Around this time, Kryuchkov revoked the arrest order. He did it upon consultation with Anatolii Luk’yanov, Yeltsin’s former dacha mate, who had fallen in with the putsch and promised to get the USSR Supreme Soviet to provide it with legal cover (though not until August 26). “Kryuchkov was impressed by Luk’yanov’s advice to take a wait-and-see position, letting Yeltsin ‘declare himself’ and giving the people to understand that the democratic leader of Russia was against the imposition of order in the country.”78 Shortly afterward, Kryuchkov tried honey rather than vinegar. It did not work: “Yeltsin refuses to cooperate. I spoke with him by telephone. I tried to make him see reason. It was useless.”79 The one general who wanted “measures to extirpate B. N. Yeltsin’s group of adventurists” by force was Valentin Varennikov, the commander of Soviet ground forces, and he spent August 19 and 20 in Crimea and Kiev, Ukraine. If Varennikov, who fought in Berlin in 1945 and in Afghanistan in the 1980s, had been in Moscow, military behavior toward Yeltsin might have been more ruthless.80
By the time Kryuchkov made news of Yeltsin’s obstreperousness known to his co-conspirators, the president of the RSFSR, after discussion in his team of whether to stay in Arkhangel’skoye-2 and the risks of moving, had been allowed to speed off in a car a little after nine A.M., headed to his office at the White House. He put on a bulletproof vest as he left. Naina Yeltsina said it would not be much use, since his head would be unprotected: “And the main thing is the head.”81 His limousine and several accompanying automobiles drove past paratroopers and tanks. Korzhakov’s bodyguard detail was armed but under orders not to shoot unless the presidential automobile was hit. Yeltsin did not speak to his family again until he phoned Yelena to wish her a happy birthday on the morning of August 21.
Holed up in the White House, Yeltsin, his government, and the parliamentary chairman pro tem, Ruslan Khasbulatov, demanded Gorbachev’s release and coordinated resistance to the putsch and the junta that had mounted it. They propagated their edicts by telephone, fax, and the foreign media, since the Soviet media were closed to them. Yeltsin declared that as president of Russia he was assuming command of all military and police units located in the RSFSR. At half past noon, in gray suit (buttoned at the waist) and tie, he marched onto the White House driveway. He was motivated by curiosity as much as anything and dismissed a warning from Gennadii Burbulis that he would be in danger from snipers, from the bushes or a nearby roof. Four or five aides grabbed at his arm and tried to keep him from going forward. “He was completely fearless—either oblivious of the danger or just thinking it didn’t really matter.”82
A light drizzle was falling. A twelve-wheeled, olive-green T-72 tank, No. 110, from the Taman Motorized Rifle Division, built at the Urals Wagon Works in Sverdlovsk oblast, had just rumbled toward the bottom of the stairs. Yeltsin walked slowly down the steps, grabbed a small Russian flag from a bystander, and stood in front of the machine, intending, he said, to keep it and the three or four additional tanks behind it from coming any closer. For a few seconds, he looked down the barrel of its cannon, “confident that they would not run over a president.” Only when the forty-five tons of metal screeched to a halt did it occur to him to heave himself onto the hull, something his training as a tank operator at UPI and his service as party overseer of industry in Sverdlovsk let him know how to do. Once on it, Yeltsin reached into the hatch to shake hands with the driver and gunner and improvised again.83 Perched on hardware that symbolized Soviet power—and what had been done in its name in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968, and in Kabul in 1979—he pumped his right fist twice. He then read out his appeal to the citizenry, a copy of which he had clutched in his hand as he walked out of the building, unamplified to a knot of television cameras and a sparse audience that grew from about fifty when he began to speak to no more than 150 at the end, as passersby and shoppers from nearby stores came to have a look. Nikolai Vorontsov (the Soviet environment minister), Aleksandr Korzhakov, Gennadii Burbulis, and members of his entourage scampered up the side of the tank as he spoke.
The appeal, rather like Yeltsin’s secret speech in 1987, was not particularly eloquent, and it was composed with two other people, Khasbulatov and Silayev. The values it cited were those of the democratic fragment of the fast-dissolving Soviet civilization. Russia’s new government, it said, had tried to preserve “the unity of the Soviet Union and the unity of Russia,” and it could not accept the illegal and immoral acts of the GKChP, which would “return us to the epoch of the Cold War and the isolation of the Soviet Union from the world community.”84 Yeltsin’s most musical moment, to use Anatolii Chernyayev’s phrase, was formed less by the words he spoke than by how he spoke them and where.
Within minutes, footage of Yeltsin’s stagecraft was transmitted internationally on CNN. Soviet television was allowed to show snippets only, but staffers gave friends in the Western news bureaus tapes they themselves could not broadcast, and copies were sent to the Urals and Siberia. Any Moscow family with a wire antenna could tune in CNN on their home television. Shots of Yeltsin on Tank No. 110 came in a flood when the coup was over. Indigenous viewers saw in them glimmerings of a totemic image from another revolution, tattooed in their heads by the history primers they had read as children—of Lenin at the Finland Station, returning from Swiss exile and holding forth to the Petrograd proletariat from an armored car in April 1917. Immortalized on celluloid from eye level, “Yeltsin’s rather awkward bulk makes him appear someone ‘larger than life,’ his unrefined speaking style ‘the voice of the people,’ his rather unkempt appearance a sign, not of the confusion of a politician caught by surprise but of a strong leader, righteously indignant and full of selfless resolve.”85
There were anxious hours still to come. The hoped-for general strike did not happen, although the GKChP was unable to make use of that failure. In the White House, Yeltsin and 300 to 400 followers hunkered down behind sandbags and office furniture, with gas masks and weapons at the ready. Maybe 75,000 people (in the daylight, fewer at night) massed on the streets below.86 At five P.M. on August 19, he assigned RSFSR Deputy Premier Oleg Lobov, his political client from the Urals, to institute a command center for a “reserve government” at a bomb shelter in Verkhnyaya Sysert, south of Sverdlovsk. Andrei Kozyrev, the hitherto ornamental Russian foreign minister and a fluent speaker of English, was sent to London to lay the groundwork for a government-in-exile.87 In another decree, Yeltsin reached out to the military, enjoining them not to carry out the orders of the coup makers: “Soldiers, officers, and generals, the clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country. They must not be allowed to bring eternal night.”
John Major of Britain was the first of a chain of foreign leaders to telephone with words of support. George H. W. Bush called from the Oval Office the morning of Tuesday, August 20, and for the first time Yeltsin aroused his admiration. “After hearing Yeltsin’s voice, Bush began to believe that there might yet be a hero in this drama, one who would actually vanquish the villains—and it was not Gorbachev, but Yeltsin.” If he won out over the tanks, the American told Yeltsin, Russia would “pave its way into the civilized community of states.”88 Bush clandestinely ordered U.S. national-security agencies to provide Yeltsin with signals intelligence from intercepts of Soviet military sources, and had a communications specialist from the embassy go the Moscow White House to help the Yeltsin group secure their telephone calls.89