A few weeks later, life would return to its complexity, but in August 1991 most people lived for the moment. Alexander Kabakov, who reported the news from a window sill of the Moskovskie novosti building via a makeshift radio, wrote a few days later that these were the happiest days of his life. Journalists stuck their leaflets on the side of the tanks. ‘A tank is the best advertising vehicle’ someone joked. It was their war: words against tanks. Fear was lifted by the sense of the absurdity of the situation. For every KGB officer who wished to hang journalists on lamp-posts, there was one who supplied them with information.
Yeltsin appointed himself the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces on the territory of the Russian republic and at the same time Yegor effectively appointed himself the editor-in-chief of all liberal media. He gathered the editors of all closed newspapers in his office and suggested they unite their forces and publish one newspaper – Obshchaya gazeta – literally a ‘common newspaper’. To print it, they used the offices of Kommersant, the first private newspaper that was edited by Yegor’s son, Vladimir, which was equipped with photocopiers and old rotary printers. The four-page broadsheet Obshchaya gazeta carried descriptions of the distribution of troops around Moscow.
Nobody, however, inflicted as much damage to the coup leaders as they did to themselves when, inspired by Yeltsin’s press conference, they decided to call one of their own. The very proposition was absurd: a militant junta which had brought tanks onto the streets of Moscow was paying heed to Glasnost. Remarkably, the press conference was broadcast on television.
The entire country saw five grey, middle-aged Soviet apparatchiks sitting behind a long table on the stage of the foreign ministry’s press centre, preparing to answer questions from Russian and foreign journalists. Yanayev, the man who had assumed power in the country, tried his best to look composed, but his hands gave him away: they were shaking – either from fear or drinking and most probably from both. Constantly sniffing, as though searching for a drink, he and those next to him looked pathetic rather than scary.
Then it got worse. Halfway through the press conference, Tatyana Malkina, an open-faced and good-looking, twenty-four-year-old journalist in a light chequered summer dress, stood up and, fixing her eyes on the men in grey suits, said with a smile: ‘Tell me, please, do you realize that you carried out a state coup last night? And which comparison do you find more appropriate – 1917 [the Bolshevik Revolution] or 1964 [the overthrow of Khrushchev]?’
Instead of suppressing this obvious revolt, by having Malkina arrested on the spot, Yanayev proceeded to answer her question: ‘As for your assertion that we have committed an anti-constitutional coup, allow me to disagree with you, because our actions were based on the constitution… Historic comparison is not adequate here and is, in fact, dangerous.’ If this was a thinly veiled threat, it did not scare the journalists.
Vremya, the main news programme, followed the broadcast of the official statements by the GKChP with the footage of Yeltsin on top of the tank, and protesters gathering in the centre of Moscow. A smooth, bespectacled reporter, Sergei Medvedev (soon to become Yeltin’s press secretary), was allowed to gather news material under the innocent-sounding rubric ‘Moscow today’. With a microphone in his hands, he stood under the bridge next to the White House, talking to men who were setting up the barricades and saying they had learned the lessons of Vilnius. With the acquiescence of Kravchenko’s deputy, the report was put on air. Yeltsin, who also watched the programme, could not believe his eyes.
The report demonstrated that the coup leaders were not in full control of television and, therefore, of the country. Individual editors and reporters exercised their own will and judgement as far as they could. Elena Pozdniak, a long-serving news director at Vremya, who was entrusted with video-editing Brezhnev’s speeches and ‘correcting’ mispronounced words, was asked to edit out Yanayev’s shaking hands. She did not.
In the absence of any enticing idea or any overt violence, the orders issued by the coup leaders were worthless. Not a single person in Moscow came out in support of the coup. But thousands came out against it despite reports that the KGB’s special forces were preparing to storm the White House.
From a military point of view, storming the White House presented no difficulties. But with tens of thousands of civilians defending the building, bloodshed was inevitable and someone had to take responsibility for giving an order. Finding such a person in Moscow in August 1991 proved impossible.
As Yegor Gaidar later wrote, the military commanders marked time, waiting for the KGB to act, the KGB waited for the army and the police waited for both of them. Nobody wanted to make the first move and shoot at people shouting ‘Rossiya’ and ‘Yeltsin’ in front of the building. Yet those who spent that night defending the White House could not be confident that the KGB would not use force. In fact, the experience in Vilnius and Tbilisi suggested the opposite. However ridiculous the coup might look in retrospect, the heroism of the 40,000 people who stood by the White House in the rain that night was real. As were the deaths of the three young men who were dragged under the tanks’ treads in a tunnel under the Garden Ring Road across from the American Embassy.
In the morning of 21 August, tanks started to pull out of Moscow. Less than twelve hours later the coup leaders were arrested and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. For the first time in Soviet history, the state apparatus – armed with tanks, nuclear rockets and the largest military in the world – capitulated before its unarmed citizens. Vasily Rozanov, a nineteenth-century philosopher, wrote after the revolution of 1917 that ‘Russia faded away in two days – three at the most’.33 So did the Soviet Union.
With the coup over, emotions ran high. A vast crowd of up to 200,000 people moved to the building of the party’s Central Committee and the KGB headquarters, threatening to smash up both. Inside the Central Committee building, the shredding machines were overheating, as party apparatchiks rushed to destroy whatever papers they could. Behind the darkened windows of the KGB headquarters, its few remaining officers were preparing to defend themselves with machine guns and hand-held grenades.
Ironically, the man who prevented the crowd from attacking the building was Alexander Yakovlev, the man most hated by the KGB. Standing on a makeshift podium and cheered by a jubilant crowd, Yakovlev sensed that ‘a critical moment was approaching. One comment about “why people in the building behind my back are not applauding”, or the question “What are they doing in there?” would have been sufficient for the irreparable to happen. People were wound up and ready for any action and had to be led away.’ He quickly came down from the stage and walked towards Manezh Square, away from the KGB headquarters. People in the crowd picked him up, lifted him in the air and carried him all the way down to the turn of Tverskaya Street. ‘Probably only my mother and the nurses in hospitals during the war had held me in their arms before then,’ he recalled.34
Meantime, a crane appeared on the square and the anger of the crowd was diverted to the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the KGB’s founding father. A couple of men climbed up and slipped a rope around his neck. Then he was yanked up by the crane. Watching ‘Iron Felix’ sway in mid-air, many KGB officers felt betrayed ‘by Gorbachev, by Yeltsin, by the impotent coup leaders’.35 The death of the regime was accompanied by a series of suicides. Marshal Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s military adviser, was found dead with a rope around his neck and a stack of suicide notes on his desk. Pugo, the head of the interior ministry, shot himself and his wife minutes before investigators came to arrest him. A man who oversaw the finances of the Central Committee jumped out of the window. There were a dozen other suicides in the first post-coup days.