Nikolai Lamm
May 1st. 0920
Larissa quietly kissed Lammakin on the ear:
"Seryozhenka, roll off me. They can't go on pretending for ever that they're sleeping."
"Seyroga! How long are you going to go on tormenting us?!" grunted Isaev from under one of the other covers.
"Envy will get you nowhere, Vitalik."
"Well get up then! It's time to turn on the TV!"
Reluctantly, Lammakin dragged himself up from the nest of blankets on the floor. He shuffled over to the television set and turned it on. Red Square came into focus. It was already filling with a festive crowd.
May First 0940
These days, nobody is surprised anymore by the types of slogans that turn up at meetings. But today the mix was somehow even more confused. There were the inevitable cliches: 'The people and the army are one!' and 'Democracy and Socialism, the Truth of the People!'. But scattered amongst them were strident calls of a completely different nature: 'Down with Ryzhkov, Shevardnadze and the other scum!', 'All Power to Popov and Sobchak: Arm Now!' Had anyone searched the young men wildly waving these placards they would have found Uzi machine guns hidden under their coats and jackets.
May First 0945
An unmarked van pulled up at the Sapunov Lane entrance to GUM. Five young men in tracksuits got out carrying identical cases. They walked quickly down the empty corridors of the country's showpiece department store, tattered from six years of neglect under Perestroika, and went up to the third floor.
"Don't open the windows!" snapped a sixth man softly in the unmistakable voice of command. "The view from here is excellent." And it really was: the Kremlin, the whole of Red Square and directly opposite, Lenin's mausoleum.
"I'll repeat," continued the sixth man, "the main thing is relax and don't be hasty. Wait for the order!"
"Understood, comrade Major!"
"Understood? Fine, then shut up and get yourselves in position!"
The 'sportsmen' opened their cases. High-powered automatic rifles snuggled in their innards.
"Now listen up," hissed 'comrade Major' when they had assembled their weapons.
"Ryzhkov," he pointed at one of the 'sportsmen', "Rasputin," pointing at another,
"Yazov... Gubenko..."
"How can you remember all their names, comrade Major?" asked one of the five.
"It's my job," murmured the major, shrugging his shoulders.
May First 0948
Sensing something in the air, a two-way radio crackled into life.
"Attention! It's one here. Let us know when you're ready three!
"Four here! What about the group at GUM with Major Semakov?"
"Was the van despatched?"
"Eleven here, comrade one! Confirmed: the van was sent."
"Then that's it. No more questions I take it, comrades? Good, as our ancestors would have said, 'let God's will be done!'"
May First 1000
In Lammakin's flat on Pyatnitskaya Street, breakfast was steaming on the table. But no one made a move to eat. The stomachs of all four were curdling as they sat watching the television. The clock above Spasskii Gate on the corner of Red Square struck ten. The country's 'leaders' began filing out behind the parapet of Lenin's tomb.
"What the devil," Isaev whispered to himself. "The President's not there! Or am I going mad?!"
Nobody answered. His bodyguard, Gadisi, knotted his fingers into a fist. Lammakin threw a worried glance at Larissa: "Do you know what this means?"
She bit her lip: "But didn't I warn you?.."
May First 1002
Outside Moscow, an ambulance and a fire engine pulled up at the gate to Sergei Lammakin's dacha.
The 'doctors' jumped out brandishing automatics. The firemen were carrying flame-throwers.
"Fire!" rang out the order. Burning oil spat forth, washing over the walls, the roof, smashing through the windows. In a moment the house was ablaze. The flames began to hum, gathering force.
The 'doctors' stood by the windows, their automatics cocked. Two positioned themselves beside the door. But nobody came out.
May First 1006
"Aim!" ordered Major Semakov. The marksmen settled their eyes to the telescopic sights of their rifles.
"Fire!"
A staccato volley rang out. Chips flew from the granite above the inscription 'Lenin'. The men standing on the mausoleum began to topple, sinking behind the parapet.
Semakov stood motionless, watching through field binoculars.
"Hold your fire! Pack your guns!"
The marksmen moved swiftly to carry out his order.
"All ready?"
"Yes sir!"
"Get back to the van! Sergeant Petukhov, you're in command!"
Major Semakov watched them depart, keeping his eye on the staircase. When they were already on the first floor, he stepped back against the wall and pressed the button on a small black box he had pulled from his bag. Below there was a flash and the crack of an explosion. The five soldiers were killed instantly.
At the same time a charge hidden in the black box was triggered. A sixth victim, Major Semakov, joined the other five.
May First 1012
The President was sitting in a large leather armchair in front of a television set. He was in a small room with a low ceiling. Heavy wood panelling hid thick concrete walls that were bare and windowless. The floor was covered with a deep and soft carpet. Hidden lighting cast no shadows. The television screen showed only the words: "Interruption for technical reasons." The President was irritated. He was stabbing at the buttons on the control panel, but not a single programme was working.
Then he cast a furtive glance at the door - the glance was a strange departure from the public image of this President - and he pulled a portable two-way radio from his pocket.
"Attention! Attention! One here! One calling two! Anatolii Stepanich, is that you? You're on the square? Did everything go according to plan?" He said all this quietly. But his voice betrayed iron conviction and a sense of triumph. He put the receiver to his ear, shrugged his shoulders, then nodded: "Yes, of course, it's a pity! But what could we do? Perestroika is a revolution. And it will demand from us a lot more victims yet!"
The above excerpt is taken from the closing pages of one of a number of novels that appeared in the Soviet Union in the last couple of years before its collapse. All of these novels had a similar theme: a coup overthrowing the President and its consequences.
The plot of April is the End of Our Days is simple. A journalist gets hold of a cassette recording of a number of conversations which leave no doubt, if they are genuine, that a coup is being prepared by the military and the nomenclatura, the elite bureaucrats. The journalist tries to verify the authenticity of the conversations on the tape, but before he is able to do so, he is killed. However, Larissa, his lover, has a copy of the cassette recording and she gives it to her friend, Sergei Lammakin. Lammakin, also a journalist, decides to take all the information to an old acquaintance, Vitalii Isaev, who is now an aide to the President. Through contacts in the KGB the essence of the conspiracy is uncovered. All the members of the President's Advisory Council are to be assassinated during the May Day Parade. Then the killings are to be blamed on the democrats through guinea pigs planted in the crowds, thereby opening the way for the establishment of a dictatorship in the country.
Lammakin, Larissa, Isaev and a KGB operative, Gadisi Nurmukhamed, manage to warn the President of the conspiracy. They gather in Lammakin's apartment and begin celebrating their victory. But...
As we now know, the head of the conspiracy was the President himself and all their attempts to warn him were in vain. However, the actual putsch, or coup, only begins as the novel ends. We do not know whether the conspirators ultimately triumph, nor do we know the fates of the novel's heroes. As the co-author, ('April...' was written together with Sergei Ivanov), I maintain that these questions are not interesting. A coup is only a full stop, or depending on the situation, a comma. The essence of writing is not the punctuation but the process. And it was this, the process leading to a coup, and the peculiarly Russian aptitude for this kind of politics which interests us.
Here we are not talking about coups as such, but about conspiracy. The Russian mind, the Russian mentality, is used to and completely at home with the idea that it is precisely conspiracies that are the engine of history. There is a sense of amusement in reading Western political histories of Russia and political science text-books about the Soviet Union which dwell on the struggles for democratisation, the liberation of the serfs, the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Stalinism, and now Gorbachev and Perestroika. It would seem that Westerners, steeped in the democratic traditions and liberal thinking of post-enlightenment Europe and America, cannot see political history as anything other than social history. That is, a history of the government which is not somehow at the same time a history of the people is unthinkable. And if it is, it is labelled 'conspiracy thinking', denigrated and dismissed as altogether too primitive and unsophisticated for the actual social processes which bring about political change.
The difficulties facing Westerners in appreciating conspiracy thinking is, as far as I can tell, largely a result of the impact of Marxist and post-Marxist philosophies on political thinking in the West. Marx more or less said that politics is a function of the economy and that the economy ultimately determines all social life. The subsequent history of political philosophy in the West has been marked by a struggle for acceptance or rejection of this notion. And even where it has been rejected, the underlying assumption of the importance, if not priority, of the economy has remained unchallenged. Conservative and liberal thinkers in the West might not accept that the economy determines political life but they do accept that it is essential to political life.
In Russia, and ironically, in the Soviet Union, a country allegedly constructed according to a Marxist blueprint, this has never been the case. Both under the Tsars and in the Soviet years, the economy was always subjected to politics. Even when this has created enormous distortions in social life resulting in uprisings and revolutions under the Tsars, and the repression, imprisonment and death of millions during the Soviet years, the needs of the economy and the interests of the people have only ever been functions, equations in the ongoing power struggles of the ruling elites. Lenin, Stalin and now Gorbachev canonised Marxism as a manual for Soviet political practice, ignoring its central tenet, the priority of the economy. As a result, every form of thought over the seventy odd years of Bolshevik rule was completely distorted. In turn, this generated two completely separate spheres in a person's life: the public Soviet persona which was subjected to the whims of the politicians and the private sphere which never officially existed and could not be shared except with one's closest and most trusted friends. The private persona was one's only haven of sanity in an increasingly mad world. In the worst years of Stalin's repressions even friends could not be trusted.
This separation of the private and public realms in a classless society in which any worker or peasant could become Party General Secretary functioned in exactly the same way as social divisions did in Tsarist times to reinforce the separation of the Tsar from the people and his absolute dominion over them. In both cases, the only knowledge people had of politics was hearsay and rumour, in which fantasy played a more important role than reality. At the same time, the political sphere existed in a vacuum cut off from the people, making the initiation of any change impossible except from within the ruling circles themselves. As a result a culture of conspiracy as the only possible form of political thought and action evolved in Tsarist times which has continued right through to today.
This culture of conspiracy had its genesis in the almost forgotten struggles of the middle ages out of which the state of Muscovy originally took shape. But it only reached its perfected form in the mid to late sixteenth century when the great families, united in the Boyar Duma, and the Zemskii Sobor or Assembly of the Land, emerged as the arbiters of the Tsar's succession. The ensuing pattern of a balance of powers and struggle for influence between sovereign, the court, and the lesser nobility, the wealthy and influential land-owners, was to remain unchanged for more than four centuries until August, 1991. It represented a closed power system which by its tripartite nature almost inevitably resulted in a dispute whenever the question of succession arose.
***
It all began in January 1598. Fyodor Joannovich, the last of the males who could indisputably claim descent from the lineage of Ivan Kalita, founder of the house of Muscovy, died. There was no one to take the Russian throne. The Zemskii Sobor elected Boris Godunov Tsar.
At the time of his election, Godunov, a distinguished Boyar, had in effect ruled the country for the past fourteen years as prime minister since Fyodor Joannovich was something of a 'holy fool' who had renounced his worldly duties as Tsar and given himself up to penance and prayer. If a man who has already administered the country for 14 years is then elected to the throne, one assumes that the numerous parties who voted in his favour had already been prospering till then. In Godunov's case, this is borne out by Vasilii Klyuchevskii, one of Russia's most eminent historians, who wrote of the Tsar's reign that the "...rule of Fyodor was for the state a time of respite from pogroms and the tyranny of Ivan the Terrible. The Tsar was kind to his people and presented them a bounteous time which in turn allowed him to rule in peace and serenity, and the whole of Orthodox Christianity took comfort and lived in accord."
Now the man responsible for this accord, Godunov, himself became Tsar. And judging by the accounts which have survived, began his reign brilliantly. His first actions met with universal approval, if not reverence. The court knew him as "exceedingly wondrous and fine tongued and a man most solicitous of his realm."
However amongst all this evident and widespread satisfaction, someone persistently began to spread rumours that Boris had killed Tsarevich Dmitrii, the direct heir to the throne, and that in order to distract the people from his evil deed had put Moscow to the torch and even caused the death of his own sister, the Tsarina Alexandra. And these were only the beginning of the things they then began to ascribe to Godunov!
The explanation is simple. The Boyars who felt that Godunov was indebted to them for electing him to the throne had hoped that Godunov would then share power with them as an act of gratitude. But as it turned out, this was the last thing Godunov had on his mind. As a result of the dissatisfaction of the Boyars, a plot was hatched to replace Godunov with an impostor claiming to be Dmitrii who, had he lived, would have been the legitimate heir to the throne. Knowing full well that Boris Godunov whom they had elected was Tsar according to the law, and that the man calling himself Dmitrii was an impostor, the Boyars nevertheless branded Godunov a criminal and declared the impostor, on the contrary, the legally entitled successor.
The conspirators did not even have to kill or imprison Boris. In 1605 he died. They say of a broken heart at the thought that the people had been so easily swayed into believing that the real Tsarevich, Dmitrii, was alive. At the same time, the conspirators naturally put themselves forward as the saviours of the House of Kalita. And it was not a case of the mentality of the dark ages at work. Kievan Rus had adopted Christianity and Christian law in 988. The last shackles of the Mongol yoke which had been imposed in the early 13th century had been broken by 1480. By the beginning of the 16th Century, Muscovy was a sophisticated state. Foreign ambassadors thronged the courts, and the leaders could even be heard talking from time to time about the good of the people.
The whole subsequent history of Russian and Soviet politics can be seen as variations on the theme of the plot to overthrow Boris Godunov. Whatever the nuances, it was the case of a representative assembly of some sort, the Zemskii Sobor, or later the Soviet Supreme Soviet and Congress of People's Deputies, in conjunction with an electoral committee, in Tsarist times the Boyar Duma, or later, the state Duma, and in Soviet times, the Communist Party Central Committee, appointing then attempting to remove the supreme leader (if he or she was not fortunate enough to die a natural death). The outcome of the struggle for succession always depended on the balance of power within and between the assembly and electoral committee and the ability of the sovereign to impose his or her will over these institutions to ensure that their designated successor was elected.
The case of Peter the Great is instructive here. Peter is perhaps the best known of all the Russian Tsars. He was elected to the throne when he was only ten years old. However the balance of power was against his supporters, his mother's side of the family, and Peter was forced to share the throne with his step brother, Ivan, while his step sister Sophia ruled the country in their stead. After seven years of disputed rule, Sophia was ousted in a palace coup by Peter's mother Natalia and her lover, Boris Golitsyn, who then paved the way for Peter to become Tsar and Emperor of all Russia in his own right.
Usually Soviet historians treat the conflict between Sophia and Peter as the worn-out argument between the old and the new, between standing still and progress. Sophia is said to have been a defender of Russian "inward-looking and conservative values", while Peter with his conquest of the Baltic states opened a 'window on Europe'. On the other hand, Boris Kurakin, a contemporary and friend of Peter's and an opponent of the regent had this to say about Sophia's reign: "... the whole state arrived during her reign at a flowering of great wealth. Commerce and every kind of trade also flourished. Popular satisfaction triumphed." At the same time another contemporary remarked that the reign of Peter's mother Natalia was characterised by "arbitrary rule, bribery on a massive scale and the wholesale theft of state property." One can also find in the historical archives surprising plans and projects with the aid of which Sophia wanted to transform Russian life. Peter's reforms were humble by comparison. But it is he who has gone down in our history as the great reformer. On closer inspection this was not an argument about paths of development for Russia, but a common power struggle in which Peter triumphed.
In these power struggles the role of the army is crucial. Or, more precisely, the role of the officers since what is important is winning the support not so much of the soldiers as of the officer corps who ultimately either appear amongst the ranks of the conspirators themselves or are bought off by the latter in one way or another. Throughout Russian and Soviet history there has not been a single example of a successful coup without the support of the officer corps. This was the case in Tsarist times and it was the case when Dmitrii Yazov, the Soviet Defence Minister, attempted to rally the General Staff behind the State Emergency Committee which had overthrown Gorbachev.
When Peter the Great died, the struggle for the throne was narrowed down to two candidates, Peter II, the dead Emperor's young grandson, and Catherine I, his aging widow who had long withdrawn from active court life. Each of the aspirants had their own band of supporters. And each side was conspiring against the other. But while the representatives of the old aristocracy, the Golitsyns, Dolgorukiis and Sheremetevos were pushing for Peter's nomination at meetings of the 'Secret Council', a sort of Tsarist Politburo, Prince Alexander Menshikov, a representative of the younger aristocracy and former favourite of Peter's, led out on to the streets of Saint Petersburg the guards' corps who promptly swore an oath of loyalty to the widow of their former Emperor. In later struggles for succession, if anything the army became even more active.
At the same time, spying developed to the point where it had soon become the most prestigious and lucrative state service. This remained the case even after the Tsarist secret police was reorganised into the Cheka by Felix Dzerzhinskii following the 1917 Revolution and it goes a long way towards explaining the presence of Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, in the State Emergency Committee and the relief with which his subordinates on Lubyanka Square greeted the announcement by their new boss, Yegenii Primakov, following the collapse of the coup in August 1991, that spying would remain an essential component of the new Russian state.
Conspiracies are simple affairs. Someone is in power. Someone else desires that power. Naturally, nobody goes around telling everybody of their desire to take power. Here, other reasons are forwarded and most often, which isn't surprising, it is the interests of the fatherland and the nation which are said to be at stake. Next, supporters are sought (read bought), and leverage (the army, the guards, etc., etc.). Then, if the conspirators meet with success and their plans are not exposed before they mature, power passes into new hands.
At times, historians try in one way or another to whitewash the intentions of the conspirators, ascribing to them the most noble and humane of intentions. For example, the argument between Sophia and Peter which, contrary to historians' opinions, can hardly be considered a struggle between the old and the new. The same thing can be said about the overthrow of Paul I by his son Alexander I. For a long time historians maintained that the father was something of an obscurantist and was dragging the country backwards. More recent accounts have tended to reverse this. Paul is seen as a great progressive. As Napoleon's friend, he was unhappy about the condition of the estates, and was trying to establish fairer class relations. On the other hand, his son scattered all of Napoleon's achievements to the winds, built military settlements across the country and, in general, considered anything advanced oppressive.
The same thing can more or less be said about the 'national idea' or 'interest' as an alleged motivation of conspirators. What sort of national idea can be at stake when the genuinely Russian Boris Godunov is simply replaced by a Polish emigre? Or take another case: the Golitsyns and Dolgorukiis, Russians, elect as Tsarina, Anna Joanovna, another Russian, who then fills the court with Germans and sends the very Russians who elected her into exile or stretches them on the rack. So much for national interests! At the same time, all of them, Russians and Germans, continued to fleece and pillage the people.
Which is not to say that the people have not rebelled at times and in one way or another hoped for a better fate. But Russian rebellions, which Pushkin called "senseless and bloody", hardly ever troubled the holders of power. They were indeed senseless and were easily quelled both when they flared up in a single village, or when, as in the case of the uprisings of Stenka Razin and Emelion Pugachev, spread across the country. And they were also bloody. But the blood that flowed was inevitably that of the peasants who had the courage to rise up. It has never been the people, who always moved in the open and defencelessly, that the Russian Tsars, Tsarinas, Emperors and Empresses have feared. Rather they feared those who lived beside them and quietly prepared to stab them in the back.
***
The end of the epoch of the coup d'etat in Russian political history and the beginning of the democratisation of Russian politics began, in the mistaken opinion of many historians, with the Decembrist Uprising in 1825. Two-hundred and twenty-seven years had gone by since the election of Boris Godunov as Tsar. In that time there were twenty changes of leadership including eight coups, eight cases of the Tsar's death plunging the court into what was often a bloody power struggle and only four cases of the Tsar's designated successor being elevated to the throne without the accompaniment of some sort of intrigue. Yet even the Decembrists' attempt to remove Tsar Alexander I is the exception that proves the rule. The officer corps and aristocracy decided to remove the emperor, speaking at the time about their lofty motives: freedom, equality, the interests of the state, etc. In fact, it had all the trappings of a conspiracy except that in this case, the Decembrists decided to act openly. The most interesting thing is that they could have quite easily achieved their goal had they strangled His Highness in his sleep. However, these were noble people, and for this reason they came out onto the square in front of the Winter Palace and demanded the Tsar's abdication. They did not shoot anybody and did not appeal to the crowd gathered on the square with whose aid they could easily have drowned in blood all the people resident in the Winter Palace. Naturally, the Decembrists were crushed. Five ringleaders were hung and hundreds of their supporters imprisoned or exiled to Siberia.
Which only goes to show that a noble goal can be achieved by foul means. Catherine II murdered her own husband Peter III, the Germanised grandson of Peter the Great, in order to take the throne, but in so doing she prevented large parts of Russia from becoming German domains. Or infamous ends can be achieved starting out with the purest and most noble of intentions. When Prince Golitsyn put Anna Joanovna on the Russian throne, it was with the intention of limiting the powers of the monarch. In its cruelty, Anna Joanovna's ten year reign was only paralleled by Stalin's. But there is absolutely no way of getting involved in a conspiracy with noble ends and to this end using noble means. Altogether too much nobleness for the narrow limits of a conspiracy. Conspiracies have their own set of rules and they are not rules that have been taken from books on etiquette and good behaviour.
There is no need here to go into any of those minor and unsuccessful conspiracies which from time to time occurred in the 19th century after 1825. For us Russians, the 19th century was important in that it witnessed an unprecedented flowering in the arts, especially in literature - Pushkin, Goncharov, Gogol, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and Chekhov. But it was an era of unrelieved pessimism in the political sphere. Though reading most commentators, this is not the impression with which one is left. On the contrary the 19th Century is seen as one of a burgeoning democratisation of political life, the birth of civil society, a century of struggling allegiances between populists and conservatives, Slavophiles and Westerners, in which all manner of social and political change occurred up to and including the liberation of the serfs in 1861. Again this results from the problem that Westerners in particular have in conceiving of a political history without a social history. Somehow, the whole of a social fabric, politics, commerce, industry and the arts has to be stitched into a single seamless garment. Western historians tend to write wonderfully complex and brilliantly thought through histories of how art and politics, commerce and industry, all influenced one another as Russia evolved. They miss the point that it was precisely because the ruling elites did not in the least feel threatened by whatever other changes were going on around them that a flowering in the arts or a burgeoning struggle for political expression amongst the middle classes was made possible. The criticisms of the political system being levelled at the Tsar never reached their target. The Tsar and the court may have been aware of them, but more as an amusement than as anything to be taken seriously. Concessions might be granted here and there, but the old order, Tsarism itself, was untouchable. For the most part the ruling elites remained oblivious to the ferment in the social sphere which by the end of the century, for the first time, threatened to break through and rip apart the closed alliance of competing familial allegiances which had dominated the political sphere since the rise of the house of Muscovy.
***
Until August 1991, the 20th century had been known as the century of three revolutions. The first of them, an aborted attempt to curtail the powers of the Tsar, took place in 1905. The government was caught between the looming threat of defeat in the East in the war against the Japanese, dissatisfaction in the armed forces and widespread social unrest. Faced with the choice of supporting the Tsar or giving in to the popular mood, the government unhesitatingly turned on the Tsar's opponents and crushed them. There was nothing in the behaviour of the Tsar and government to suggest that the style of court politics had changed in the least. Until 1917, the events of 1905 had officially been called an uprising. It is only called a revolution here following a tradition in Soviet historiography.
So respectable an event as the bourgeois-democratic February revolution of 1917 was also no more than an uprising combined with a conspiracy. On the one hand, grain deliveries to Petrograd had come to a halt (probably as a provocation), and as a result starving queues built up which rapidly turned into tumultuous demonstrations. But those in power remained convinced that they could deal with these demonstrations simply by cocking their guns. However, both the Governor General and most other notable members of the State Duma were already involved in a conspiracy against Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs, and seizing their chance, forced the emperor to abdicate and then pacified the crowds by bringing grain (i.e. bread) back into the city. Power changed its facade. The people of Russia were no longer subjects but citizens. But their lives did not change at all: World War One continued, land was not redistributed and no sign of an improvement in the economy was to be seen on the horizon.
The conspiracy of the Bolsheviks was even more of a black and white case. One of the ruling parties seized and arrested the government, announcing that henceforth it was the sole and indisputable authority in the country. Even Lenin called the October 1917 'Revolution' a coup at the outset. And it was only after his death that other Bolsheviks with quite other interests at stake began re-writing the history books. The clamour of the Bolsheviks about improving the lives of the people only affirms the conclusion that in every such case these cries masked a personal power struggle. The real 'improvement' in the lives of the people brought about by the rule of the Bolsheviks over the last seventy odd years in our country ought to be evident and there is no need to depress ourselves by investigating it here.
Nor did the Bolsheviks introduce anything new into the theory or practice of conspiracies. As soon as Lenin's health deteriorated, Stalin isolated him in a dacha outside Moscow out of harm's way under the vigilant eye of the Chekists, Dzerzhinskii's spies. Little by little he tugged Vladimir Ilyich's mantle of power onto himself. Then, having dealt with Lenin, and declaring himself his true disciple and follower, that is to say, the true 'heir' to Lenin's throne, Stalin clung to power for 29 years, all the time afraid of conspiracies and for this reason regularly culling the ranks of his closest associates. But in order not to be seen by the people as a senseless killer, he accused his friends and associates of yesterday of conspiring against the people, while the people for their part, long used to the recurring possibility of conspiracies amongst the highest leadership did their best not to get involved in any way and went quietly about their business. The people cared only about bread and sausage. These Lenins, Stalins, Trotskys, Rykovs... meant nothing to them.
But then Stalin died, and as the case has always been in Russia with the death of a Tsar and the absence of a designated successor, discord was triggered amongst the Boyars of the inner circle, in this case, amongst the members of the Politburo of the Communist Party Central Committee. Khrushchev's conspiracy gained the upper hand and his almost but not quite omnipotent opponent, the chief Chekist in the country, Lavrentii Beria, had his life cut short by a hasty trial and a bullet in the back of his head. One beneficiary and favourite of the tyrannical Tsar had won victory over the other. And only because he had managed to acquire as an ally, Marshal Georgii Zhukov, which meant the army.
However, Khrushchev then became frightened by the strong-minded independence of the Marshal and pensioned off his former comrade, and along with him almost half a million of the officer corps. For which he in turn then paid the price. In their own conspiracy, Brezhnev, Suslov and his other opponents in the Politburo and Central Committee correctly counted on the support of the army whose pride had been severely stung. Khrushchev was toppled from power.
Brezhnev had learned his lesson and for the duration of his eighteen year reign never once offended the army, or the secret police, the KGB. For this reason he kept the throne until he died. After Brezhnev the 'Bolshevik Tsars' began to die off like flies resulting in a virtual plethora of conspiracies. We all watched these Kremlin power struggles bemused, if not a little uncomfortably. First Andropov crawled out into the light of day, then Chernenko, then Gorbachev.
In all this, each in the line of Bolshevik sovereigns, like each of the family of Kalita and Romanov, promised the people the earth when they were elevated to the throne. Godunov and Khrushchev promised to feed them; Peter I and Gorbachev promised to open a window on Europe; Sophia distributed vodka to the crowds gathered in Moscow while Brezhnev distributed two kilograms of flour.
And if something did change for the better in the lives of the people with the appearance of a new leader, then it was never the result of his or her personal progressiveness, but rather from force of circumstance and the confluence of interests which he or she had to defend in order to preserve their hold on power. Our last ruler, Gorbachev, is no exception here. It was not because he began his policy of 'perestroika' and 'glasnost' that he felt himself to be a great democrat, but because in his struggle to retain power he relied on second-level people in the Party apparatus who for their part had become sick and tired of their superiors, old, gray, and after Brezhnev's death, caught with their hands in the till. All this 'perestroika' and 'glasnost' was intended to elevate these second-level people to the leading ranks. It is another matter that Gorbachev inadvertently unleashed forces which he would never have been able to pacify even had he tried. The unintended consequences of Gorbachev's reign finally accomplished what every other Tsar had managed to avoid no matter by what means and how bitterly and ruthlessly they fought for their personal power. Gorbachev broke a cardinal rule of the power system. In his ruthless quest for personal survival he breached the seal between the political and public spheres. The ancient mechanism by which the aristocratic families and elites of the land met to approve the Tsar's accession or resolve a contested succession was smashed when Gorbachev suspended the last Boyar Duma, the Communist Party Central Committee, and dissolved the Assembly of the Land, the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies. Whatever ingratitude the people might feel about this (and I mean here our 'muzhiks', the ordinary people of the street) is nothing compared to the eternal hatred with which Gorbachev shall be regarded by the last generation of Boyars, the Party apparatchiks whose hold on power seems to have finally been broken and who, as a species, are now threatened with extinction.
***
Tsar Ivan III said: "All the Russian lands from times of yore and our ancestors are our fatherland". By this he simply meant that all the Russian lands were his domain and that he was master over them. And perhaps, from his time, if not from even earlier times, the seed took root in Russian minds that our lands, meaning we too, have a master and that this master has the right to punish us and honour us as he sees fit, and that it doesn't pay to go sticking one's nose in his business. The Russian aphorism, 'the master is lord' is apt here. Whatever the master wants, he will get.
In a normal civilised state, the laws are subject to the interests of the country, the interests of the state. However, if one looks back at all of Russia's laws, beginning with the acceptance of Orthodox Christianity, through the communist era, right up to and including today, one sees that our laws have never entertained any pretensions to an interest in the welfare of the country or the good of the state. Rather, Russian law has always borne a more humble character, establishing the order of activity of the subjected. In a democratic country a leader, even if he or she comes to power by the most dubious of methods, all the same remains a servant of the people and fears the people. In the case of Russia, we, the people, fear our sovereign. Today he or she can command us to do one thing, and tomorrow, something completely different. Tsarist fiat has merely been replaced by presidential decree.
And so long as we continue to consider that we are servants, and that we ought to have a master, so long as we continue to live with the sense that we are here for the benefit of the state, and not the state for our benefit, that is, for the benefit of the people, then there will never and can never be any democracy in this country. To win one's freedom is only the beginning. Freedom has to be felt, it has to be imbibed in mother's milk. Moses was not being stupid when he led the Jews into the wilderness, weaning them of their thirst for slavery. We still have our forty years in this desert ahead of us. Two, perhaps three generations...
But the beginning of our path has been laid. With the help of Mikhail Sergeievich Gorbachev, to give him his due, who in turn seems to have become the victim of the latest Russian conspiracy. 'Seems', because in my view it is not altogether the case.
On the surface of it, events took the following form. In the course of carrying out his reforms, Gorbachev found himself caught between those who had put him in power and those for whom he had allegedly undertaken the whole of his 'gorbystroika'. That is, he found himself between the rejuvenated party apparatus and the democratic camp which appeared somewhat unexpectedly, and one senses contrary to the desires of the General Secretary himself. And when the rejuvenated apparatus decided that power might altogether slip out of his hands, a conspiracy was set in motion with the aim of removing Gorbachev. This conspiracy took the form of the August coup. And there is no doubt as to its authentic nature at least insofar as the Gorbachevs themselves saw it. Right from the outset, Mikhail Sergeievich knew exactly what he was dealing with. Interviewed by Trud newspaper following the collapse of the coup, Raisa Maximovna said that when the deputation from the State Emergency Committee arrived in Foros to see Gorbachev on the afternoon of Sunday the 18th, before going out to meet them, Gorbachev called the royal family together: "Something difficult, perhaps terrible has happened. Medvedev [former head of the President's bodyguard] has informed me that a group of people have arrived from Moscow. They are already on the dacha grounds and demanding a meeting. But I didn't invite any of them. Let me check the telephones... They're all disconnected. Even the red one. We're being cut off. Or even arrested. It's a conspiracy."
Only in this case, the conspiracy was thwarted. Thanks to the unexpected defiance of a tiny but significant sector of society and to the personal heroism of Boris Yeltsin.
At first glance everything indeed seems to fit this picture. But this is only at first glance. Too much that is strange happened. Had the conspirators acted a little more sagely, taken a leaf out of our book April is the End of Our Days, then there is little doubt that today our bards would not be singing about the victory of democracy. But it can hardly serve as an excuse that the coup leaders simply neglected to do their reading. Whatever two novelists might have cooked up can hardly have been beyond the intellectual abilities of the heads of the KGB, Police, Government and Defence Ministry. On the other hand, it was not likely that they were cowered by the possible course of international reaction to their conspiracy. In recent years the West has repeatedly shown that its bark is far worse than its bite. Should Gorbachev be removed, the West would get very, very indignant, do nothing and then quietly forget it ever raised its voice.
More specifically, it is not clear how Gorbachev was even held at his holiday house if no new armed units were introduced into the area, while those that had been there from the beginning, in the words of their commanders, remained loyal to their commander-in-chief. Interviewed on 'Vzglyad'', Major Vladimir Degmyarev, the deputy political officer of the border guards in the area, stated categorically that: "There was no isolation of the President by the army, and in particular by the border guards". On the other hand, the coast guard were told that Gorbachev was sick and incapacitated. However, they saw him walking the grounds of the dacha and standing on the balcony taking in the fresh air and speaking with members of his family. Yet not one of them attempted to radio this news to Yeltsin's people in Moscow. Then there is the strange failure of the KGB to arrest Yelstin, when they shadowed him all the way back to Moscow from his dacha at Arkhangelskoye, about 30km to the west of the city. Why were the telephones in the White House never disconnected? And why, finally, when the coup was collapsing, did the conspirators rush to throw themselves not at the mercy of Boris Yeltsin who apparently had defeated them, but at the mercy of Gorbachev, whom they had allegedly overthrown precisely because he was becoming an ineffectual and irrelevant political figure?
On the surface of it, the entire three days of the coup appear to be an open and shut case of a conspiracy being plotted by a group of not very bright people. But even if it would be difficult to claim that Kryuchkov, Pugo, Yazov and Yanaev were towering intellects, to call them idiots would be altogether too simplistic. They had the whole history of the Russian conspiracy as their model and all the means necessary for bringing it to life. They were close to Gorbachev, most of them from his inner political circle. They had the support of the army, or at least of much of the general staff. And they had the backing of important sections of the secret police, not to mention specialised divisions of the regular police. They could even count on the support of the people with their promises to put bread and sausage in the shops. But then suddenly this terrible vacillation set in. Maybe it just wasn't their day?
The clear beneficiaries of this allegedly bungled coup were Yeltsin and the democrats. All of them old apparatchiks to the core. Alarm bells start going off in my head.
After the fall of the house of Kalita, Tsar Boris ascended the Russian throne. He was the first, and unfortunately, the last Tsar to be chosen in a genuinely popular election. Or at least in what then passed for a genuinely popular election. The reign of Tsar Boris ended in mayhem and a terrible era of impostors.
With the fall of the house of the General Secretaries of the Communist Party Central Committee, another Boris has been elected, this time as Russian President. He too was chosen in a genuinely popular election.
God grant that the similarity between the two of them ends here.