Gorbachev’s refusal to play along with their plans disoriented the conspirators, but they decided to proceed with the takeover, in the hope that the country would welcome their move as heralding a respite from disruptive change and mounting disorder.
In the early morning of Monday, August 19, troops were mobilized in the vicinity of Moscow and large numbers of tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) began moving toward the city. Beginning at 6:00 A.M. Moscow time, the country awoke to television and radio broadcasts announcing the formation of the State Committee for the State of Emergency.[12] The junta consisted of eight men, seven of them high-ranking members of the government and all of them identified with the top echelon of the party-state: Vice President Gennadii Yanaev; KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov; Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov; Minister of Internal Affairs Boris Pugo; Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov; Oleg Baklanov, First Deputy Chairman of the National Defense Council and leader of the military-industrial complex; Vasilii Starodubtsev, Chairman of the Peasants’ Union; and Aleksandr Tiziakov, President of the Association of State Enterprises and Industrial Groups in Production, Construction, Transportation, and Communications and member of the Council of Ministers.
The Committee’s first public statements announced the imposition of a state of emergency in the country to rescue “our great Motherland” from the “mortal danger” that loomed over it. The form as much as the content of these statements indicated clearly that the Emergency Committee wished to turn back the clock to an earlier era, to restore the law and order once commanded by an all-powerful Communist Party, and to preserve the Soviet Union as a unitary state.
Yet it was also obvious that the conspirators wanted to give a constitutional gloss to their actions, for the benefit of the Soviet population as much as the rest of the world. Although in clear violation of the Law on the State of Emergency,[13] they claimed to be acting in accordance with certain articles of the USSR Constitution (adopted in 1977, but much amended since 1988). Article 127(7) of the Constitution provided for a transfer of power to the Vice President of the USSR if the President was for any reason “unable to continue to execute his duties.” (Throughout the coup, the Committee would maintain the pretext that Gorbachev was incapacitated by health problems.) Ironically, this effort to formulate a constitutional justification for the seizure of power suggests that, as one commentator observed, “the reform process begun by Gorbachev ha[d] been effective in introducing some semblance of the rule of law in the USSR.”[14]
By mid-morning on Monday, large numbers of tanks and APCs and truckloads of soldiers had begun to enter the city of Moscow. Later that day, both Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) were placed under martial law. Although martial law was not formally imposed in the Baltic republics, troops began moving there, too, and the commander of the Baltic Military District declared that he was assuming control of the region.[15]
Popular resistance to the takeover did not appear immediately. The galvanizing force was Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected President of the Russian Federation. On Monday morning Yeltsin issued an “Appeal to the Citizens of Russia,” denouncing the takeover as illegal and calling for popular resistance, including a general strike. At midday Yeltsin mounted a tank near the building known as the White House (the House of Soviets, which housed the Russian government) and made an appeal to soldiers and officers, exhorting them to give their allegiance to the government of the Russian Federation.
In the late afternoon, at around 5:00 P.M. the Emergency Committee held a televised press conference, open to Soviet and foreign press. Speaking in a booming, authoritative voice, but with his hands visibly trembling, Vice President Yanaev, ostensibly the leader of the coup, offered the junta’s case for the takeover. Without producing any evidence for his assertion, Yanaev repeatedly declared that Gorbachev was ill and would eventually, Yanaev hoped, resume his duties.
That same evening, in one of those odd twists that abounded during the coup, the image of Yeltsin on a tank, captured by a CNN camera, was beamed to millions of Soviet viewers on the news program “Vremia.” This icon of defiance was part of a remarkable five-minute segment on “Vremia” about the appearance of a democratic resistance to the coup in the country’s capital. Put together by television journalist Sergei Medvedev, the short segment conveyed a vast amount of information: the tanks rolling down the streets of Moscow, Yeltsin’s “Appeal to the Citizens of Russia,” the building of barricades, and the massing of people determined to defend the White House from attack. Medvedev’s report on the evening news, following a taped rebroadcast of the Emergency Committee’s press conference, helped to turn the tide against the coup d’état.[16]
As motorized armor converged on the streets of Moscow—over six hundred pieces, not counting the trucks carrying soldiers in full battle gear—people began erecting barricades, some in Manezh Square (a large plaza near Red Square where big rallies are held) and many more outside the White House. In some cases, people stopped the movement of tanks and APCs by forming a human chain.
Many among the first barricade-builders understood that the putschists were using a tried-and-true Soviet technique, one that had been used successfully all over Eastern Europe in the years after World War II: while tanks surround the government headquarters, a junta offers the alternative of “national salvation” through Party-imposed order. Most recently the scenario had been employed in Vilnius, Lithuania, in January 1991. This time, however—unlike Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1981, where coups d’état had been carried out under the cover of the Cold War and with totalitarian controls—Lithuania stood firm. Indeed, the Lithuanians enjoyed broad and vocal public support among Russia’s intelligentsia and democratic politicians, and the “Committee for National Salvation” failed to take power.
Thanks to the Vilnius example, and to Sergei Medvedev’s brief but incisive “Vremia” report about the barricade-building in Moscow, Russian citizens knew what they had to do: defend the White House, the seat of their freely elected government. That the putschists expected to succeed in Moscow (where close to 80 percent had voted to elect Yeltsin President)[17] with a plan that had not worked in Vilnius speaks volumes about the plotters’ general competence, political imagination, and horizons.
A major change in the alignment of forces occurred as early as 10:00 P.M. on Monday night, when several tanks from the Taman Division, stationed in the vicinity of the White House, declared their loyalty to Russia and moved to defend the building, cheered on by a large crowd that had been gathering since the early afternoon. An hour later, eight armored scout vehicles flying the Russian tricolor arrived to protect the White House; they were led by Major General Aleksandr Lebed, under orders from the commander of the airborne paratroop forces, Colonel General Pavel Grachev.[18] These were the first indications of divided loyalties within the military.
Meanwhile, in Leningrad, Mayor Anatolii Sobchak had hastily returned from Moscow to take charge of the democratic resistance. One of his first acts was to reach an agreement with local military officers to keep tanks and APCs out of the city. In the evening he delivered a rousing televised speech, calling for resistance and urging people to attend a protest rally the following day. From that time on, the Leningrad television station transmitted information in support of the democratic resistance.
12
The Committee’s name was officially abbreviated as GKChP (pronounced Geh-Keh-Cheh-Peh), which not only sounds awkward but is suspiciously reminiscent of the well-known and much disliked acronyms for the secret police—KGB, GPU, and Cheka.
13
The law stipulated that a state of emergency could be declared only in the event of “natural and man-made disasters, epidemics, and large-scale public disorders,” either by the Supreme Soviet of a constituent republic of the USSR or by the USSR President, “following the petition or consent of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR or constituent republic, or the supreme organ of the constituent republic.” If the President decided to declare a state of emergency on his own, he had to “immediately seek the approval of the Supreme Soviet.”
14
Carla Thorson, “Constitutional Issues Surrounding the Coup,” in RFL/RL Research Institute,
16
See Victoria E. Bonnell and Gregory Freidin, “
18
According to General Lebed’s recently released memoirs (published in the Transnistrian Republic), the paratrooper division under his command had been ordered by General Grachev to be battle ready on August 17. Neither Grachev nor his staff disclosed to Lebed the nature of his mission. The order for Lebed to move his division into Moscow came at around 4:00 A.M. on August 19. Still in the dark about his mission, Lebed (who had not listened to state radio while on the march) reached the outskirts of Moscow at 10:30 A.M. He was soon contacted by Grachev’s staff officer, who conveyed to him another order from Grachev: Lebed was “personally,” and without using any communications equipment, to lead the 2nd Batallion to the White House and there, after contacting the head of White House security, to assume the defense of the building. Still unaware of the coup d’état, Lebed arrived at the White House at 1:30 p.m. He tried to follow Grachev’s order but was chased out of the building by an irate crowd of about 200 defenders who assumed that he was on the side of the Emergency Committee (at one point in the ensuing fracas, Lebed practically had to run for his life). As a result of the confusion, Lebed was able to carry out his order to defend the White House only late in the evening of the 19th. See Aleksandr Lebed,