When Eduard Shevardnadze unexpectedly resigned as Soviet Foreign Minister in the winter of 1991, most observers concurred that his departure had been engineered either directly or indirectly by two Soviet officers, Viktor Alksnis and Nikolai Petrushenko, known as 'the Black Colonels'. Both of them were members of Soyuz (Union), a loose coalition of right-wing forces in the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies which had attacked the policies of the former Foreign Minister at each sitting of the Congress in its brief twenty-seven-month existence.
Colonel Alksnis is a Senior Engineer-Inspector in the Soviet Air Force. He is stationed in the Baltics Military District and lives and serves in Riga. A Latvian by nationality, he is a well known advocate of centralism and preservation of the Soviet Union.
I spoke with Viktor Alksnis on Friday September the 6th, two days after the Congress of People's Deputies had voted to suspend its own activities in the wake of the coup. As the highest representative body in the country, this move by the Congress effectively sounded the death knell for the old Soviet Union. Though this in itself did not in effect happen until December with Gorbachev's resignation as President. Even so, the Congress of People's Deputies never formally disbanded itself and on March 17, 1992, exactly a year after a nation-wide referendum in which a majority had declared their support for some type of union, Alksnis figured prominently in a pathetic attempt to kick start the old Soviet Congress of People's Deputies back into action. Held in the dilapidated hall of the 'Voronovo' State Farm on the outskirts of Moscow, the 6th 'Extraordinary' Congress of People's Deputies was an abject failure. Only 250 delegates turned up. There was no electricity in the hall and the Congress lasted all of an hour and a half. When Sazhi Umalatova made her speech opening the Congress, it was Viktor Alksnis who stood beside her, valiantly holding a candle to provide her with light.
Interviewed before the replacement of the old centrally dominated Soviet Union by a commonwealth of sovereign republics, Viktor Alksnis provides a rare glimpse of other paths which the course of events might have taken. Despite the failure of the 6th Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, his views still find wide support today.
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JJ: How would you describe yourself?
VA: I am a people's deputy, a member of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR.
JJ: What is your relationship to Soyuz?
VA: I am one of its leaders, one of its five co-chairmen. We don't have a rigid organisational structure.
JJ: How many members does Soyuz have altogether?
VA: There were about seven hundred. But now, I don't know. Today, I doubt that the majority of them would dare acknowledge that they were members of Soyuz.
JJ: You would agree that the Soyuz programme is rather similar to what the State Emergency Committee stood for. Yet on August the 19th, when Yanaev's announcement was broadcast and tanks and soldiers appeared on the streets, Soyuz was not amongst them. Why not?
VA: I don't know. I honestly don't know. The whole thing was a surprise to me too. On the morning of the 19th, I was in Riga. At 7 o'clock in the morning when I was still asleep, I received a telephone call. An acquaintance had rung. "They've removed Gorbachev! Turn on the TV, they're reporting the important events!", he shouted. I was stunned. At the same time I felt invigorated. I was pleased. I was thinking, well, it's about time! Finally an attempt to save the country is being made.
But when I saw who had seized power... And you have to understand, I knew practically all of them, I knew what sort of people they were. To be blunt, they were weak, very weak. And this was one of the reasons why the coup failed. One of the reasons why the people didn't come out in support of them. They did not have a prominent leader, someone who could, for example, go on television without ceremony and make a fiery speech so that the people would at least react. But by the same token, you cannot say that the people opposed the Emergency Committee. Remember that Yeltsin, who apparently won the presidential elections, the idol of the people, called for a general strike. But in Moscow, not a single enterprise went on strike. In Leningrad not a single enterprise went on strike. In Russia, if I am not mistaken, only eight mines went on strike. And that's all.
So we have a strange situation: Yeltsin, the popularly elected President of Russia, an undeniably popular man, calls on the people to support him and go out on strike. But the people don't go out. Though it is true, they also did not support the appeals of the Emergency Committee. It was only in Leningrad, Moscow, and several other cities that people opposed the coup. But there were forces in these cities capable of getting their supporters out on the streets. For the most part though, the country did nothing, the people remained silent. They stayed silent as in Pushkin's 'Boris Godunov'. Everyone was sitting and waiting to see what would happen, to see how it would all end.
JJ: What did Soyuz do during those days? Did it meet? Did it discuss problems which had arisen with relation to the coup?
VA: No, it did not meet. As for me personally, already on the evening of the 19th I flew to Moscow from Riga. But at first I did not meet with anybody. And only on the evening of the 20th did I ring Defence Minister Yazov's office with a request that he see me and explain what was going on. But I did not receive an answer.
JJ: Why not? Why do you think that they did not invite you, of all people, to join them?
VA: I don't know. But even now I can say that had they invited me, I would have joined them. Although, of course, I understand that as a deputy I should condemn these anti-constitutional actions, any attempts to seize power. But as a person, as a citizen, I repeat: had they invited me, I would have joined them.
JJ: And you think that by doing this you would have been expressing the mass feeling of the people?
VA: Yes, that is correct.
JJ: But these crowds at the White House, in Leningrad... Views like this would hardly have found support there!
VA: Remember that at most about one hundred thousand people came to the White House. The other nine or so million Muscovites went about their daily business of shopping, standing in queues, drinking vodka and watching how it would all turn out. And in Moscow these one hundred thousand people are a force the democrats can always rely on, one hundred thousand politically active citizens. Their number never changes, it is always one hundred thousand. They get one hundred thousand at one meeting, one hundred thousand at the next. They're always the same people, and the democrats here in Moscow know they can count on them.
JJ: But neither was there unanimity amongst the military units here in the capital.
VA: The split only began afterwards. I can imagine how difficult it was for the soldiers. Think about it, standing all day in a cordon isn't an easy thing in itself. But then when you're subjected to the ceaseless mind-numbing protestations of these one hundred thousand people as well, it would be unbearable. I can imagine myself in their place. People say that I have conviction and that I am an experienced political campaigner, but even I don't know how I would have held up under such an onslaught. How much less likely is it that young soldiers would be able to bear it?!
Of course they were helpless. But then, in principle, nothing was demanded of them anyway. You don't really think that they were going to order these lads, kids, to shoot at the people. No way! If there was going to be any shooting, it would have been done by professionals. But the soldiers were needed as a show of force, to keep the people off Manezh Square and away from the Kremlin. In general though, they would have been better off with fewer paratroopers, tanks, armoured personnel carriers and soldiers. The people they're now calling conspirators should have acted completely differently, using the KGB's and the army's special forces to the limit. But to throw the whole army into the fray was a serious mistake.
JJ: You say that you were enthusiastic about the coup when you first heard about it. Which means that in your opinion it was necessary. But why? And why in August?
VA: It was necessary to prevent the signing of the Union Treaty. And to the merit of the putschists, they succeeded in this. They saved the USSR. Even if they only saved it for a week, two weeks. But the frustration of the signing of the Union Treaty was a positive moment of the coup.
Had they not lost though, had they managed to stay in control of the situation, then they really would have saved the country, saved it from disintegration. Then, obviously, they would have relinquished their places on the stage. Other leaders would have come to the fore. But I repeat, the Union would have been whole!
JJ: That's exactly right. But what does "the Union" mean these days? Do you mean 'Union' in the old sense of the word, or in a changed sense?
VA: You have to understand, I am convinced that were we to take and realise in practice all the principles written into the old Stalinist Constitution of the USSR, we would end up with a normal federative state. After all, there aren't any surprises there. The same ideas are there as you find in the American Constitution and the constitutions of other democratic federative states. But in our case, these principles only ever existed on paper. In reality, they were never implemented. But let's at least proceed from a unified state to a normal law governed federative state. Let's strictly observe what is written in the Constitution. And if something in it is not suitable, then let's change it. But again, according to the law. And not liquidate in the one go both the Constitution and the country.
JJ: What role then would you have for the Party in the preservation of the USSR?
VA: Without the Party today it is going to be very difficult since the Party was essentially the structure which united all the republics and all the peoples. Communist ideology for its part was a framework supporting everything and everybody. As a result of the banning of the Party, we have the problem to end all problems. What do we now replace the Communist Party with and what can serve to unite us again? It won't be an easy problem to solve. Which means, that neither will it be at all easy to preserve the Union. In the absence of an all-embracing political party, we now have 'Rukh' in the Ukraine, 'Sayudis' in Lithuania, 'Democratic Rossia' in Russia, 'Berlik' in Uzbekistan. These are all regional movements, and bit by bit they are pulling the country to pieces. For this reason we need the Party or union-wide parties which by the nature of their structures and intra-party links would bind the state together. Unfortunately the appearance on the political arena of a force of this nature is highly unlikely in the near future.
My feeling is that Gorbachev made a serious mistake when he did not begin his political reforms with the Communist Party itself. Had he himself presided over its separation into two parties, for example into a Bolshevik and a Socialist Party, and had he put, shall we say, Comrade Ligachev [10] at the head of the former and Comrade Yakovlev [11] at the head of the latter, and had he divided the Party's property between them, then perhaps something positive would have come of it even now. In any case there would not have been this total disintegration of all the structures.
JJ: Fine. But let's go back to the three days of August. Why in the end did the coup fail? Where did the putschists go wrong?
VA: Last year when foreign journalists were speculating on the chances of a military coup, I said it was impossible for two reasons. First the country and the army are too big. In places like Portugal, the Captains could gather, as they did in 1974, in the one cafe and discuss the revolution they had there in April that year. In our case, even the Kremlin Palace of Stars would not be big enough to hold all our Generals, let alone the lower ranks. The second problem is that we don't have a Marshal Zhukov [12] we have Defence Minister Marshal Yazov.
On the morning of the 19th when I heard that a state of emergency had been declared in certain parts of the country, I realised straight away that this meant Latvia too, since the Baltics were part of the six regions where the state of emergency went into effect. But if my telephone at home was still working, then, excuse me, but what sort of state of emergency was it? Utter disorganisation!
I suppose they felt that the main thing was to remove Gorbachev. And then everything would fall into place of itself. But they lingered, their hopes were dashed, and they only have themselves to blame. Think about it, on the 19th the majority of the republics were in a very awkward position. In principle, had they won here, in Moscow, the others would simply have flung in the towel and even relinquished their sovereignty. In effect only Yeltsin, Moldova's Snegur and President Landsbergis of Lithuania categorically opposed the Emergency Committee. While Mr Gamsakhurdia from Georgia all but formally recognised it. He paid his first ever visit, since his election as president, to the commander of the Trans-Caucasian Military District, General Petrikeev, to convince the latter of his loyalty to the State Emergency Committee. But later, as soon as the coup collapsed, he went the other way and ordered that the Georgian national guard be armed, which is something he would never have done before this. You can understand why. He sees what is happening in Georgia: disorder, tension, demands for his resignation. In other words, the worst fears of the Emergency Committee are beginning to come true.
On the other hand, they made a serious mistake with Yeltsin. I was stunned to find out that on the morning of the 19th, Yeltsin and his people were in Arkhangelskoye. The Emergency Committee had him shadowed all the way into Moscow but did not arrest him. Clearly if they were going to make one anti-constitutional move, that is, holding the President, they should have made a second and arrested Yeltsin. 'A' here logically leads to 'B'. Obviously the whole thing was a crude violation of the Constitution, but once you've decided on a coup you ought to go about it intelligently.
JJ: So you think it was a question of not enough thought? Incompetence on the part of the conspirators?
VA: No! No, this was not the reason for failure. If only because Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, was there. He has spent his whole working life in foreign espionage and undoubtedly has lent his hand to the organisation of coups in many countries. And you could hardly say that the others were stupid anyway. Moreover, they had the KGB on their side. And the KGB is a professional organisation.
Thus at the outset things were planned efficiently, but when it came to carrying them out... Here collective irresponsibility, a fear of making a decision, began to play a role. This, for what it's worth, is why the coup failed: everything was ready, but the leaders feared responsibility for what would happen and were afraid to follow through with what they had planned. Moreover, as I pointed out above, there wasn't a leader amongst them. They needed a person who would say: "Finish it!" And had Yanaev, for example, been such a person, then everything would have worked out. But look at the power the opposition had. Yeltsin. I'm convinced that were Boris Nikolaevich in Yanaev's place, he would not have stood on ceremony with this lot down at the White House. He would have resolved the whole issue efficiently and confidently. In principle his behaviour during the coup shows that he is a solid person and a person who is capable of accepting responsibility. In general, Yeltsin acted very competently. But his influence is limited to Russia. Yeltsin has no authority in Ukraine, or in Kazakhstan, or in Central Asia. Therefore, if he is capable of becoming a leader, then it is only within the confines of Russia. But we don't have a leader of his standing who could take charge of the whole country.
JJ: Let's move away from leaders for a moment. Don't you feel that since the collapse of the coup people have become happier, that the mood of the people has improved?
VA: I have the opposite impression. The people are worried about tomorrow. You think that the mood of the people has improved because you are watching this popular exultation in the wake of the victory of the opposition: fireworks, concerts, etc. But I think that once our people take a serious look at what happened in August, then their joys and hopes will evaporate. General Jaruzelski in Poland was right when he commented after the coup that the Soviet people would still have reason to mourn its failure.
I more or less believe that we are returning to a totalitarian society. Think about this last session of the Congress of People's Deputies which in the end legislated the disintegration of the Union. The fate of the country was being decided and being voted on without any discussion whatsoever. The usual thing, cowed and obedient Deputies, no dissent, complete unanimity. Any attempt to express some sort of opposition view from the floor was quickly cut off by Gorbachev in the chair. Well, it may have been easy to keep the opposition away from the microphones, but it won't be so easy to keep the people off the streets. I don't rule out that soon all hell is going to break loose.
At the Congress many of my colleagues, unfortunately, were frightened into silence. And there's nothing more unpleasant, nothing worse than a frightened deputy, the people's representative. I can understand fear from a simple man on the street. He has the right to be afraid. But hundreds of thousands of people are relying on each of us deputies. And we don't have the right to succumb to emotions, we cannot be afraid. Whatever the situation, we have to remain representatives of the people who elected us and defend their interests.
JJ: You talk about the approach of totalitarianism, but surely you yourself have often been called an advocate of a totalitarian system. You should be pleased.
VA: No, I am for democracy, but for democracy rooted in the law. Let's go back to the theme of the Constitution. There is a Soviet Constitution. So we don't like it. Then let's change it, make it better, even replace it if necessary. But always on the basis of law. But what do we have? Imagine, here I am, the leader of a republic and I personally don't like the Constitution of the USSR so I throw it out and replace it. That sort of thing isn't done. Should not be done. If I don't like it, I come to Moscow and I say: "Sir!", "Comrade!", whatever, "Let's sit down together and sort this out." You try to convince everyone that such and such an article in the Constitution is bad and then propose something to replace it. We, the other leaders, will discuss it and, if we consider it reasonable, include it. It is unacceptable that everyone, whoever wants to, can replace the Constitution. It's a sacred thing.
Look, Yeltsin has always trampled on the Soviet Constitution. But when the critical moment on August the 19th arrived, it wasn't the crowds of Muscovites that saved him, but our Stalin-Brezhnev Constitution. He spoke as the guarantor of its observance. All the time he kept pointing out that the State Emergency Committee was in violation of the Soviet Constitution. This was the reason why the people trusted him. First he used the Constitution as toilet paper, but when the test came, he immediately began speaking of its violation. And now the Democrats are again howling: "That's it, the Constitution has outlived itself, let's replace it." How can they behave like this?! They pull it out when they need it, but when they don't need it any more they toss it in the trash!
And if we're talking here about democracy, let me say that we are not heading towards it all that convincingly. I was arguing that we should be moving towards democracy through the market. And not how Gorbachev would have it: through democracy to the market. First we have to create the economic prerequisites for democracy: a mixed economy, various forms of ownership. And while we're doing this, at the start certain political restrictions have to be imposed.
JJ: And this would not be anti-constitutional?
VA: Imposed on a legal basis. But look at what is happening. The State Emergency Committee closed the democratic newspapers. Now the democrats are closing the communist newspapers. You're not going to tell me that all this is legal? At least in the case of the Committee, they declared a state of emergency and only then on the basis of the law concerning a state of emergency did they close that press which they did not like. But did we see the democrats declare a state of emergency today? Had Yeltsin declared a state of emergency then he could have closed Pravda and papers like it completely legally. But when a state of emergency has not been declared, but Pravda is closed or Alexander Nevzorov's '600 Seconds' in Leningrad is taken off the air just because the authorities don't like it, that is anti-constitutional.
And this is the difference between me and the democrats. I consider that the law has to be placed above everything. There has to be a hierarchy of laws. Yeltsin, when he was Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet last year, spoke about a pyramid of power. That is, all laws are to be delegated from below. First, the suburbs and villages take on as much responsibility as they can handle, the rest is delegated to the cities. Then the city takes its share, while what is left goes to the provincial authorities and so on, and in this way a pyramid of power is formed.
But as soon as Yeltsin travelled to the autonomous regions and said: "Take as much sovereignty for yourselves as you can handle", they immediately declared their complete sovereignty and announced their independence. A year goes by and we have Ruslan Khasbulatov, Chairman of the Praesidium of the Russian Supreme Soviet, saying at one of its recent sittings: "If the autonomous regions keep on about their independence, their Supreme Soviets will be abolished." What sort of legality and trustworthiness are we talking about here!
JJ: But don't you consider that today's leaders are doing exactly what you spoke about earlier: addressing the need to limit political freedoms in order to force the economy to work?
VA: You're right. Now, and during the coup as well, those ideas which I have been advancing over the course of the last year are being realised. And I also advocated dissolving the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. But this was proposed under conditions of a strong central authority being in power in Moscow which would be capable of controlling the situation throughout the whole country. But what has actually happened?! They have moth-balled the Congress of People's Deputies, but there isn't any strong central power. I proposed that a state of emergency be introduced in a constitutional manner. They have done it in an unconstitutional way. That is, bits and pieces are being extracted from a programme I put forward, and each person is attempting to use them as they see fit. As a result we are witnessing a disaster.
JJ: In other words, you're proposing the Chinese version for the development of the country?
VA: No, I like the South Korean variant more. But the version being proposed now is the Yugoslavian variant. While Yugoslavia was a unified state, the government of Markovich was able to conduct a successful market-oriented transformation. They even managed to make the dinar convertible on the internal market. But as soon as the process of the disintegration of the state was set in motion the economy collapsed. In our case though, we don't even have a working economy to begin with but already we are dissolving the state. We're contorting ourselves into sovereign states and as a result there are no economic reforms whatsoever. This is bad for everybody. Neither Ukraine, nor Russia, nor Lithuania can solve these problems in isolation because we have a totalitarian economy which for decades has been run from a single centre. Agreed, the centralised economy has not been very effective, but it's there. Now they are trying to govern by a single administration directed from fifteen capitals. All this, as you can see, is leading nowhere.
JJ: How then do you see the future of the country, of the people?
VA: The people are tired. They no longer believe anyone, not Yeltsin, not the Emergency Committee, no one. They want one thing. They're begging for one thing: that finally some power appears in the country that can feed them, clothe them, put boots on their feet and defend their rights. That's all the people want. Currently the people are in a state of apathy. But the next phase will be an explosion of desperation. When they finally give up waiting for some improvement in their lives, the people will come out on the streets. But they won't come out as supporters of Communism or Democracy with demands for this or that. They will simply come out to destroy everything and everybody in sight.
Think about how the Japanese dress up life-size dolls as administrators and stand them around in the work places so that the workers can curse them and beat their frustrations out on them. Well, our dummies are of a different kind. When our people unburden their souls they will be lopping the heads off living apparatchiks and democrats alike. Pushkin said it all: "God spare us a Russian rebellion, senseless and bloody it will be".
[10] Yegor Ligachev, former Politburo member and arch conservative.
[11] Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev's closest advisers and former Politburo member.
[12] Marshal Zhukov masterminded the Soviet victory in World War II. Without his backing Khrushchev would not have defeated Beria in the struggle for the leadership following Stalin's death.