand in front of the main entrance, replying to every question with silence and a shrug of the shoulders. And where is the support of the system, the Party apparat? They have already managed to assume new administrative positions in government and commerce or are heading up joint ventures — outposts of the nascent capitalism.
Gorbachev must feel increasingly alone. He is still enormously popular in the West. The West would like to live in harmony with the rulers of the Kremlin, but it has one condition — that they be likable, that they smile, that they be well dressed, relaxed, cheerful, humorous, courteous. And now, after six hundred years of hopeless waiting, such a man appears: Gorbachev! London and Paris, Washington and Bonn, all open wide their arms, rejoice. What a discovery! What a relief!
Elderly American ladies set off in droves to visit Russia.
“Let’s go to Moscow! Let’s have lunch with Gorbi!”
Russians observe all this wide-eyed.
The Russian peers of the American lady tourists, standing in line for hours for a piece of meat or cheese, regard the secretary-general with somewhat less enthusiasm.
He must of course be aware of this. He must feel the emptiness all around him growing. One of the pillars of the system is the so-called telefonnoye pravo (law of the telephone), by which the more highly situated official telephones the one below him and issues instructions. Dismiss Smirnov. Execute Korsakov. The more lowly situated functionary must perform as told without asking any questions. If he refuses, he himself will be dismissed or executed. Such a system of communication ensures that later there will be no paper trail, no proof of decision making. Responsibility vanishes into thin air. Telefonnoye pravo also works in the opposite direction. Before the more lowly situated official makes any decision, he calls the higher one and asks for his approval. Thus, among other things, it is the number of telephone calls from below, their kind and significance, that allow the higher official to ascertain whether he is still important. Many former Party bosses have written in their memoirs that they concluded that their fall was being prepared from the fact that the telephones on their desks rang with decreasing frequency, then fell silent altogether. This signaled the end of one’s career, demotion, dismissal, and — once — death.
At the end of 1991, the telephones on Gorbachev’s desk ring less and less frequently. The center of power has moved elsewhere: as of June 12, the president of the Russian Federation is Boris Yeltsin, who gradually seizes the reins of government over the greater part of the territories of the Imperium.
It is Yeltsin who in November suspends and illegalizes the ruling Communist Party. (At that point it has close to twenty million members.) It is on his initiative, without Gorbachev’s knowledge (or at least without his consent), that the leaders of the Russian Federation, as well as of the Belorussian and Ukrainian republics, meet at the beginning of December in the Białowieza forest and resolve to create a new union — the Commonwealth of Independent States. Two weeks later, the leaders of the five Central Asian republics join this initiative. The shape of the new Imperium starts to emerge.