Introduction

Mikhail Gorbachev

For Muscovites, the coup began in the early hours of Monday morning, August 19, 1991. The city woke up to the strains of Swan Lake on all the state radio stations. In the Soviet Union, the music from Swan Lake was traditionally associated with the death of a leader or a changing of the Kremlin guard. On this day, the music was interrupted only by the announcement that for health reasons, Mikhail Gorbachev had relinquished his powers as President to his deputy, Gennadii Yanaev.

The Soviet people did not know that Gorbachev had already been isolated in Foros, at his holiday house on the southern tip of the Crimea on the shores of the Black Sea. Along with his wife Raisa, his daughter Irina, son-in-law Anatolii and their two children, he had been corralled with his personal bodyguard and staff. They were cut off from the outside world. The telephone had been dead since the previous evening when emissaries from the Emergency Committee had barged their way into the house and demanded that he cooperate with them. Following his refusal to delay the signing of the new Union Treaty and resign as President, the Committee had acted. The head of Gorbachev's personal bodyguard along with his troops who had remained loyal to him were put under house arrest. The roads leading to the house were blocked by soldiers while Foros airport was closed. Gorbachev's private plane and helicopter which arrived to fly him to the Union Treaty signing ceremony were diverted. Escape to sea was apparently blocked by warships. Gorbachev was trapped in the wings and reduced to the role of absent centre in the three days of drama his removal triggered.

The sombre tone of the music being played in the capital was broken only by a short statement announcing his absence. However, for a people steeped in the treacheries their ruling circles perpetuated on one another from time to time, it spoke volumes. The decree handing over power to Yanaev was not published until Tuesday morning in the few newspapers the Emergency Committee was still permitting to publish. (Appendix 1) The announcement of Gorbachev's removal was accompanied by a lengthy statement from the Emergency Committee outlining its rationale for taking power. (Appendix 2) At the same time the new self-appointed leadership of the Soviet Union moved towards implementing its authority. Its first act was to announce the scope of its powers. (Appendix 3)

With these three documents, the Emergency Committee sought not only to establish its constitutional legitimacy, but to establish its popular appeal by showing that it was defending the interests of the broadest strata of Soviet people. Given the subsequent development of events, this was obviously all that they felt would be necessary to lay the foundation for a smooth transition of power to the new authorities. And in the old days when the Party and the State held absolute sway over the people, this would have been the case.

Every Soviet leader since the Revolution in 1917 had either died in office (Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yurii Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko) or had been liquidated or ousted in a Machiavellian power play (Nikita Khrushchev). This was the case when Lenin had any opposition to the Bolshevik Party absorbed into the new party, or forced out of the political arena, imprisoned and in some cases killed. It continued when Stalin liquidated or imprisoned all of his old comrades whom he wanted out of the way for one reason or other. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev had the feared Secret Police chief, Lavrentii Beria, shot. Brezhnev, in his turn, ousted Khrushchev.

This pattern was still the norm today, though following Stalin's death and Beria's execution, retirement or demotion rather than imprisonment or death had become the usual reward for anyone finding themselves out of favour with the Party elites. Gorbachev himself had proved a past master at cleansing opponents from the ranks around him. After Chernenko died in March 1985 and Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU [3], he moved quickly at successive Communist Party Congresses to shift his own supporters into the Central Committee and the Politburo.

Nevertheless as the promises of Perestroika continued to remain beyond realisation and the living standards of the people, having reached a plateau in the latter years of Brezhnev's rule, first started to fall and then plummeted in 1987 and 1988, Gorbachev's original successes in appointing people loyal to him began to be reversed. Pressure from the bureaucracy and the military to keep an ailing state from falling apart continually forced him to postpone the radical reforms most now accepted were necessary if the original goals of Perestroika were to be realised. Gorbachev himself was becoming increasingly conservative as opposition to him began to emerge amongst even his staunchest supporters and his grip on power became more contingent on the support of opponents of Perestroika. He began to shed his former allies and supporters from the Politburo. Some, wary of Gorbachev's increasing conservatism, simply resigned. The last of them, Alexander Yakovlev, who had resigned as Gorbachev's chief adviser on August 5, announced his intention to resign from the Communist Party on August 15 warning, as Eduard Shevardnadze had when he resigned as Foreign Minister in December 1990, of an impending coup.

Gorbachev was now alone at the top. His former supporters were either in active opposition to him or simply silent. He was at his most vulnerable since becoming General Secretary. Apart from the leadership of the Party and the Presidency itself, his opponents now occupied every major position in the Party and the State. They could not have envisaged anything simpler than isolating Gorbachev and forcing him either to cooperate or resign. Nevertheless, it was not that they underestimated his stubbornness and commitment to what by 1991 was to everyone except, it seems, Gorbachev himself, obviously a hopelessly flawed vision of a renewed socialism that their attempt to take power was defeated. Rather it was that as men of the old guard, locked into and preoccupied all their political lives with the ebb and flow of power within the Kremlin walls, they were slow to notice, and if they did, even slower to appreciate the implication that if Perestroika had achieved nothing else, it had radically changed the channels in which Soviet power as such flowed. No longer was it all dammed up behind the Kremlin Walls. A lot of it had trickled and seeped out through chinks and cracks opened up by the creation of presidencies, parliaments and councils which were no longer subordinate to the Party but elected by the people. The strongest of these new institutions, and the one which in the end washed away the State Emergency Committee, was the Presidency of the Russian Republic.

Boris Yeltsin

Boris Yeltsin was brought to Moscow by Gorbachev. [4] At the time, he was Party boss in Sverdlovsk, an important regional industrial centre, nowadays returned to its Tsarist name of Yekaterinaburg. Yeltsin's new job in the country's political epicentre was to oversee building and construction for the Party. He was quickly promoted to boss of the Moscow Party and made a candidate member of the Politburo. However, the higher his post, the more urgent were his demands that Perestroika be accelerated. This, in the face of declining production and a nationwide fall in living standards, brought him into direct conflict with conservatives in the Party who were demanding that Perestroika be slowed down, if not scrapped altogether.

This confrontation came to a head at a Party Plenum in October 1987 when Yeltsin was openly critical of what he considered were attempts by the Central Committee to sabotage Perestroika. Even Gorbachev himself was chagrined at what Yeltsin had to say about the Central Committee. Stung by his criticisms, the conservatives waited less than a month for their revenge. On November 11, Yeltsin was stripped of his post as head of the Moscow Party and a week later consigned to a relatively obscure post as First Deputy Chairman of the State Construction Committee and to what should have been political oblivion.

However, Perestroika was having an effect, even if it was not the effect that Gorbachev wanted. Yeltsin survived his downfall and even began to make something of a come-back in the wake of the greater democratisation of the Party as Gorbachev expanded its voting base in order to preserve his own hold on the General Secretaryship as more and more conservatives were returned to senior posts. Moreover, Gorbachev had created space for Yeltsin to move outside of the Party with his continued push for a broader support base which by now had led to the creation in December 1988 of a popularly elected Soviet parliament of which he, Gorbachev, had subsequently been elected chairman. It was this parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies, which then elected Gorbachev President in May 1989. Meanwhile, Yeltsin had been elected to the same Congress of People's deputies two months earlier with an astounding 80% of the vote in his constituency. Moreover, he had run against an opponent whom Gorbachev had publicly endorsed. By July 1990, Yeltsin felt his own support base sufficiently strong to openly taunt the Party. And at the 28th Party Congress he walked out, saying he had better things to do as he needed to concentrate on his work as Chairman of the Russian Parliament. In June 1991, he was elected Russian President.

Yeltsin's election as Russian President was the first ever popular election to a post at this level in Russia's or the Soviet Union's history. His election by an overwhelming majority, 57.3% of the primary vote, compared to that of his nearest rival, Nikolai Ryzhkov, the choice of the Party machine and former Soviet Prime Minister, who could only manage 16.9% in the first round of elections, must have alerted the old guard of the degree to which their authority and that of the Party had waned in the eyes of the people.

Nevertheless, even if their authority had waned, their power had not. They still controlled the state administration, the armed forces, the KGB and the police. When the heads of these institutions formed the State Emergency Committee and removed Gorbachev, they counted on an easy victory. Even if the vast majority of the people found Boris Yeltsin more appealing than Nikolai Ryzhkov, they could still be counted on for support when the issue was bread and sausage rather than politics. However the Emergency Committee underestimated Yeltsin's character and his ability to generate the impression that the coup, despite the Committee's protests to the contrary, was not at all about bread and sausage but was a blow against them, the people.

Yeltsin argued that the Emergency Committee had removed the President of the country from his post and was now seeking to remove him from the Presidency of Russia, a post to which they had elected him in direct defiance of those same people who were now offering them bread and sausage as compensation for taking away their freedom to choose who governed them. Yeltsin was reminding the people of the pride they had invested in voting against the Party and State when they made him President. He staked his immense authority against the fact that he was totally isolated within the soviet power system. And the ploy worked. Nobody came out onto the streets in support of the State Emergency Committee. To do so would have meant swallowing their pride and going directly in the face of the choice they had made and the protest they had registered when they had elected Yeltsin two months earlier.

However, if they were not going to reject Yeltsin out of hand, fear of confronting the forces which for seventy-four years had wielded so much power over them prevented the majority of these same people from giving him overt support. The tiny minority who did, did so in the full knowledge that were they to fail, many of them would almost certainly have ended up severely penalised, if not in prison.

When the one hundred thousand or so who did brave the streets rallied to Yeltsin's support at the White House, they presented the Emergency Committee with a dilemma the likes of which had not been seen in the capital (Petrograd at the time) since the heady days of February and November 1917 when it was the Bolsheviks and their supporters who were confronting the institutionalised authority of first the Tsar and then the Provisional Government. It was a dilemma for which the Emergency Committee, men who were accustomed to unquestioning obedience at every level, were unprepared. From the very first moments of Yeltsin's opposition they were confused. There simply should have been no opposition to what was an ordinary changing of the Kremlin Guard. No one had protested when Brezhnev replaced Krushchev. No one protested when Krushchev had Beria shot. Why all the fuss now? What were these people doing down on the streets, surrounding the White House and preventing Yeltsin's arrest without the likelihood of widespread bloodshed?

As the Emergency Committee faltered on Monday, Yeltsin went to work preparing counter-measures to the decrees and declarations issued that morning by which the Emergency Committee had hoped the question of Gorbachev's further presence on the political scene would be closed once and for all. Given that the Emergency Committee had framed their claims within their interpretation of the Soviet Constitution, Yeltsin, as Russian President, counter-attacked with a set of claims grounded in the Russian Constitution. The formal battle lines were thus drawn.

From the outset the struggle was to be waged as a battle of constitutions in which tanks and soldiers and civilians would be pawns. As pawns they would nevertheless occupy the most important positions on the board. And in the end, they would decide not only the outcome of the game but call into question the traditional value of the players. In facing down tanks and soldiers, the people of Moscow were proving not so much that Yeltsin had to be defended at any cost, but rather that the right to choose who governed them was.

Yeltsin understood this. And it was to this sentiment of popular rights being trampled on that he appealed when he launched his counter-attack against the Emergency Committee. His first act was an appeal to the Soviet people to recognise the unconstitutional nature of the State Emergency Committee and demand that the law be respected and that Gorbachev be returned to his post. (Appendix 4) In conjunction with this, Yeltsin issued a Presidential decree countering the constitutional legitimacy of the Emergency Committee and declaring that their removal of the President amounted to nothing less then a coup d'etat. (Appendix 5) Having countered the claims of the Emergency Committee in the same language by which they had sought to legitimise their removal of the Soviet President, Yeltsin had done all he could. Now it was up to the people. Without the people, the power of those whom they elected was nothing. As Yeltsin himself put it, only the people themselves could defend the power of the people. (Appendix 6)

The Putsch

In the six years since its inception, Perestroika, the movement initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in April 1985 with the intent of renewing socialism, produced quite a different effect. Rather than re-invigorating a lagging socialism in the face of the other, capitalist world, Perestroika (reconstruction) and Glasnost (openness) opened this other world up to the gaze of curious millions with the result that they were now not only rejecting the idea of socialism as such but were actively dismantling its economic base, the Soviet bloc. The Polish opposition, Solidarity, won its country's parliamentary elections on June 4, 1989. The Hungarian Party abandoned Leninist ideology in October that year. The Berlin wall was torn down on November 9. The Czechoslovak Communist Party ceded power to the opposition in the Velvet Revolution later that month. And finally, there was the Romanian revolution which ended with the execution of the country's leader, Nikolai Ceausescu, and his wife, on Christmas day. It was an implosion which a year and a half later, by late summer 1991, was threatening the Soviet Union itself.

Under increasing pressure from burgeoning nationalist independence movements in the constituent republics of the USSR [5] the centre had reluctantly shifted towards giving them greater control over their own affairs. The latest attempt to bind the country together by loosening the bonds over its member republics was enshrined in the new Union Treaty, due to be signed on Tuesday, August 20, 1991. The new Union Treaty significantly weakened the role of Moscow in the running of the country. Once it was signed, any hope of maintaining a strong and centralised administrative system, the centre piece of soviet power, would disappear. The raison d'etre of the state and its instruments, particularly the Army, the bureaucracy and the KGB, would be seriously threatened. Without a centralised command and administrative system there would be no real reason for so vast an apparatus of bureaucrats to run the country and little need for the policing functions carried out by the KGB and Police, backed up by the implicit threat of the Army.

To make matters worse, the Army itself had now become part of the problem. The debacle in Afghanistan, ten years of fighting for slogans about international brotherhood and socialism which meant little to the peoples of Afghanistan they were supposedly defending, had raised serious question for the Soviet people about the wisdom of the leadership which had taken their country to war. By 1991, even the need for an expressly 'Soviet' Army, that is a single army drawn from the fifteen constituent republics of the Union, and dedicated to defending its interests was being questioned now that political power was in danger of losing its single focus and devolving away from the centre. The Army had always been the pride of the Soviet people, guarantor of the nation's security and a symbol of the unity of the ethnically and culturally diverse nations of the Soviet Union. This was no longer the case after years of unrest in the Baltics and civil strife and war in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, with the Army's overt or covert involvement at different times on different sides. Even the casual observer could see that as the Soviet Union itself began to come under the pressures which had contributed to the collapse of its satellites in Eastern Europe, an ethnically diverse army might prove as much a part of the problem as any solution if the different peoples of the Soviet Union now began facing off against one another. The Army could break up into national forces, with the inherent threat of new violence breaking out and the level of violence in the already existing inter-ethnic conflicts escalating. Or it could remain united as the country divided, emerging as the single strongest institution with all the problems, including the possibility of military dictatorship, which this implied.

By August 1991, six republics, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia and Moldova were already refusing to sign the new Union Treaty, while a seventh, Ukraine, had called for a referendum on the issue. The Baltics were committed to independence, their resolve hardened by the killings carried out in January that year by Omon, the Police Special Forces, also known as the 'Black Berets'. Thirteen had died in Vilnius on the night of January 13 when the Television Tower was stormed by Omon troops. The following day, the driver of a minister in the Latvian government was shot dead. In the south, Georgia's President, the dissident intellectual, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was accusing the centre of imperialist ambitions. Armenia was wavering, considering a referendum on the issue. However, it was preoccupied by the undeclared war for control of the nominally autonomous region of Nagorno Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan's decision to sign the new Union Treaty had only made it more likely that Armenia would not. The Moldovan government was committed to independence but mired in a struggle of competing allegiances complicated by a Russian speaking enclave, the Dniester region, within its territory and its geographical, linguistic and historical ties with Romania.

At worst, what was once a vast empire was on the verge of breaking up. At best, the existence of the Soviet State as a single structural entity was about to give way to a multiplicity of entities whose structural compatibility was not a fait accompli, regardless of which republican leaders actually signed the new Union Treaty. As a result, the interests of those apparatuses and institutions which maintained the single Soviet State were at stake. By removing Gorbachev and pre-empting the signing of the new Union Treaty, the coup's leaders were moving to defend these interests and hence their own spheres of influence and sites of power. Vladimir Kryuchkov was head of the KGB, Igor Pugo, Chief of Police. Dmitrii Yazov was Defence Minister. Both Oleg Baklanov and Alexander Tizyakov were central figures in the military-industrial complex. Valentin Pavlov was Prime Minister and Gennadii Yanaev, Vice President. The inclusion of the Chairman of the Peasants' Union, Vasilii Starodubtsev, in the Committee was intended to demonstrate its organic links with the people. They were all 'good' communists. It was a committee which represented all the interests of those who had most to lose should the signing of the new Union Treaty go ahead.

The State Emergency Committee represented the old face of Soviet power which Gorbachev had betrayed. For a polity steeped in Tsarist cum Stalinist political forms power was eminently personal. Gorbachev alone had set the preconditions for the collapse first of the Soviet empire and now of the Soviet Union itself unless something drastic be done to forestall this in the nearest future. Forcing Gorbachev to see the error of his ways, and if necessary, getting rid of him, would be the first step in halting the final break up of the Soviet heartland. And if Gorbachev had become anathema to his lieutenants, he was now hated by many of the ordinary people he had once held spellbound with the promise of a better socialist future. Not only had no better socialist future materialised, most of the people were far worse off now than they had ever been during the 'stagnation', the latter years of Brezhnev's rule, and in many cases even the harsh decades of Stalin's hold on power. Not only were Party members, soldiers, bureaucrats and the police worse off personally, the institutions in which they worked were coming under increasing budgetary and administrative pressures, in short, having to do more with less. As a bitter rejoinder to this, the draft version of the new Union Treaty envisaged that large parts of the centre would actually be dismantled with many of its bureaucratic, legislative and policing functions being shifted to the republics. This would mean that millions of workers, exhausted by the added difficulties of doing their jobs yesterday, would be made redundant overnight.

Gorbachev was given one last chance to acknowledge the error of his ways and throw in his lot with the old guard. But when he turned away their emissaries on Sunday evening August 18, it was clear that he had no intention of going back to the 'soviet' way of doing things. And it was clear to the Committee, that if 'their' Soviet Union was to be preserved, Gorbachev would have to go.

John Jirik

Notes

[3] CPSU - Communist Party of the Soviet Union

[4] Yeltsin was something of a maverick within the Soviet power system. His success has always depended on positioning himself perfectly within the given confluence of political forces to take maximum advantage of the leverage they afforded without ever becoming dependent on them. This went against the accepted wisdom of the ruling system which held that a leader became powerful precisely by giving in to the power flowing around him, surrendering to its force and becoming strong by skilful navigation of its currents. In such a system any change in the flow of power can radically alter any particular leader's standing without damaging the system. Soviet leaders have come and gone, sometimes with bewildering rapidity, but the instruments of power, the bureaucracy, army, police, and KGB have always thrived.

Yeltsin radically changed this. Not only did he not become dependent on the flow of power within the party, over time he began to dam up power around himself, affecting the overall balance of power in the system which guaranteed its viability whatever its given state. Eventually he accrued so much power to himself that he was able to survive in opposition to the existing power system, and following the collapse of the coup, defeat it.

He is the first truly charismatic leader to have emerged at the helm of Russia since Lenin. Which does not in any way make him invulnerable. Simply that if or when he is defeated it will not be because power has flowed away from him, leaving him marooned, naked, stripped of authority, as the case was with Gorbachev, the last of the Soviet leaders, without damaging the system. In draining power out of the existing system and accruing it to himself, Yeltsin fatally weakened the soviet power system. Yeltsin's own demise will unleash a flood of dammed up energy into the Russian power system that replaced it. In its current weakened state there is no guarantee that the system will survive the shock.

[5] USSR - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics