The media were even less compliant. As Ryzhkov told the presidential counciclass="underline" ‘It is sickening to watch a TV presenter pronouncing Yeltsin’s name with aspiration! [We should] remove half of the people from television! And kick out all these… from newspapers!’ Gorbachev agreed: ‘[It is time] to restore some order in the media.’ In fact the time for doing this had long passed. On 14 November, Yegor printed an appeal from the country’s most highly regarded artists, writers and thinkers who were now also the founders of the new independent Moskovskie novosti. The letter was headed ‘The Country is Tired of Waiting’ and was addressed to Gorbachev. It drew a line under the period which had started in the spring of 1985. ‘The peaceful changes are over. Blood has been spilled in many republics and could now be spilled in the centre. The country is sliding towards an abyss and a civil war.’ It ended with an ultimatum: ‘You cannot escape responsibility for today’s state of affairs by swearing an allegiance to the socialist choice and communist perspective. Either you confirm your ability for decisive actions, or resign.’17
Gorbachev felt he had been hit in the solar plexus. ‘Gorbachev is more upset by this than by anything else these days. He saw in it a personal betrayal,’ Gorbachev’s aide Anatoly Chernyaev recorded in his diary on 15 October 1990. ‘The country is in a state of collapse and panic. Every newspaper predicts revolts, civil war and a coup. Every critical statement ends with the demand on the president: if you cannot even use the powers which you have been granted – “Go!”’18
The liberal reformers were not the only ones who presented Gorbachev with an ultimatum. So did the hardliners. The same day as the article in Moskovskie novosti printed its open appeal to Gorbachev, Viktor Alksnis, a Latvian army colonel – a reactionary figure dubbed the ‘black colonel’ by liberals – demanded that Gorbachev either restored order in the country and brought the republics to heel, or resigned.
Two days later Gorbachev addressed the Supreme Soviet with a short and dramatic speech, marking his sharp swing towards the hardliners. In his twenty-minute-long speech – one of the shortest in his political career – Gorbachev put the government under his direct control, dismissed the Presidential Council that included Alexander Yakovlev and a few other liberals and replaced it with a hawkish Security Council. The liberals were appalled. The conservatives were delighted. ‘We will have to become more right-wing,’ Gorbachev told his aides. The country, he argued to himself, could not cope with the pace of reforms and the liberals were irresponsible in their criticism.
Kryuchkov smeared Yakovlev, telling Gorbachev that he had been plotting against him. Having emasculated Yakovlev, the KGB took over the key appointments in the media and the police. The liberal-minded Bakatin was replaced as the head of the police with one of the KGB’s own men, Boris Pugo. Leonid Kravchenko, a conservative party hack, was put in charge of television and promptly removed liberal TV presenters from the air.
All the signs pointed to a counter-revolution. Yet its creeping nature meant that nobody called it that. But, on 20 December, Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s foreign minister who had helped to end the Cold War, ‘detonated’ the situation by announcing his resignation. He said dictatorship was coming and a ‘junta’ was preparing to take over. Shevardnadze knew what he was talking about: half of the foreign ministry staff was seconded from the KGB and many of them had told Shevardnadze about its plans.
Vzglyad, which refused to go on the air without interviewing Shevardnadze, was shut down. Interfax, the first independent news agency in the country, was kicked out from its offices. ‘It begins to look more and more like a crackdown on the organs of Glasnost. Glasnost is the central principle of Perestroika: a real crackdown would be very serious, close to the beginning of the end,’ Braithwaite recorded in his diary.19
At the same Congress of People’s Deputies that Shevardnadze used to make his resignation, Ales Adamovich, writer, war veteran and one of the founders, along with Sakharov, of Memorial, gave a prophetic warning. ‘Gorbachev is the only leader in Soviet history who has not stained his hands with blood, and we would all like to remember him as such… But the moment will come when the military will instigate a bloodbath, and later they will wipe their bloodstained hands against your suit,’ he told Gorbachev.20
The moment Adamovich warned about came on 12 January 1991 when interior ministry troops and the KGB tried to overthrow the government of Lithuania which had declared independence. There was shooting on the streets of Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. Tanks went in. It all seemed like a repeat of 1968. Events seemed to follow a familiar script: a call for ‘normalization’ in Lithuania, clearing the ground at home and cracking down on the media. There was one big difference, however. Those who had lived through 1968 were not about to give in. They still controlled print and print was still powerful. Most important of all, there was an alternative source of political power in the country – Yeltsin – who overtly supported the Baltic states.
That evening, Yeltsin was among the reformers, artists, journalists and foreign diplomats who gathered to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Moskovskie novosti. Yegor considered cancelling the party, given the events in Vilnius, but his journalists persuaded him otherwise: it was decided they should use the occasion to rally the country’s elite and tell Gorbachev what they thought about Vilnius – while they still could. Yegor was on the stage at the Moscow Film-Makers Club when the news came in about tanks surrounding the television and radio centre and the main printworks in Vilnius. Yegor looked at his journalists who were in the audience and dispatched them to the three Baltic republics. They left before the evening was over – still dressed in their party wear. Boris Yeltsin also left early and went to Tallinn for an emergency meeting with the heads of the Baltic republics.
Shortly after midnight, Soviet special troops burst into the Lithuanian television and radio centre. The Lithuanian news presenter reported the attack live until she could do so no longer. The screens went blank. The main fighting, however, unfolded outside the television transmitting tower. Fourteen Lithuanians were killed and 140 wounded by Soviet soldiers who opened fire at the unarmed crowd that tried to defend the television tower. None of this was shown on Soviet television, which presented the crackdown as an attack by Lithuanian nationalists. Apart from one young newsreader, Tatyana Mitkova, who refused to read out the official statement on the late-night news programme Televezionnaia Sluzhba Novostei (Television News Service), most television programmes, including Vremya, fell into line. The main source of information in Moscow was a private radio station called Echo Moskvy (Moscow Echo).
The fact that the main fighting occurred over a television tower was a tribute to the power and importance of television as a way of controlling the minds of the people. To prevent the bug from spreading to Russia, the KGB had reinforced its forces with its own information offensive led by the television paratrooper, Alexander Nevzorov.
He raced to Vilnius to shoot a ten-minute ‘documentary’. With a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and with Wagner’s Das Rheingold as the soundtrack, he strode into the television tower, talking to the stern-looking Russian ‘heroes’, the ‘defenders of the empire’ and the Russian-speaking population against the ‘fascist threat’ posed by the ‘nationalist Lithuanian traitors’. As for those Lithuanians who had had their skulls smashed by the riot police, or been run over by the tanks, they had died of ‘heart attacks’ or in ‘car accidents’, according to Nevzorov.