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Sunday, August 12, 2001
By Sam Greene, Special to the Post-Gazette
MOSCOW -- Ten years ago this week, nine leaders of the last empire met secretly in the Kremlin and decided enough was enough.
The president of the Soviet Union, their president, was destroying the one-party state, its central economy, its totalitarian institutions of social control. Mikhail Gorbachev must be stopped, they believed, and his "reforms" reversed or the Soviet way of life would fall to pieces.
The men plotted to imprison Gorbachev in his vacation home, to send tanks into the streets of Moscow, to reassert the Communist Party's total control over the Soviet government and its satellite states.
Instead, they set off a chain of events that would, within months, achieve their worst nightmare. The Soviet empire dissolved as statues of its founder, Vladimir Lenin, toppled across half the world's time zones.
The reaction to the hardline coup of August 18-22 in the streets of Moscow, where thousands of politicians and everyday people protested in the face of overwhelming military force, proved the Soviet Union and everything it stood for were, in a sense, already dead.
Exhilaration followed.
For the first time since the Bolshevik revolution brought down the czar in 1917, the Soviet people -- Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Georgians and more than 140 other nationalities -- had taken power into their own hands. In Boris Yeltsin they had a new hero. And in Yeltsin's defiant climb aboard a tank among the burning barricades that surrounded the Russian White House, they had a lasting symbol of their revolution.
When the plotters were sent to prison, most people thought they were locking up a past that no one would miss.
But Russian epics are long and difficult, and the last 10 years of Russian history are but a single chapter.
We do know this: A decade ago, one country became 15. Nine of them, including Russia, have since fought bloody wars. All but three are mired in intractable economic decline. Seven have dictatorial regimes, while democratic reforms in the biggest -- Russia and Ukraine -- remain in doubt.
Capitalism has brought great wealth to a very few, while most Russians subsist on less than $100 a month. Poverty, unemployment and alcoholism have conspired to lower the life span of the average Russian man to 55. Russia's population is actually declining, by 1 million each year.
As Russians mark the anniversary this week of the coup that failed -- and Russians mark every anniversary -- some will carry portraits of Lenin and Stalin on Red Square, longing for a time when a job, a home and a meal were guaranteed. While few would really want a return of Soviet communism, the idealism of 1991 now seems a naive illusion.
Yeltsin, drunk and discredited, retired as president and handed power to a former KGB spy whose commitment to democracy is questionable. Other heroes of 1991 have fared little better.
The White House, Russia's parliament building, was shelled in a second coup attempt only two years after the first, and it now stands as a monument to the massive, corrupt and inept bureaucracy that rules Russia today.
Gorbachev's vacation home in the Crimea, once the favorite holiday destination of the Russian elite, now sits in a foreign country, Ukraine.
As for the nine main plotters, one is dead and three are convalescing. But one is an adviser to Russia 1s new president and another serves in parliament. The rest quietly seek their way in the new Russia along with everybody else.
Defenders of reform
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
Gorbachev should have seen it coming, or so everyone said. The CIA had heard rumors of a coup but couldn't get the message across. When one of Gorbachev's closest advisers, Alexander Yakovlev, tried to warn him, the Soviet leader brushed it off as paranoia.
For the lifelong Communist Party man, a coup was inconceivable. Gorbachev had never envisioned the end of Soviet communism, much less the end of the Soviet Union. He believed his economic and political reforms -- Perestroika and Glasnost -- were processes wholly under his control. The coup proved him wrong.
Gorbachev returned to Moscow beaten. Within days, he gave in to the reality that people no longer believed in him or the communist system he still wanted to preserve. Eventually, on Christmas Eve, 1991, he announced his resignation and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He handed the keys to the Kremlin to Yeltsin.
Unemployed and discredited at home, Gorbachev looked to his friends in the West for support. After fighting a battle with Yeltsin -- who wanted to bar him from traveling outside Russia -- Gorbachev became a favorite on the international lecture circuit. He enjoyed the plaudits, including a Nobel Prize, and earned enough to retire comfortably.
But Gorbachev, a workhorse from his farm-boy days, was not through with public life. He plowed his earnings back into the Gorbachev Foundation, tasked with looking after democratic reforms, and he founded the Russian Social Democratic Party.
So far, his search for a center-left constituency in Russia's raucous political scene has been fruitless. When he challenged Yeltsin for the presidency in 1996, he garnered less than half a percent of the vote.
Nevertheless, a full decade out of power, Gorbachev has emerged as a credible crusader for free speech and the welfare of the country's poor and elderly. A recent poll placed him among the five best Russian leaders of all time. Only a few years ago, he would likely have come in last.
BORIS YELTSIN
For a politician who had always mastered the moment, the coup was the opportunity of a lifetime for Boris Yeltsin. Time and again he had upstaged Gorbachev -- often on the floor of the Soviet parliament -- in a bid to show that he, the president of Russia, should be in charge.
Nothing crystallized that message more than the image of Yeltsin, flag in hand, addressing the masses from atop a tank, adoring faces gazing upward. For 48 hours behind the barricades of the Russian White House, he tirelessly berated the old-line communists who were trying to overthrow Gorbachev.
Yeltsin did not risk his life simply to preserve Gorbachev's position. When the Soviet president returned to Moscow, Yeltsin's message was clear: This, Mr. Gorbachev, is no longer your country.
Within months, he engineered the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics, leaving himself in charge of Russia and Gorbachev jobless.
The master of the moment, however, proved to be less skilled at managing reform. As early economic experiments brought triple-digit inflation and misery to tens of millions of Russians, he began a long decline into illness.
Sensing his weakness, his entourage more than once tried to push him from power, most famously in 1993, when his vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, declared himself president and barricaded himself in the White House. Yeltsin didn't hesitate to deploy tanks -- in defense of reform this time -- and the coup was defeated.
But Yeltsin, too, was beaten. His health failing, he grew to rely more and more on his inner circle, which included some of Russia's most notoriously corrupt businessmen. It was they who ensured his narrow 1996 victory over the rejuvenated Communists, pouring money into his campaign. And it was they who hired and fired the country's numerous prime ministers, some of whom wielded presidential authority as Yeltsin repeatedly convalesced.
The Yeltsin era came to an end in 1999, when, on New Year's Eve, Yeltsin announced his resignation and handed power to his latest-prime minister Vladimir Putin. Putin, deploying the levers of state power, easily won election three months later.
By then, the man who had inspired Russians to revolution had convinced them of the futility of reform. He replaced Gorbachev as most hated Russian leader.
EDUARD SHEVARDNADZE
Just months before the coup, the Soviet foreign minister -- popular at home and in the West for his principled reformist views -- resigned from Gorbachev's government, warning of a return to authoritarianism. When the hardliners staged their attempted takeover, Shevardnadze stood alongside Yeltsin and took an active role in the negotiations that brought a relatively peaceful resolution.
In 1992, Shevardnadze returned to his native Republic of Georgia as it became an independent country and won the presidency. Still in power despite more than one assassination attempt, his rule has been somewhat less than fully democratic. A smoldering separatist movement in Abkhazia has provided a reason, or excuse, to ban virtually all opposition.
Now ailing, Shevardnadze has announced he will leave office next year, respecting constitutional term limits.
ALEXANDER RUTSKOI
Yeltsin's vice president both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Afghan war veteran was in charge of marshaling his boss' political troops.
But as Yeltsin often did with those he thought were getting too powerful, he fired Rutskoi in September 1993. In retaliation, Rutskoi declared Yeltsin incompetent to serve and said he would take over. He and his supporters holed up in the White House, only to be bombed out by tanks on Yeltsin's orders.
In April 1994, only two months after being released from prison, Rutskoi formed the Great Power Party, aimed at restoring Russia's lost superpower status. He has since allied himself with the reformed Russian Communist Party.
YURI LUZHKOV
Vice mayor of Moscow at the time of the coup, Luzhkov quickly became one of its loudest opponents, winning broad public popularity in the process. As a result, he became Moscow's next mayor.
He, too, would turn against Yeltsin, founding the Fatherland Party and unsuccessfully attacking Yeltsin and his entourage in parliamentary and presidential elections.
All that changed earlier this year, when he agreed to merge the Fatherland Party with Putin's Unity Party, a move seen by most political analysts as part of Putin's crusade to suppress or co-opt organized opposition.
Key plotters
It was a scene so bizarre, it could only have happened in the political chaos of contemporary Russia. Last month, the remaining alumni of the coup plot held "a friendly tea with journalists." The only thing they regretted, according to Valentin Varennikov, was that they "didn't follow the thing through until the end."
A decade on, the plotters are doing surprisingly well. With the exception of Boris Pugo, the Soviet minister of internal affairs who shot himself rather than face arrest, all are still alive -- and in some cases, so are their political careers. Here's a look at some key remaining figures:
VLADIMIR KRYUCHKOV
Head of the infamous KGB at the time, Kryuchkov was in many ways the coup's driving force. He was among the first to be arrested.
After he got out of prison on a general amnesty for veterans, he wrote a book about his experiences but was forced from public life by ill health. He caused a stir when he resurfaced as a guest at Putin's inauguration.
ANATOLY LUKYANOV
The coup plotters looked to Lukyanov, then chairman of the Supreme Soviet, as their ideological leader. After his release from prison in 1993, he again took up politics and played a key role in developing the philosophy of the remodeled Russian Communist Party. That same year, he was elected to the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, where he now chairs the committee on government reform.
VASILY STARODUBTSEV
Chairman of the Soviet Farmers Union, by 1995 he had re-risen to the highest ranks of the Russian Communist Party. Two years later, he was elected governor of the Tula Region, just south of Moscow, and was re-elected this year, with 72 percent of the vote.
VALENTIN VARENNIKOV
He was head of the Soviet Army, but it was Varennikov's inability to control his troops that eventually led to the coup's downfall. Still, he paid few consequences, serving now in the State Duma -- as a member of the Communist Party, of course.
DIMITRI YAZOV
The Soviet defense minister notoriously told his generals to ensure law and order as the coup began, adding, "As for the rest [such as who would take control of the country], you'll learn that from the radio and newspapers." Toward the end of the coup it was rumored he had committed suicide, but he was arrested alive and well -- if slightly inebriated.
After years of obscurity, Yazov climbed back into the limelight by 2000 as a senior counselor in the Defense Ministry. Now, according to press reports, he has become a key military adviser to Putin, important enough to be spotted greeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Il on his recent visit to Moscow.
ALEXANDER LEBED
In Russian political circles, the former major general is not known as the smartest of men. But on Aug. 20, 1991, Lebed made a very smart choice. Under orders to storm the White House, he quickly assessed the futility of the coup and his place in history if he slaughtered unarmed civilians. He switched sides and joined the defenders of the White House.
Five years later, Lebed became Yeltsin's main nemesis, almost driving him from power in the 1996 presidential election. In return for withdrawing from the race at the last minute, Lebed was made national security chief and given the thankless task of securing peace in Chechnya. His "peace" held only until 1999, but that was long enough for him to get elected governor of the vast, oil-rich Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk.
Scenes of the crimes
THE WHITE HOUSE
At the time of the coup, it was headquarters of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, one of 15 constituent states of the Soviet Union. It was here that Yeltsin had his offices and here where he made his stand, turning the building into a symbol of democracy for Russians and newswatchers worldwide.
Two years later, when Rutskoi tried to oust Yeltsin, the Russian president did not hesitate to turn his tanks on the building, blackening the top floors and smoking out his opponents.
After a multimillion-dollar renovation, the building is now headquarters for Russia's bureaucracy. These civil servants now outnumber those of the Soviet era and symbolize the corruption and red tape that has paralyzed the country's economy.
GORBACHEV'S DACHA
Every Russian loves his "dacha," his little home in the woods that provides respite from city life, but Gorbachev's was something special. While most Soviet citizens, and most Russians today, retreat to bare-bones bungalows whose vegetable gardens provide vital sustenance, the Soviet leader was entitled to the most modern of amenities and a beautiful beachfront on the Crimean Peninsula.
After the break-up of the Soviet Union, though, the Crimea became part of Ukraine, now an independent country. Its border guards closely scrutinize the passports of their former Russian overlords who still go there on vacation. While most Russians have long forgotten about Gorbachev's dacha, most long for the return of the Crimea, something Ukraine promises will never happen.
Sam Greene is a freelance journalist based in Moscow who writes on occasion for the Post-Gazette