Kryuchkov has repeatedly said that the plotters’ main mistake was not to use the airwaves to make a public call for support. As he said in 2001: ‘We should have made the case to the people and opened their eyes to the danger which the country faced.’32 And in 2006 he mused: ‘I cannot say whether the people actively supported us or not, but if we had made the call, the people would have come out onto the streets.’33 But Yazov gave the most convincing analysis of the coup’s failure, when he admitted that he could not himself answer the question of why the coup was needed: ‘People always ask me: why did you never give the command to fire? And I ask: and who to shoot at? In the name of what? So that Gorbachev could stay in power?’34
The hardliners had placed their faith in the power of tanks and soldiers, but realized too late that without an answer to the question ‘Why?’ they could not use them. They had spurned the public politics of democracy, but found that even if they wanted power at the point of a gun, they still needed a message, an idea, a reason for being. They still needed to explain themselves, and they could not. ‘They seriously thought that history could be operated by telephone’, says Dugin today.
The totally surreal death of their beloved Soviet Union astounded and captivated the Soviet hardliners. The coup and its aftermath did not feel like a momentous historical turning point: it had none of the weight, none of the consequences that would normally accompany events of this magnitude. This, they had been led to believe, was an earthquake in world history, comparable to 1789 and 1917. But it was nonsense: history demands sacrifices in blood; it advances across the bones of those it supersedes and confines to oblivion. The dawning of a new paradigm, the surrender of one totality and its replacement by a new one, should at least have been accompanied by drama and a large body count.
Yet in the three days that sounded the death knell of the Soviet Union, a total of three people lost their lives (in an accident – see above), and 11 went to prison for a matter of months. The highest drama was Yeltsin’s made-for-TV spectacle of mounting a tank in front of the White House and addressing the public – yet this was CNN footage and was not even seen inside the USSR. Prokhanov felt he had just witnessed ‘a giant simulation, a piece of theatre’. In the space of three days, without a shot being fired, the greatest superstate the world had ever seen was destroyed.
With the end of the coup on 21 August and Gorbachev’s return to Moscow on 22 August, the USSR was dead. The Day, as the incubator of the coup, was closed temporarily, and its arch rival Literaturnaya Gazeta, across the hall at the USSR Writers’ Union, published an exposé of its funding via Yazov’s Ministry of Defence.
Dugin returned to work, but the country was falling apart around him. Gorbachev was finished as a politician, and everyone knew that the USSR could not survive. Slowly the negotiations got under way to manage the collapse as peacefully as possible.
Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Soviet Republic, who before the coup had already been working on plans for a Russian secession from the Soviet Union, now redoubled his efforts. In December of that year he met the chairman of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich, chairman of the Belarusian Supreme Soviet, in the Belovezh forest resort near Minsk, and dissolved the Union, presenting Gorbachev with a fait accompli.
In his quest to be rid of his rival, Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union, putting Gorbachev, its head, out of a job. One-quarter of the territory of the Soviet Union seceded over the next few months, and on 25 December the Soviet flag was lowered from the flagpole of the Kremlin forever, to be replaced with the tricolour of Democratic Russia. That was the day, says Dugin, that he became a ‘Soviet man’ for ever.35 As he wrote later:
I realized that I had become, totally, irreversibly a Soviet man. Fatally, triumphally Soviet. This after so many tortured years of implacable hatred for my surroundings, for the ‘Sovdep’, and following my radical, uncompromising national nonconfomism. Of course I always hated the West as well… But in that August, (despite much conscious effort) all the internal logic of my soul was on the side of the Emergency Committee.36
The GKChP had delivered a victory for Yeltsin, but not a decisive one. He still had to contend with a profoundly divided society, as well as with a bureaucratic apparatus and security services that were overwhelmingly loyal to the old order, which had secured their privileges.
Soviet hardliners and patriots made their peace with the new era, but for many, these ‘last soldiers of empire’ did little to hide their antipathy towards Yeltsin, and clung to their belief that they had been defeated by a new, postmodern enemy (rather than simply being on the wrong side of history). Behind the scenes, old hardliners confronted a new generation of liberals in bureaucratic battles over reform across the state apparatus. This was especially noticeable in the military and special services, where loyalty to Yeltsin was so low that his bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, said that he was forced to create a ‘mini KGB’ – inside the KGB – of Kremlin loyalists.37
The shadowy confrontation between new-order loyalists and old-era hardliners went largely unwitnessed by the public. However, there is evidence that Dugin and Prokhanov’s fantastical stories about rival conspiracies battling at the heart of the Russian state were not so far off the mark. We have already seen evidence of one major conspiracy by Russia’s security services in the post-Soviet era – that organized by Kryuchkov and Yazov (and quite possibly Gorbachev) in 1991. This is hardly an example of omnipotent behind-the-scenes manipulators – it was an obvious failure. But the existence of this plot does make clear the undeniable enthusiasm of Russia’s elite for conspiracies. And the fact that the recent GKChP conspiracy failed does not mean that other, more successful ones do not exist – particularly since the definition of success in this is instance precisely that we do not know about them.
‘Deep states’ – conspiracies by military and security men to rule from behind the scenes – are a regular feature of new and unstable democracies. A small elite, well represented in the military or security services, will, almost without exception, feel it too risky to cede full control to a civilian constitutional government. This is both on account of concern for its own privileges and because of a well-justified fear that politically immature societies are easily seduced by populism and demagoguery. It is a fact that such ‘deep state’ plots are actually known to have existed in several modern states in the post-war era. One of the best known (thanks to several court cases beginning in 2008) is the derin devlet, ‘deep state’ in Turkish, in which the military and security services of Turkey sought to guide successive civilian governments from behind the scenes, through decades of turmoil.
Other well-known examples have been a number of anti-communist conspiracies in southern European states during the Cold War – such as the P2 Masonic lodge in Italy, which is so legendary that it is hard to separate myth from reality. But several respected researchers have come to the conclusion that it is not a myth: they argue that it did in fact sponsor right-wing terror and had links to the CIA, with serving generals, bankers and admirals as members. Meanwhile, successive military dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina and Chile in the post-war era, through the 1970s and 1980s, all follow this model of a military–security ‘deep state’, which periodically intervened when the politicians lost their way, and then stepped back into the shadows during periods of civilian rule. There is no guarantee, however, that the self-appointed guardians of the ‘deep state’ will not themselves be seduced by the same trappings of power.