The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy

The Soviet prime minister, Ryzhkov, told a Politburo meeting in November 1989, “We should not fear the Baltic[[s]], but Russia and Ukraine. This would smell like total disintegration. And then we would need another government, another leadership for the country, and already another country.” Few could foresee in the fall of 1989 how prophetic Ryzhkov’s comment would prove only a few months later.

In May 1990 Yeltsin was elected Speaker of the Russian parliament on the third ballot by a rather slim margin: 535 deputies voted for him, 467 against. But the declaration of Russian political sovereignty that he proposed a few months later gained the support of two-thirds of the deputies.

In the summer of 1990 the Yeltsinled Russian parliament declared Russia sovereign, giving its laws priority over those of the Union. In the fall of that year, Ryzhkov told the Politburo that none of his orders were being followed. He was soon dismissed by Gorbachev as part of a cabinet reshuffle intended to crush what became known as the “parade of sovereignties.”

WHEN MOST OF THE SOVIET REPUBLICS declared sovereignty, there was no formula in place to define the new relationships between them and the central government. The constitution provided an all-Union façade for the heavily centralized state and even guaranteed republics the right to leave the Union, but it offered no tools for managing relations between the center and the republics.

In January 1991, without formally declaring a state of emergency, he gave carte blanche to head of the KGB Vladimir Kriuchkov, Minister of Defense Dmitrii Yazov, and the new minister of the interior, Boris Pugo, to take any measures necessary to stop the movement of Soviet republics toward sovereignty and independence.

Gorbachev had finally found an alternative to a state of emergency: instead of going back to the status quo ante and relying on force to restore the power of the center, he would go forward and find a formula to balance the interests of the center and the republics.

Gorbachev had to accept the results of the first presidential elections in Russia—his former protégé, now his opponent, became the first president of the Russian Federation thanks to a popular mandate that Gorbachev himself lacked. Gorbachev had become president of the Soviet Union on the basis of ballots cast by members of the Soviet parliament. He now found himself obliged to deal with Yeltsin.

BORIS YELTSIN, WHO HAD EMBARRASSED Gorbachev at his own party and then at the Spaso House reception hosted by Bush, was not just the popularly elected leader of the Union’s largest republic; he was also about to take control of most of the Union’s oil and gas resources. The state of the Union’s coffers and, possibly, the salary of Mikhail Gorbachev himself would depend on Yeltsin’s goodwill.

Yeltsin was calmer but no less determined. “Ukraine must not leave the Soviet Union,” he told the American president during their meeting in Yeltsin’s Kremlin office. Without Ukraine, Yeltsin argued, the Soviet Union would be dominated by the non-Slavic republics.

It appeared that the CIA, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin were all agreed on one thing: if the United States wanted a peaceful transformation of the Soviet regime, which was now abiding by the START agreements to cut its nuclear arsenals, it should make certain that Ukraine stayed in the Union.

Kravchuk and the Ukrainian leadership decided to use Bush’s stopover in Kyiv to push for two things: the opening of a Ukrainian consulate in the United States (a US consulate had just opened in Kyiv) and economic investment of up to $5 billion.

The president was gathering his thoughts about a day that he called historic in his diary. In faraway Moscow, that day had seen the declaration of a state of emergency by Gorbachev’s former allies, his ousting from power on grounds of alleged poor health, and the appearance of tanks in the streets.

Those in charge of the committee—a group of hard-liners led by Vice President Gennadii Yanaev—included the heads of the KGB and the military, Vladimir Kriuchkov and Marshal Dmitrii Yazov.

Bush noted, however—correctly, as it turned out—that it was not Yanaev but the KGB and army hard-liners who were calling the shots in the coup.

The most important thing on the minds of administration officials that day was to look tough in front of the television cameras without provoking the coup leaders into abandoning international agreements signed by Gorbachev.

Robert Gates wrote in his memoirs that in the months leading up to the coup the administration was following the approach summarized by Brent Scowcroft at a national security briefing for the president on May 31, 1991: “Our goal is to keep Gorby in power for as long as possible, while doing what we can to help head him in the right direction—and doing what is best for us in foreign policy.”

one of his aides, Georgii Shakhnazarov,

A few minutes earlier, two KGB officers who had arrived in the Crimea together with the head of the bodyguard department of the KGB, General Yurii Plekhanov, ordered Tamara Vikulina, a telephone operator at the KGB-run government telephone center, to cut Gorbachev’s lines.

the plotters, who included the minister of defense, Marshal Yazov, and the chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Moiseev, the bearers of two other nuclear briefcases. The Ministry of Defense became the sole master of the Soviet nuclear force.

Vladimir Medvedev, the chief of his personal security

Members of the group included his chief of staff, Valerii Boldin;

commander of Soviet ground troops, General Valentin Varennikov.

When they told him that they represented a committee including Kriuchkov, Yazov, and Yanaev,

Valerii Boldin, the fifty-six-year-old chief of the presidential staff and the plotter who knew the president best, believed that Gorbachev felt somewhat relieved when he heard the names of the committee members. Gorbachev’s main concern, argued Boldin in his memoirs, was that the visitors might represent not his indecisive aides but his impulsive archenemy, Boris Yeltsin.

liberal adviser and the “grandfather of perestroika,” Aleksandr Yakovlev, and the military.

General Plekhanov, the chief of the KGB directorate.

As Gorbachev sat in his study, facing the representatives of the plotters, it was not the loyalty of the guards but the treason of his most trusted associates that was his first concern. Against all odds, he was trying to win a political battle, not an armed confrontation that might well have ended tragically for him and his family. Once he learned that the plotters were not his political opponents but his heretofore sycophantic allies and aides, he not only felt psychological relief of sorts but also found himself in a position of strength.

Interior Minister Boris Pugo, and Vice President Yanaev. Also present was Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov,

There can be little doubt that Kriuchkov, like many of the other plotters, originally supported Gorbachev’s perestroika, which they understood as a set of reforms intended to make the Soviet system more competitive without undermining its foundations. But once they realized that it threatened not only the party, to which the most pragmatic of them had no ideological attachment, but also the political structure of the state and their place in it, their attitude changed.

What made Kriuchkov and the other plotters strike when they did was the threat to their own positions at the top of the power pyramid.

Vladimir Kriuchkov spent the rest of the night meeting with his deputies and commanders and organizing the implementation of the coup. It had been his idea to start with, and his people had been involved in drafting the relevant documents and making the first clandestine preparations.

Yeltsin, Russian prime minister Ivan Silaev, and chairman of the parliament Ruslan Khasbulatov,

Russian vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi,

deputy mayor of Moscow, Yurii Luzhkov,

The proceedings began well. The loyal correspondents asked questions designed to help Yanaev make his case in favor of extraordinary measures and against the actions undertaken by Boris Yeltsin.

The Soviet ambassador, Viktor Komplektov,

Andrei Kozyrev, the foreign minister of the Russian Federation, headed

The issue of Soviet versus Russian identity now came to the fore.

The KGB commandos were also refusing to storm the White House. The all-powerful espionage organization was crumbling under Kriuchkov’s feet. If one trusts claims made later by Vladimir Putin, the future president of Russia, that day the KGB chief received an unexpected call from St. Petersburg. Mayor Anatolii Sobchak, who supported Yeltsin, asked what had happened to the letter of resignation submitted a year earlier by his deputy, the thirty-eight-year-old KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin. That day Putin allegedly submitted his second letter of resignation. His allegiance was to Sobchak, not to the coup leaders. As Putin recalled later, he respected Kriuchkov, but “when I saw the criminals on the screen, I understood immediately that it was all over: they were done for.”

There was the mayor, Gavriil Popov, and his deputy, Yurii Luzhkov.

Yeltsin sent his vice president, General Aleksandr Rutskoi,

commander of the Soviet air force, Air Marshal Shaposhnikov,

the Speaker of the Soviet parliament, Anatolii Lukianov,

chief of the General Staff, General Mikahil Moiseev,

Gorbachev’s aide Vadim Medvedev,

By the afternoon of August 21, Gorbachev had fully reemerged as a powerful force in Soviet politics.

Until the very end, Yeltsin and those around him did not know for sure whether Gorbachev was behind the plotters or not.

There were many things in the postcoup situation that Gorbachev apparently failed to grasp or fully appreciate. One of them was the dramatically increased power of the street in Soviet politics. The masses that had occupied the streets and squares of Moscow during and immediately after the failed coup had become a force in their own right. They were also a potent weapon in the hands of Boris Yeltsin and his allies, who could speak to the masses, direct their actions, and make use of their support in political battles at the top. Gorbachev could not.

Eager to fill vacant cabinet posts as soon as possible, Gorbachev promoted deputies of former ministers who he believed were not implicated in the coup.

As acting minister of defense he appointed General Mikhail Moiseev,