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
That afternoon Yeltsin blazed away at the concourse in front of the White House, this time with loudspeakers to amplify his voice: “You can build a throne out of bayonets, but can you sit on it for long? I am convinced that there is not and will not be any return to the past…. Russia will be free!”90 By telephone and through mediators, he proselytized military officers, after which Generals Yevgenii Shaposhnikov and Pavel Grachëv, the commanders of the Soviet air force and airborne troops, agreed between them to have Shaposhnikov send two jets to strafe military vehicles in the Kremlin if the White House were stormed. The pop groups Helios, Mister Twister, Metallic Corrosion, and Time Machine rocked it up in the square. Poet Yevgenii Yevtushenko did a reading for the crowd, stand-up comedian Gennadii Khazanov performed impersonations of Gorbachev and Yanayev, and the master cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich lionized the opponents of the coup and waved a Kalashnikov rifle. Tension was astronomically high that evening, when soldiers accidentally killed three young male civilians.91 Yeltsin was nonplussed that the coup makers did not attack or even seal off the White House: “How could Kryuchkov be so blockheaded as not to understand how dangerous such indecision could be?”92 The GKChP blinked first. At three in the morning of August 21, Kryuchkov decided not to storm the White House, concluding that the carnage would be politically unmanageable. The blockade was lifted in the afternoon and the troops began to evacuate Moscow. By midnight the putschists were behind bars—arrested by agents of the RSFSR procurator general—and Gorbachev, the emperor who had no clothes, was back from Foros, escorted by Vice President Rutskoi of Russia. Descending the stairs of the plane, Gorbachev thanked Yeltsin and, tone-deaf to the end, spoke of being “an adherent of socialism.” On August 24, at the funeral for the three young men who died, Gorbachev was ill at ease, while Yeltsin movingly asked the parents’ forgiveness for not saving their sons’ lives.
Russia had entered an intermezzo of duopoly, dvoyevlastiye, like between the February and October revolutions of 1917. One aspirant, Yeltsin, elected by the people, was ascendant; the other, Gorbachev, chosen by two now lifeless bodies (the Central Committee of the CPSU, which he dissolved on August 24, and the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, which voted to shut itself down on September 5), was descendant.
Capitalizing on the legitimacy gap, Yeltsin compelled Gorbachev to annul his post-coup decrees on leadership of the national-security agencies and appoint men Yeltsin trusted. Gorbachev had made General Mikhail Moiseyev, who was complicit in the plot, acting defense minister on August 21. On August 22 Moiseyev was called to Gorbachev’s office and found Yeltsin next to the Soviet president and commander-in-chief. “Explain to him that he is not minister any longer,” Yeltsin barked at Gorbachev. “Gorbachev repeated Boris Nikolayevich’s words. Moiseyev listened in silence, and off he went.” The dovish Shaposhnikov, sight unseen by Yeltsin, was made minister of defense, and Vadim Bakatin, whom Gorbachev had fired as interior minister the winter before, was made chairman of the KGB.93 On September 1 a Shaposhnikov order cleared by Yeltsin abolished the political directorate of the armed forces, long an implement of party control.
With Gorbachev, Yeltsin went for the jugular in public on Friday, August 23, in the Russian Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev had been requested to make a statement and answer questions from the benches, which he did for ninety minutes. With a national television audience watching, Yeltsin sashayed up to Gorbachev and stuck in his face a transcript by Nikolai Vorontsov showing that most Soviet cabinet members backstabbed Gorbachev at a cabinet meeting on August 19. “Gorbachev kept his dignity when he was alone at the podium. But when Yeltsin came over, the effect was almost as if he crumpled.”94 Yeltsin hectored Gorbachev into reading out quotations from the paper to the lawmakers. That done, Yeltsin asked members, “on a lighter note,” to watch him finalize Decree No. 79, suspending the organs of the Russian Communist Party. He scrawled his signature slowly for the delectation of the deputies. They applauded him and heckled the red-faced Gorbachev, who mumbled “Boris Nikolayevich” several times. As an Izvestiya reporter noted, in an eerie inversion of the taunting of October–November 1987, Yeltsin, had now selected Gorbachev for the part of “naughty schoolboy.”95