In April 1991, Alexander Yakovlev wrote to Gorbachev:
My information and analysis suggest that a coup d’état is being prepared from the right. Something like a neo-fascist regime will be established. The ideas of 1985 will be trampled. You and your allies will be declared an anathema. The only way out (politically) is to unite all healthy democratic forces to form a party or movement for public reform… Of course, all this should stay between us, just as it did in 1985. I understand the seriousness of this action both for you and for me. It would be easier for me to retire and turn to scholarship and memoirs, which is what I have decided to do. For you, of course, there is a possibility of leading such a movement, since you won’t be able to play someone else’s ‘part’ and ‘game’ for long… P.S. You know, Mikhail Sergeevich, that it is too late for me personally to strive for power. Here everything is clear.28
Gorbachev dismissed Yakovlev’s prophetic and sincere note. He believed there was still a way out. On 23 July, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Kazakhstan met at Gorbachev’s dacha to thrash out the final details of a treaty that would govern the relationship between the Soviet Union and its republics. Yeltsin, backed by the leaders of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, demanded that the three men responsible for the bloodshed in Vilnius – Kryuchkov, Pugo and Yazov, the heads of the KGB, the police and the army – should be dismissed. Gorbachev agreed, unaware that the whole conversation was secretly being recorded by Kryuchkov.
The same day Sovetskaya Rossiya published a manifesto entitled ‘A Message to the People’: ‘Our Motherland… this great state which history, nature and our predecessors willed us to save, is dying, breaking apart and plunging into darkness and nothingness.’ Yeltsin and other ‘scheming, eloquent leaders, cunning dissidents and greedy rich exploiters… who hate this country and are now slavishly seeking advice and blessings from overseas’ had to be stopped. ‘Let us all rise up in unity and challenge the destroyers of the Fatherland… Russia, unique among nations, is calling for our help.’29 The letter, Nevzorov said, was drafted by him. This time, it was signed not by the unknown Leningrad teacher, but by men who, as Braithwaite put it in his diary, ‘could do something about it if they wished’. Among them was General Varennikov, the head of the Soviet ground forces. The liberals and the hardliners were racing each other.
On 16 August Alexander Yakovlev, whose letter to Gorbachev was left without reply, quit the Communist Party and published an open letter about the possibility of a coup: ‘I’d like to warn society that a powerful Stalinist group has been formed in the leadership of the party, which opposes the course chosen in 1985… [It is] leading the country toward a revanche and a state coup.’ Two days later, at 4.50 p.m., a group of coup leaders arrived in Foros in the Crimea, where Gorbachev was vacationing, to tell him he had a choice – either to resign or to support the self-appointed Committee for Emergency. ‘Yeltsin’s been arrested. He’ll be arrested… Mikhail Sergeevich, we demand nothing from you. You’ll be here. We’ll do all the dirty work for you,’ one of the group told Gorbachev. Gorbachev told them to get out.30 Soon his lines of communications, including those by satellite, went dead.
In the small hours of 19 August 1991, special interior forces surrounded the Moscow television centre and TASS, the Soviet telegraphic agency. Leonid Kravchenko, the head of Soviet TV, was summoned to the Central Committee and instructed about an upcoming state of emergency. Once it was in place, ‘television should work to the same regime as during the funerals of the leaders of the Communist Party and the country’. At 5 a.m. he was handed the decrees of the Emergency Committee abbreviated into the all-consonant GKChP. An hour later, a Soviet television announcer read out a statement: ‘In view of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev’s inability, for health reasons, to perform the duties of the USSR president and of the transfer of [his] powers to Vice-President Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev, we resolve: to declare a state of emergency in some parts of the Soviet Union for six months from 04:00 Moscow time on 19 August 1991.’
The coup leaders stated: ‘The policy of reforms, launched at Mikhail Gorbachev’s initiative… have led to a dead end… Using the granted freedom… new extremist forces have emerged aimed at liquidating the Soviet Union…’ The statement was repeated on the hour throughout the day with no commentary. In between, television channels played classical music and showed the ballet Swan Lake – just like during the funerals of the Communist Party leaders. The bells were tolling for the USSR. The television centre was put under the control of the KGB. Gorbachev was under house arrest in Foros.
Yeltsin was at his dacha when the coup broke out and like everyone else in the country learned about it from state television. Remarkably, though, he was not arrested. Having ensured that some of the military were on his side, he went to the White House – the seat of Russia’s parliament ‘that would become the main bridgehead of the events that were to come’, Yeltsin recalled.31
First of all, Yeltsin held a press conference in which he defined the actions by the GKChP as a coup, demanded an immediate reinstatement of Gorbachev as the Soviet president and appealed to Muscovites to resist the junta. In the midst of the press conference, Yeltsin received information that another fifty tanks were moving towards the White House. Following his political instincts, he walked out of the building and climbed onto a tank, shaking hands with its crew. In scenes resembling Lenin reading out his first decrees, Yeltsin took a piece of paper from his pocket and read his appeal to the ‘citizens of Russia’. In the days of the disintegrating empire, imagery and symbols had far greater power than any legal papers or even guns. And none was more important than that of Yeltsin on a tank reading out his appeal. It gave political focus and meaning to everything that unfolded in Moscow over the next three days. Thousands of people – young and old – flocked to the White House to defy the coup – not in the name of Gorbachev but in the name of Russia and Yeltsin.
And just like seventy years earlier, this battle unfolded over the printing press and telegraphic agencies. The first decree of the GKChP, after announcing the state of emergency was a ban on the publication of all independent newspapers. Moskovskie novosti was the first on the list. Its offices were heaving with people – not just journalists and editors, but everyone who considered it a key venue on the political map of the country. Yegor came back from the White House at about 2 p.m. on 19 August. He was collected and calm. He told his staff that, since they could not print the paper, they would print and photocopy leaflets and distribute them around Moscow by hand. He also told his journalists they were free to decide whether to stay or leave since Moskovskie novostis could be stormed at any moment. Everyone smiled but nobody left.
Yegor got an anonymous call on his vertushka – a special frequency ‘Kremlin’ line. The caller did not introduce himself: ‘You tried to do me in, now listen to the radio, you son-of-a-bitch…’32 The radio broadcast the decrees of the GKChP. Yegor was in his element. He relished it. This was his finest and most heroic hour – something that he had waited and longed for all his life. It was his answer to the revolutionary life of his father’s generation. It was the moment that allowed him – and everyone who defied the coup – to show their best side. With tanks in the centre of Moscow, there was the beautiful simplicity of moral choice.