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June 28 - August 1, 2023
The position at the helm of the KGB was entrusted to Leonid Shebarshin,
What now seemed paramount was not the closeness of Gorbachev’s new appointees to the coup leaders, who were no longer a threat, but their distance from Yeltsin, who was reemerging as Gorbachev’s main rival for power.
Gorbachev’s aide Vadim Medvedev referred to Yeltsin’s actions in the first days after the coup as a countercoup.
The new minister of defense, appointed on Yeltsin’s recommendation, was Air Marshal Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, who had opposed the coup and made his position known to Yeltsin and his entourage. Yeltsin now had his man in charge of the Soviet military. He also negotiated the appointment of Vadim Bakatin, a Gorbachev ally who had supported Yeltsin during the coup, as the new KGB chief. Furthermore, Yeltsin insisted on the removal of Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, the Soviet foreign minister, who had reported himself ill while the coup was in progress.
“I had told him that the coup had taught us a bitter lesson and therefore I had to insist that he not make any personnel decisions without first obtaining my consent,” recalled Yeltsin, describing his conversation with Gorbachev about ministerial appointments.
It was a countercoup indeed. Yeltsin was forcing Gorbachev to appoint either his own people or those he considered well disposed to him personally. The appointments of Shaposhnikov and Bakatin would turn out to be crucial in the months leading up to the disintegration of the USSR.
Gorbachev was clearly in retreat. He was confused, and his position was undermined by accusations that he himself had been behind the coup.
Then came the morning of August 23. Yeltsin’s lieutenants seemed to be in control of the crowds and were in no hurry to send the demonstrators home, realizing their political importance for the moment.
That day, while Gorbachev and Yeltsin bargained for ministerial positions at the Kremlin, real power in the country and the capital rested with Gennadii Burbulis, a forty-six-year-old grandson of Latvian immigrants who had grown up in Yeltsin’s native Sverdlovsk. A former university professor of Marxist political economy and, since the beginning of perestroika, a democratic organizer and an anticommunist to boot, Burbulis had recently been appointed by Yeltsin to the post of secretary of state, the second-highest office in the Russian hierarchy. This gave him control over the presidential
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Yeltsin had scored another major victory in his contest with Gorbachev to control the levers of power. With the reversal of the appointments of security ministers and suspension of the activities of the Communist Party, Gorbachev all but lost his influence in the country and his power base.
ON THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY, August 23, George Bush and Brent Scowcroft were watching a televised relay of Gorbachev’s meeting with the Russian deputies and Yeltsin’s humiliation of his rival. “It’s all over,” was Scowcroft’s comment. Gorbachev, he told the president, was “not an independent actor anymore. Yeltsin is telling him what to do. I do not think Gorbachev understands what’s happened.” George Bush agreed:
The banning of the Communist Party was an important milestone in the ideological competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and seasoned cold warriors such as Bush and Scowcroft had every reason to celebrate. But more important for the moment was its significance for Gorbachev’s political survival.
On that day Yeltsin’s young foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev,
THE SOVIET PRESIDENT’S DOWNFALL became complete on Saturday, August 24. On the morning of that day, he and Yeltsin attended the funeral of three young men who had died defending the White House on the night of August 20.
Yeltsin’s prime minister, Ivan Silaev.
It was the KGB and military officers who had led the coup. As a group, however, the apparatchiks had stood to benefit most from a successful coup, which was supposed to reverse Yeltsin’s decree banning party cells at state enterprises.
The coup had seemed the only way to restore the party’s monopoly of political power. But with the coup a failure and Gorbachev resigning from the highest party post, the political force that had ruled the country with an iron fist, and often with a blood-smeared club in its hands, was going down to defeat without bloodshed.
On the evening of Sunday, August 25, one day after Gorbachev stepped down as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and signed a decree on the transfer of party property, and the day on which Yeltsin signed his own decree seizing that property, Nikolai Kruchina, the sixty-three-year-old chief of staff of the Central Committee, went to his old office to discuss the property transfer with representatives of the Moscow government.
It was the sunny Saturday morning of August 24, the day on which Yeltsin upstaged Gorbachev at the funeral for the defenders of the White House and on which the Soviet leader stepped down as head of the Communist Party. What would happen in Kyiv that day would send a shock wave around the Soviet Union considerably greater than the one set off by that day’s events in Moscow. The second Soviet republic would declare its complete independence from the Union.
The Kyivan crowds had not gathered in the city’s downtown on August 24 to defend parliament, as had been the case in Moscow a few days earlier, but to condemn the communist parliamentary majority for its covert support of the coup.
The fate of the party was not their only concern; otherwise people would have gathered at the building of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee, only a few blocks from parliament. They did not do so because it was no longer in the party’s power to grant or revoke what they wanted. Carrying placards that read “Ukraine is leaving the USSR,” they demanded independence for their country. Only parliament could deliver that.
John Stepanchuk, the acting consul general of the United States in Kyiv,
Leonid Kravchuk, the silver-haired Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament,
Varennikov had come to Ukraine because the plotters in Moscow were apprehensive about Rukh—the pro-independence alliance of Ukraine’s opposition parties—and its possible actions against the coup in Kyiv and western Ukraine.
deputy prime minister, Serhii Komisarenko.
The title of the government decree establishing the commission indicated the main concern of its creators: “On the Establishment of a Temporary Commission to Prevent Extraordinary Situations.” If a state of emergency was declared in Ukraine, then real power would be taken away from the parliament and government, where it had rested until then. Once lost, it would never be regained.
first secretary of the Central Committee, Stanislav Hurenko,
Chornovil, a longtime prisoner of the Gulag and now head of the Lviv regional administration in western Ukraine,
Anatolii Sobchak, the democratically elected mayor of Leningrad. With the help of his deputy, Vladimir Putin,
reformist leader in the Ukrainian parliament, Deputy Speaker Volodymyr Hryniov,
The first impression was that the republican leaders did not mind Yeltsin’s rapid accession to virtually dictatorial powers in the Union to which they all still belonged. Experienced politicians raised in a tradition of party subordination and Byzantine intrigue, they voiced no disagreement with the now dominant Russian president, who was their traditional ally against the weakening center. They were also unanimous in condemning the coup that many of them had supported only a few days earlier. Nor did they voice any objection to Yeltsin’s assault on the party to which they belonged. That day
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Levko Lukianenko, the head of the Ukrainian Republican Party,
The plan was to keep Ukraine within the Union by raising the prospect of partitioning its territory if Ukraine insisted on independence.
Reporting on this new mission of Rutskoi and his colleagues, a correspondent for the pro-Yeltsin Nezavisimaia gazeta wrote, “Today they have the opportunity to inform the Ukrainian leadership of Yeltsin’s position that, given Ukraine’s exit from membership in ‘a certain USSR,’ the article of the bilateral agreement on borders becomes invalid.” Translated into plain language, this meant that Russia was denouncing its existing treaty with Ukraine, its neighbor, and threatening Ukraine with partition of its territory. “It is expected,” continued the newspaper account, “that independence will be
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Anatolii Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad
The declaration of Ukrainian independence produced a shock wave throughout the Soviet Union, dramatically altering the political landscape.
Kravchuk’s Ukraine became the first country with a communist-dominated legislature to make such a declaration, clearing the way for other republics run by the communist or former communist nomenklatura
On August 25, the day after Ukraine’s parliament voted for independence, a similar declaration was made by Belarus; on August 26 came one by Ukraine’s other neighbor, Moldova. Faraway Azerbaijan would proclaim its independence on August 30. It would be followed the next day by Kyrgyzstan and a day later by Uzbekistan. Not only Gorbachev but also Yeltsin looked on in horror and astonishment as one republic after another declared its independence.
What, then, were the practical consequences of the declarations? For the time being, the major difference between sovereignty and independence was that if sovereignty gave republican laws priority over all-Union ones, independence made it possible to disregard all-Union laws entirely. Only republican laws were now valid. The formal independence of the republics also meant the emergence of more powerful republican leaders.
August 24 marked a turning point, not only because of the declaration of Ukrainian independence but also because, on the same day, the three Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, received recognition of their independence from Yeltsin himself.
Georgia, which had declared independence on April 9, 1991, much earlier than Estonia or Latvia, was not granted recognition. It was not clear whether Ukraine’s declaration of independence would place it in the same camp as the Baltics or Georgia.
deputy from Ukraine, Yurii Shcherbak,
Many in Yeltsin’s camp treated Ukrainian independence not as an act aimed at the weakened center but as a stab in the back of democratic Russia, which had emerged victorious in the battle with the communist Goliath.
As Sobchak, Stankevich, and Likhachev joined forces in an attempt to save the Union in the Soviet parliament, Boris Yeltsin ordered his press secretary, the forty-two-year-old economist-turned-journalist Pavel Voshchanov, to prepare a statement to the effect that “if any republic breaks off Union relations with Russia, then Russia has the right to raise the question of territorial claims.”
The statement did not name the republics with which Russia might have territorial disputes, but when Voshchanov was asked during the press conference which countries Yeltsin had in mind, he responded by naming Ukraine and Kazakhstan. He recalled later that the contested areas included territories that had earlier belonged to Russia: the Crimea and the Donetsk region of Ukraine, Abkhazia in Georgia, and northern territories of Kazakhstan.
Gavriil Popov, the democratic mayor of Moscow and Yeltsin’s close ally, appeared on central television to claim that he supported Yeltsin’s position on secessionist republics and that border questions would have to be decided by referendum in the border regions. He referred specifically to the Crimea, Odesa, and Moldovan Transnistria. The irony of the situation was that the elites in the regions mentioned by Popov had welcomed the coup, and most of their inhabitants showed no sympathy for the democratic Russian leaders in Moscow.
But not everyone in Moscow applauded Yeltsin and Voshchanov. On the day after the publication of Voshchanov’s statement, seven prominent democratic figures led by Yurii Afanasiev and Elena Bonner, whose anticoup credentials were beyond reproach, signed an appeal titled “We Welcome the Fall of the Empire.” They acknowledged that the leadership of some republics leaving the Union was dominated by communists who had supported the coup and were prone to oppress their own people, but this was to be resisted by coordinated action with other democratic powers, not by restoring the empire. “Most
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On August 27, the day on which the Voshchanov statement was issued, the Rukh association of Ukrainian democratic parties fired off a statement of its own. It accused the “newly democratized leaders of Russia” of “imperial aspirations” akin to those manifested by the Bolsheviks in 1917. At that time, under the banner of proletarian revolution, the Bolsheviks had crushed the young Ukrainian independence movement and destroyed its democratic institutions.
By August 28, a mere two days after Yeltsin and the new Russian deputies had reduced Gorbachev to submission and all but taken over the Union center, the victors found themselves in great difficulty. Kravchuk and Nazarbayev, who were supposed to have been reminded of their place in the Union hierarchy, were evidently refusing to fall into line. It was becoming clear that the non-Russian republics were not just pawns in a chess game between the Russian president and his Soviet counterpart. They had agendas of their own, and their combined forces were too strong to be kept in check by two main
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Yeltsin’s prime minister, Ivan Silaev,
