The coup, of course, achieved the opposite of its intended effect. Not only did it not prevent the break-up of the USSR, but it cemented Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Republic, as the dominant leader of the land and stripped the hardliners of their legitimacy. This drove a stake through the heart of the Union, leading directly to its demise four months later. But exactly what happened during the three tense days after Gorbachev realized that his phone lines had been cut is still hotly disputed by experts, despite thousands of pages of testimony, three separate investigations, nine trials and at least a dozen published personal accounts of the events.
To many, the defeat of the GKChP represented victory for the public politics of the democratic over the reactionary, the totalitarian, the rule of conspiracy and the gun. ‘One century ended, the century of fear, and another began’, as Boris Yeltsin, who vaulted to power in the coup’s aftermath, put it. The enduring image of the ordeal was of Yeltsin standing on a tank in a flak jacket, facing the gun barrels of the regime. But the more one delves into the details, this convenient reading of the stand-off – as a clash between public democracy and totalitarian conspiracy – does not quite fit the facts. Rather than public choice and transparency, what was vindicated in August 1991 was quite likely the superior ability of one side to mystify, mislead and manipulate. In other words, the best conspiracy won.
The following day, 19 August, the morning sun rose on a column of tanks rumbling down Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a broad avenue that leads from the western suburbs towards Moscow’s city centre. Dugin remembers being woken by his wife Natasha, and hearing the radio broadcast announcing that, for reasons of ill health, Gorbachev was handing over power to his deputy, Gennady Yanaev. ‘It’s our coup!’ exclaimed Natasha. ‘It’s our people. They are coming to power!’ They were ecstatic.
The radio message went on to say that Russia’s democratic reforms were destroying the state, and that it was necessary to prevent the collapse of the USSR. As the GKChP said in its ‘Address to the Soviet People’:
In place of the initial enthusiasm and hope came lack of faith, apathy and despair. The government at all levels has lost the trust of the population… The country has in essence become ungovernable… To remain inactive at this moment, which is critical for the fate of the fatherland, is to assume the weighty responsibility for tragic, unpredictable consequences.
The coup’s unwitting propagandists had little inkling of what was to come. Even Prokhanov admits being ‘completely surprised’ by the rapid sequence of events, and despite having authored the manifesto of the coup, ‘Word to the People’, he denies any knowledge of the article’s role in the unfolding events: ‘I was like Pushkin, the Decembrists didn’t take him either’, he quipped, referencing the poet who acted as a promoter of the 1825 coup attempt by progressive army officers, but was ultimately excluded from participating in it.
The chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Anatoly Lukyanov – Lev Gumilev’s great champion – came on the radio, aiding the coup plotters by announcing that the legislatures would not meet for a week, thus giving the plotters time to consolidate their power. ‘Lukyanov’s speech was like an angel’s chorus’, Dugin wrote later, ‘heralding the new order of respect, honouring the commitment of past statesmen to defend a great power in the face of gathering cosmopolitan crowds that wanted to surrender to Coca-colonialists.’26
But from the very first day, the coup was a shambles. The first mistake was obvious: as soon as Lukyanov’s address was finished, state television and radio began to play a continuous loop of Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky’s tragic opera of the triumph of evil over good. But not using the radio and TV to buttress their case with citizens was only the first of many mistakes the plotters made. As Prokhanov says today: ‘They could have made a real effort with information, with propaganda, but they had absolutely no idea how to do this. Instead we had Swan Lake.’
The rank amateurishness of the coup surprised many of the seasoned veterans of the cut-throat power games at the summit of the Communist Party hierarchy. As Gorbachev’s bodyguard General Medvedev wrote in his autobiography:
It’s not as though we don’t have experience of coups and bloody mutinies. In fact, unfortunately, we are probably ahead of the rest of the planet on this score… They killed Leon Trotsky in a different hemisphere [Stalin’s political opponent was assassinated in Mexico in 1940]. So why couldn’t they arrest Yeltsin, who was their neighbour?
Another unanswered question is whether Gorbachev, as he has always insisted, was actually under house arrest at Foros with his communications cut off, or, as a number of participants in the events allege, whether his isolation was self-imposed, allowing him to wait to find out the outcome before denouncing the coup, which he did on 21 August. ‘If we had won’, claims Vasily Starodubtsev, one of the 11 plotters, ‘Gorbachev would simply have come back and sat on his throne, as the legitimate president.’
Today, Gorbachev is remembered as the reformer who broke the back of communism and then voluntarily bowed out of history with the fall of the USSR in December 1991. But back in August of that year, his main political opponents were not the hardliners (whom he cultivated, along with reformers, in an effort to secure political survival), but Yeltsin, who in June of that year had been elected president of the Russian Soviet Republic, giving him a broad political mandate alongside the popular charisma of a reformer. Gorbachev’s attitude towards the new Union Treaty he was supposed to sign on 20 August was difficult to read; if the Soviet Union collapsed, he, as its president, was out of a job. He may have been looking for reasons not to go ahead, and the GKChP was a too-convenient outcome. ‘We were the arms and hands of Gorbachev, who knew everything’, the elderly Starodubtsev told me in 2011 shortly before his death, a crease of certainty on his face.27
The whispered questions are not limited to disgruntled ex-hardliners. Yeltsin himself, after years of backing Gorbachev’s version publicly, told a television interviewer from the Russian channel Rossiya in 2006 that, in the days before the putsch, he and other reformers had tried to convince Gorbachev to fire Kryuchkov, but that Gorbachev had refused: ‘He [Gorbachev] knew about this before the putsch began, this is documented, and during the putsch he was informed about everything and all the while was waiting to see who would win, us or them. In either case he would have joined the victors.’ The Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow answered this charge in a press release: ‘In blackening Gorbachev’s name, Yeltsin is trying to rid himself of the guilt for the Belovezh Agreement [which abolished the USSR in December 1991] and other actions which led to the fall of the Union.’ Soon after the piece was aired, Yeltsin died, closing the book on the spat forever.
According to Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s chief of staff, who was among the delegation sent to recruit him, the Soviet leader wanted to get rid of Yeltsin at any price. ‘Gorbachev did not want to be present during the fight that was inevitably going to take place’, Boldin told the Kommersant newspaper in 2001. ‘He knew (and maybe even gave the command) that what happened during his holiday was going to happen.’ Gorbachev insists that he was under house arrest and believed that his and his family’s lives were in danger. After the delegation flew back to Moscow, both Gorbachev and his wife Raisa (who died in 1999) described the fear they felt during the three days at Foros. According to Leonid Proshkin, an investigator at the Soviet prosecutor’s office who interviewed her after the events, Raisa Gorbacheva said she had even suffered a minor heart attack. ‘They were really living in distress’, he said, adding that they had refused to eat much during their three-day ordeal for fear of being poisoned. But the question remains open as to whether, had he wanted to, Gorbachev could have communicated to prove that he was not ill, as his vice-president (and coup plotter) Gennady Yanaev told a press conference the following day, after assuming Gorbachev’s functions: