I still remember waking up 20 years ago today. My phone was ringing; it was my brother (who is always my business partner.) I assumed he was calling me about work - it was a bit early, but he got to work before I did. He wasn’t calling me about work. He asked me if I had the news on. I didn’t and he told me that Michael Gorbachev had been overthrown in a hard line coup. Before he could give me any details, I cut him off with one question. “Where’s Yeltsin?”
This diary is about Boris Yeltsin - my personal hero - and how his bravery and brains brought down the malignant entity that loomed over the first half of my life. Please follow me after the jump.
I heard about Boris Yeltsin before nearly anybody else in the west. Before the Internet, it was very difficult to get news other than local interest stuff, US News and the most high profile world stories. I am not sure where I read of this person named Yeltsin who had been forced out of the Politburo for being too much of a reformer. (In fact, Yeltsin quit because he was uncomfortable with what he saw as a cult of personality forming around Gorbachev and because he really just couldn’t stand hypocrisy of the Soviet government who rewarded it’s top people with special stores and privileges while the ordinary people went without.) I remember thinking that perhaps this was a high tide for Gorbachev’s reforms and that he would not let things go any further. In fact, Yeltsin was simply ahead of the curve - within a year others would be saying openly what he had said behind closed doors to Gorbachev’s face. With hindsight, it’s clear Gorbachev and his people miscalculated badly in how they handled the Yeltsin affair; by dragging him through the mud but without laying out exactly what he had said, the man on the street started imaging all sorts of things that Yeltsin might have said on their behalf. Yeltsin had been the top party official in charge of Moscow before quitting and in that position he’d gained a reputation as a populist standing up for the little guy. He used to take public transportation rather than use the Zil limousines provided by the party, for example. In any case, Gorbachev’s reforms went just far enough to allow Yeltsin a way back into power without the support of the party bosses. He managed to secure a nomination to run for the new Congress of People’s Deputies running in the Moscow district (despite Party shenanigans to deny him one) and then won in a landslide. This symbolic victory vaulted him to international attention and some people started looking at him as the possible opposition leader. There was another possible candidate for this unofficial position - Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov had been an international figure for years; a noted dissident and was quite popular in the west. However, he died within a year of being elected leaving no one with the stature to challenge Yeltsin.
Yeltsin continued to build his power base; getting elected to the new Russian parliament and being chosen as the chairman of it. From there, he pushed for the creation of the post of President of Russia, which he then ran for and won in June of 1991. As President or Russia, he had been the leading advocate for a new union treaty, which would weaken the Soviet Union and strengthen it’s member states’ autonomy.
Gorbachev, meanwhile, had indeed been backsliding. He had purged his government of reformers and replaced them entirely with hardliners. In December of 1990, his closest ally in government, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had nosily resigned, warning that ‘dictatorship is coming!’ In January 1991, Gorbachev sent tanks into Vilnius, the capital of the Baltic republic of Lithuania which had been making noise about splitting off from the Soviet Union and killing a number of unarmed protesters. Forces were also sent into Lativa at the same time. The message was clear; Gorbachev had been prepared to let the Warsaw Pact countries go, but he was not prepared to let any of the Soviet Republics break away and was prepared to spill blood to prevent it. However, when he agreed to the new Union treaty in the summer of that year, he unknowingly sealed his own doom.
He didn’t replace any of the hardliners he’d filled his government with and many of them felt that the new Union treaty was giving away too much power. Almost without exception, the whole government turned on Gorbachev and on August 18th, sent a delegation to confront him where he was vacationing on the Crimea, demanding his resignation in favor of his colorless Vice President, Gennady Yanayev. They had expected their united front would get Gorbachev to agree and throw in the towel, but he refused, leaving them to go with plan ‘B’ which was to put him under house arrest and claim he was ‘tired and sick’ and simply declare Yanayev the leader without Gorbachev’s resignation.
Many people assumed after the fact that this coup was destined to fail but this is far from the truth. In it’s opening hours, the coup plotters were quite successful. The armed forces responded to their orders and sent large numbers of tanks patrolling through the streets of Moscow as a show of force. With the exception of some noise from the Baltics, the leaders of the other Soviet Republics were silent; most notably Nursultan Nazarbayev, the leader of Kazakhstan. Gorbachav’s replacement for Shevardnadze as Foreign Minister, Alexander Bessmertnykh, got busy sending messages to all the Soviet embassies telling them to support the coup. Asked about the coup on Air Force One, President George HW Bush made a rather neutral statement to the press saying that he had met Yanayev before and could ‘work with him.’ Two years before, a move toward democracy had been brutally crushed in China; for a few hours, it looked like the same thing could be happening in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, it should be noted, had no popular mandate. He’d never once stood for election - getting into the Congress of People’s Deputies by appointment rather than face the voters. His position as General Secretary and as President of the Soviet Union came by the appointment of the same party apparatchiks who had now turned on him. They now controlled all levers of government; the army, the press and the bureaucracy. While they did not present an impressive picture (Yanayev was visibly drunk when he read the statement taking over the government), they were holding most of the cards on the morning of August 19th.
I had asked my brother when he called up “Where’s Yeltsin?” He had returned from vacation and was at his house in the Moscow suburbs. Expecting Gorbachev to resign, the coup plotters had not made a plan to deal with Yeltsin and this was their undoing. Had they isolated him the way they did Gorbachev, their coup would likely have succeeded. They did belatedly send a team to surround his house, but before they could get them the orders to arrest him, he was on the move. Over his wife’s objections, (she was sure he was going to be shot) he left his house protected only by a tiny Russian tricolor flag fluttering on the front of his car and drove to the Russian White House; the seat of government for the Russian Federation. They tried to isolate him there; cutting off the phones and sending tanks to surround it but a new line had just been installed and was not listed on the records so this line remained open. Yeltsin would use this line over the next three days to direct the opposition to the coup. As for the tanks, Yeltsin had a different tactic.
Unlike many in the pro-democracy movement in the Soviet Union, Yeltsin had gone out of his way to cultivate a good relationship with the military. He made it clear that he did not see them as an arm of the Communist Party and this attitude would be critical to bringing down the coup. Over the objection of his extremely nervous aides, Yeltsin went outside and greeted the tank commanders, shaking their hands and smiling at them. Then he climbed up on top of one of them and read a statement to the press. The words were not important; Yeltsin wasn’t a wordsmith and the statement had been hastily written. Basically, he called on the military not to dishonor Mother Russia by harming its citizens and for the people to resist the coup. It wasn’t the words that people noted, it was the picture. Yeltsin standing confidently on the tank with protesters holding up a large Russian flag send the message to the people that they did not have to accept this coup and they did not have to fear their own military. More and more protesters came to the White House and one of the tank battalions that had been sent to surround it switched allegiance to Yeltsin and declared that they would in fact defend the White House if any other units tried to attack it.
Meanwhile, Yeltsin got on the phones, calling world leaders and telling them to demand Gorvachev’s reinstatement and to not recognize the coup. Yanayev declared a State of Emergency, but events were quickly spinning out of the Gang of Eight’s control. The next day, they decided that they would have to storm the White House by force and issued orders to the special forces to do so. After assessing the situation, the leaders of the special forces realized it would be a huge bloodbath if they tried it and secretly informed Yeltsin what was being requested of them. That night, one motorized unit did move forward but after being involved in a situation that ended in three young protesters being killed, they stopped. The main units flat out refused to follow the order.
Now in a panic, the Gang of Eight sent a delegation to Gorbachev to try and negotiate their way out of the situation but he was having none of it and once he had his phone restored, he had them all arrested (One of them, the Interior Minister Boris Pugo, shot himself.) Gorbachev returned to Moscow but did not understand that he was a survivor, not the victor, of the coup. That position belonged solely to Yeltsin and he struck quickly, banning the Communist party and within six months, had dismantled the Soviet Union. The entity that had held much of the world in fear and oppressed it’s own citizens for close to a century was no more.
Yeltsin’s reign as President of Russia was a mixed bag, of course. As his own worst critic, he himself admitted that he did not succeed in doing what he’d hoped for. What he wanted to rise in the ashes of the Soviet Union was, in his words, a ‘normal country’ where people had every chance to prosper and enjoy themselves. This had been his dream ever since walking into a supermarket in Huston Texas in 1989 and he realized that something ordinary Americans take for granted would seem a Utopian dream for most Russians. He wanted his people to be able to walk into a supermarket like that and have enough money to buy food to put on their table.
Yeltsin usually had to deal with a hostile western press, especially early on. Many of them had fallen in love with Gorbachev and resented Yeltsin for opposing him. Unlike the more polished Gorbachev, Yeltsin was from the provinces and spoke no English; the western intelligentsia found him boorish. But it must be stated that Gorbachev was a dyed in the wool Leninist - he often said that his grandfather would turn over in his grave if he did anything to harm the party - and is intention was to simply reform the system. Yelstin’s grandfather, by contrast, has been an up-by-his-bootstraps guy who had worked hard and risen from being poor to middle class, only to see the Communist party steal everything he had worked for. Yeltsin’s father and uncle had been arrested and sent to a gulag in the height of the Stalinist purges simply because as the sons of someone who had once ‘owned’ something they were considered suspicious. Yeltsin had no love of the Communist party and had only joined it so he could get some things done in his region. And engineer by trade, he despised the inefficiency and unfairness of the system and succeeded in bringing it down.
I could say more about Yeltsin but to cover the years of his presidency would be beyond the scope of this diary. Most people today mostly remember things like his drinking problem and the collapse of the Russian economy that happened under his watch. But I remember the man on the tank; the man without whom we might well still be living in a divided world with two hostile powers aiming thousands of nuclear weapons at each other. That man grabbed the current of history and yanked it into a new course; I can think of no other person in the second half of the 20th century who changed our world as much as Boris Yeltsin. The last thing I will say is that I expect to soon become a father and my son will be named Boris. As the drunken priest who baptized Yeltsin said “It’s a good strong name; Boris.” And Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin is certainly deserving of the honor.