The Party was over. Lenin’s dream, as an old Bolshevik might put it, has been consigned to the dustbin of history. Five of the eight coup leaders who had tried to depose Mikhail Gorbachev were jailed in disgrace and two others were detained; the eighth, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, shot himself. In the wake of the coup’s collapse, the hero of the resistance, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, ordered the party shut down throughout Russia. And at the weekend, Gorbachev himself resigned as general secretary, ordered all party property to be turned over to the people and urged the Central Committee to formally dissolve the party. A massive purge seemed inevitable; their persecutors may refrain from Stalinist show trials and gulags, but clearly thousands of apparatchiks will soon be trading special privileges for unemployment, if not jail cells.
No one suggested the constitutional and economic crisis of the Soviet Union was over. Nor could anyone realistically guarantee that this coup would be the last, or that the accelerating process of political change would not sooner or later descend to violence. The Soviet Union has been run so long by the Communist Party–and before that, by the tyranny of the czars–that it was far from certain its diverse peoples could find a way to govern themselves equitably. But the images from Moscow-of Yeltsin’s defiant speech atop an Army tank, of Gorbachev’s midnight return to Moscow, and of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens gathering to defend their infant democracy-were persuasive indicators that this time Russia might escape its tragic tradition of blood, revolution and repression. The party and the KGB, once omnipotent but now disgraced by their leaders’ complicity in the failed coup, were in full retreat: the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB and mastermind of the Bolshevik terror, was unceremoniously removed from its pedestal before a mob of jeering Muscovites. “This is a turning point in Russian history,” said Phillip Petersen, a Soviet expert at the National War College in Washington. “The Russian people have waited a thousand years for this.”
The obvious irony was that the coup makers, in conspiring to preserve the old order, had simultaneously discredited the party and the KGB and given Yeltsin’s reformers a smashing triumph. The junta’s nominal leader, Soviet Vice President Gennady Yanayev, was widely regarded as the front man for the others. Six of the eight held top government posts: the list included KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Defense Minster Dmitry Yazov, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and Interior Minister Pugo. All eight were longtime members of the Communist Party and veterans of its internecine power struggles. Their professed motive for attempting to overthrow Gorbachev was to rescue the Soviet Union from its economic crisis. Their real motive, in the eyes of most observers, was to prevent the adoption of the proposed union treaty, which would drastically decentralize Soviet political power, and to protect their own privileged positions as members of the party elite. They were trying, so to speak, to make the world safe for bureaucracy.
Though clearly trying to depict himself in the most favorable light, Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh gave ABC’s “Nightline” a tantalizing glimpse of the coup’s inner workings. As he told it, he knew nothing of the plot until he was summoned to the Kremlin on the night Gorbachev was taken captive. “I was directed to a large room and there was a long table and there were people sitting there, generals in military uniforms and [KGB Chairman] Kryuchkov, [Prime Minister] Pavlov, some of those.” Kryuchkov, he said, took him aside and said “the situation in the country is terrible … it’s an emergency. Something should be done, and we decided to do something.” What about Gorbachev, Bessmertnykh asked. “He is incapable of functioning now. He’s laying flat in a dacha,” Kryuchkov said. Bessmertnykh said he refused to take part, and that he warned the plotters that overthrowing Gorbachev could lead to the Soviet Union’s diplomatic isolation and possibly to sanctions and embargoes by the West. “They don’t help us anyway,” he was told; as he saw it, the decision to go ahead with the coup had already been made.
The conspirators’ abject failure has now pushed Gorbachev straight into the arms of those who are demanding fundamental political and economic reform. His performance before the Russian legislature last Friday was a case in point. With Yeltsin clearly in control of the situation, Gorbachev reluctantly agreed to the order suspending party activity in Russia. Under Yeltsin’s prodding, he also read the minutes of the Monday night cabinet meeting at which most ministers supported the coup. As the minutes revealed, the state leadership registered no dissents and no objections-and Gorbachev, though warning against a “witch hunt,” could only concede that the ministers had panicked. “There are people who lost their heads, all sense of responsibility,” he said. “You could even call them traitors! Traitors!”
Now, Gorbachev said, “we need a major regrouping of political forces.. a reliable government.” In plain language, that meant a purge-first against the main conspirators, then against the lesser figures who had helped them. One was Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s own chief of staff-allegedly the inside man. Another was Col. Gen. Mikhail Moiseyev, the armed forces chief of staff. Moiseyev, who had just been appointed defense minister to replace the arrested Marshal Yazov, had reportedly approved the orders to send the tanks into downtown Moscow on Monday morning. He was sacked hours after assuming his new job. A third culprit was Anatoly Lukyanov, speaker of the Soviet Parliament, said to have been the ideological leader the conspirators and, in effect, the ninth member of the rebel junta. Leonid Shebarshin, acting chief of the KGB, was also sacked. And Bessmertnykh, who mournfully protested his innocence, was forced to resign because he had failed to oppose the coup publicly. Those who defied the coup, he complained, “now ask everyone, ‘Where [were you] during those three days? Were you on the barricades? And if you were not on the barricades-aha! there’s something suspicious.’ Who are you?”
Few doubt that the search for scapegoats will continue for weeks and possibly months. Yeltsin’s crackdown on the party hierarchy has already led to the sealing of the party’s Moscow headquarters, where apparatchiks were destroying records that could reveal the involvement of specific party officials in the coup. “It’s not a purge,” said Sergei Filatov, an official of the Russian parliament. “But they’re destroying documents that could make it possible to restore the truth. … we must determine the position of each official and say, ‘Can we trust you in that post?’” The issue now, many in the democracy movement say, is how to judge the conspirators and their fellow travelers. Yeltsin has promised that the coup makers will be put on trial. But many of his supporters want those trials to be public, with an eye to eliciting testimony that will implicate other culprits. The arch-conservative Soyuz movement and its “black colonels,” the military officers who are Gorbachev’s most vociferous critics, are also likely targets of investigation. “The important thing,” Filatov said, “is to make a clean sweep, but not to make a war out of it.” But, he added, “a war is possible.”
Yeltsin and Gorbachev, meanwhile, took dramatic new steps to break the party’s longstanding grip on Soviet government and society. One is the expropriation of all party-owned property, including Pravda, Izvestia, Tass and other propaganda organs. The party, which is already leaderless, is thus likely to be broke as well. Other decrees ended the party’s institutional relationships with the KGB and the Soviet military-the interlocking directorate that essentially governed the Soviet Union from 1917 to the beginning of Gorbachev’s reform era.
The loss of the KGB alone was shattering. With its legion of spies, snoops and thugs, the KGB served as the Communist hierarchy’s eyes, ears and fist through the nightmare years of Stalinist repression. That history-along with widespread suspicions that the KGB has attempted to disrupt the democracy movement-now fuels the reformers’ hatred of the party and the KGB. “The party has shown itself to be a terrorist organization, with the KGB as its punitive arm,” said Aleksandr Golishnikov, a member of the Russian legislature. “But when light is finally thrown on them, the Communists will all go to ground, like cockroaches.” Last week, the reformer Gorbachev appointed to head the KGB, former interior minister Vadim Bakatin, said he intended to end the tradition of secretpolice surveillance that dates back to the time of the czars. The KGB, Bakatin said, should now restrict its role to being a foreign intelligence agency-something like the CIA. We have to be sure, Bakatin said, that “everyone is secure and that no one is being watched.”
Expelling the party from the Soviet military is nearly as fundamental. Political officers-party agents-have been a fact of life in the Soviet Army and Navy since the revolution. Their real mission is to ensure loyalty to the party hierarchy and to detect any sign of rebellion or deviation by commanders or their troops. (As dramatized in the movie “The Hunt for Red October,” to cite a fictional example, the political officer shared control of the Soviet submarine’s missile-launch codes with the vessel’s captain.) The union treaty that was to have been signed last week between the Soviet government and its 15 constituent republics will establish a dual system of control for the military: to move troops and equipment, the approval of both Moscow and the republics will be needed. The idea is to make a military-led coup more difficult to pull off-but it may also become a flash point for the Soviet Union’s underlying ethnic and regional tensions. If Army units from the republics balk at Moscow’s directions, this split in military control could provide the ingredients for civil war.
The accelerating assault on the Communist Party could thus lead to liberation–or to deepening chaos. And it was by no means clear, last week, that diehard party members would obey Gorbachev’s order to disband. Nationwide, party membership is currently estimated at more than 15 million. While many have joined the party as a means of winning promotions or desirable jobs, millions of others still believe in the party’s goals and political values. There will be resistance to its demise, and the party may well survive in selected pockets of the nation. Some observers are also fearful that the party may go underground, thus becoming what it was before Lenin’s successful coup d’etat in 1917–subversive, bitter and possibly violent, a committed enemy of the peaceful revolution now underway.
After the deception and intrigue of coup, it was tough keeping up with the changes in the Kremlin last week. The purged became the purgers–and vice versa. Even the most dedicated Kremlin watchers needed a score card to keep track of their comings and goings.
Air Force commander who defied coup leaders. Supports military reductions.
Former interior minister, fired last year for being too liberal. Staunch reformist.
Gorbachev’s advisor on the national union treaty, now his top aide.
Former editor in chief of Izvestia; likely to be chosen Parliament speaker.
Former chief of the joint armed forces of the now disbanded Warsaw Pact.
Chosen by Gorbachev last year. Assumed role of acting In coup. Arrested.
Since 1988, tried to improve KGB’s image. A vocal critic of Gorbachev. Arrested.
Son of a peasant, was promoted over more senior officers in 1987. Arrested.
An economics specialist, appointed in January. Hospitalized–then arrested.
Appointed in 1990. Perhaps most hard-line of the putschists. Committed suicide.
Replaced Eduard Shevardnadze last year. Accused of “passivity.’ Fired.
A key negotiator on the START treaty. May have acquiesced in the coup. Fired.
Alleged to have been the ideologue behind the plot. Fired.
