FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION - 20 YEARS AFTER THE COUP:Emotions still run strong and ideologies deep for those on both sides of the 1991 events
ON THE afternoon of Saturday, August 17th, 1991, 20 years ago this week, my wife, Anita, my younger daughter Deirdre and I went on a pleasure cruise on the Moscow river. Nothing, we had been told, happened in Moscow in August.
Some leading American correspondents had even left Moscow for good and handed over to their successors, believing a quiet time was ahead.
My plans were for colourful journeys to Samarkand and Bukhara. Instead, as Irish Times correspondent, I found myself in Moscow for a five-month political convulsion that brought about the death of the USSR and for the years of turmoil that followed.
As our river cruiser glided past the Kremlin, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, had gathered a group of men together to finalise plans for a military coup. The following Monday, the tanks were on the streets of Moscow in an attempt to block the signing of a new treaty that would give the individual Soviet Republics greater autonomy, leading in some cases to independence.
The coup failed and the hero of the hour was deemed to be Boris Yeltsin, who stood on a tank outside the Moscow White House and defied those who planned the coup. In hindsight, matters look different. The plotters got cold feet not long after the coup was launched but they still had Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev detained at his holiday home in the Crimea.
With both hardliners and Gorbachev out of the equation, Yeltsin saw his chance to grab power and he took it. He was a man who wanted power, according to the late Yegor Yakovlev, one of Russia’s most committed democrats. Before his untimely death, Yakovlev spoke to me of Yeltsin’s “animal, his beastly, desire for power”. From this, he said, stemmed his savage hatred of Gorbachev “who was the main obstacle to his coming to power in the first place”.
Yeltsin succeeded in defeating both Gorbachev and the coup plotters, and he brought the Soviet Union to an end on December 8th in a political coup with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus. A formal lowering and raising of flags took place later on Christmas Day.
But Yeltsin was not as comfortable in replacing Soviet power as he was in destroying it. Boris Nemtsov was a member of the Russian parliament who stood side-by-side with Yeltsin against the coup. It was an exhilarating time for him and it kick-started his successful political career.
In Moscow during the week, Nemtsov – now a leader of the democratic opposition to what is known as the “power tandem” of the president, Dmitry Medvedev, and the prime minister, Vladimir Putin – was open about the way things were run. “Yeltsin said to me, ‘I need a governor of Nizhny Novgorod and you are the only one I know from Nizhny Novgorod, so I’m appointing you as governor’.” From the governorship of what was then Russia’s third-largest city, Nemtsov went on to become prime minister, only to be sacked by Yeltsin, for whom sacking had almost become a hobby until he brought Putin to power.
Yuri Firsov was a political insider in 1991. I met him in Ne Skuchni Sad (the Not Boring Garden), a park once part of the Moscow domain of Catherine the Great’s favourite, Prince Orlov.
Firsov had served as foreign affairs adviser to four Soviet prime ministers and was working in the office of prime minister and coup plotter Valentin Pavlov in the Kremlin on those fateful August days.
As we walked through the pathways that wound their way through birch and pine woods, he told how he had been kept in the dark about plans to launch a putsch but he did feel a build-up of tension during the week before.
“I was in Pavlov’s office one day during that week. There was a special phone there to take calls from the president, Mikhail Gorbachev. It rang and Pavlov picked it up. Usually when the president spoke to the prime minister we civil servants would leave the room. On this occasion, I stayed for a while. Then I heard Pavlov utter the following words: ‘Mikhail Sergeyevich, I may be a thief but I’m a Soviet thief.’”
It was obvious the president and prime minister were at loggerheads. Kryuchkov, Pavlov and the other plotters brought the tanks out and said they were doing so to save the Soviet Union. “That may very well have been the case but they were also saving their jobs,” Firsov told me.
Oleg Baklanov thinks differently. A member of the group that planned the coup, he was imprisoned for his efforts. He is not only unrepentant, he believes there’s nothing to repent. Opening his remarks by saying Gorbachev and Yeltsin were a “renegade and a drunkard”, Baklanov continued in Russian in the Ukrainian accent of a man born and raised in Kiev.
His one regret was the coup’s failure: “It was our fault. We should have arrested Yeltsin and Gorbachev.” His feeling of guilt at the coup’s failure seemed genuine. When I asked him how he felt now as he walked around Moscow to see the flag of the Tsar flying where the Red Flag once flew, he left the room in tears.