To clean up the mess, prosecutors are going to have a hard job just deciding where to begin. Documents relating to the coup began to leak out of government offices last week, and they show just how wide a net the plot was at least supposed to cast. One of them, dated Aug. 19, the second day of the coup, is an urgent message from Gen. Mikhail Moiseyev, then chief of the General Staff, explaining that the coup was designed to curb “chaos and anarchy,” that the republics were supporting it and that it had met “a certain understanding” overseas.
Documents obtained by NEWSWEEK show how Moiseyev’s order was transmitted to the Air Defense Forces. One of the documents orders commanders of regimental level and above to put officers on round-the-clock duty and prepare for action, to restrict training exercises, to control communications, to curtail leaves, to stop deserters and to “conduct explanatory work” among troops, their families and local civilians.
A second document, titled “An Appeal,” went to the commander in chief of the Air Defense Forces and his subordinate commanders. “Comrades,” it begins, calling on them to “lead [society] out of the severest crisis it has known since the October Revolution.” The tone is typical of Soviet Army documents, clearly assuming that the military will remain loyal to its top brass. One paragraph offers a tribute to “your political and personal maturity” and says, “We have no doubt that … you will prove worthy of your constitutional duty to the motherland. " But just in case, the document also quotes Lenin’s warning: “Delay may mean death.”
Who was behind all this? No one credited Vice President Gennady Yanayev, the coup’s putative leader, with enough spine for the role. Yanayev spent the last day of the plot sulking in his Kremlin office. A Gorbachev loyalist found him, ordered him to stay put, then forgot him until the next morning. When the loyalist returned, he discovered Yanayev passed out on a couch, the floor around him littered with empty vodka bottles. By the second day of the coup, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov was reportedly taking drugs in large doses. Then he took to his bed, where he had just enough strength to answer a call from Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Shcherbakov and tell him that he was “not so crazy” as to support the Emergency Committee.
Sources in Western intelligence told NEWSWEEK that the masterminds of the coup were KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, 67, and Oleg Baklanov, 59, a leader of the Soviet military-industrial complex. Oleg Shenin, 54, a conservative member of the Politburo, was a silent partner. Dmitry Yazov, the fallen defense minister, was a stolid soldier unlikely to have organized and directed the plot. The real muscle appeared to come from Gen. Valentin Varennikov, commander of the Soviet ground forces. Varennikov directed the Afghan war from Moscow. Leaders in the Baltics suspect him of undertaking the bloody suppression of Lithuanian independents in January. During the summer he joined other ultrarightists in signing a broadside called “Word to the People,” demanding a crackdown on Gorbachev’s reforms. One of his acquaintances says that among all the plotters now in custody, only Varennikov still thinks the coup was a good idea.
The most improbable of the military men implicated in the coup was Sergei Akhromeyev, 68, Gorbachev’s gruff, plainspoken personal military adviser. He appeared to be the Cassius of the plot, a man of integrity who feared for his country and picked the wrong side. He wrote a long suicide note (“Everything I have devoted my life to is collapsing”) and hanged himself. A Soviet prosecutor told Stepankov that seven of the coup leaders had implicated Akhromeyev. Across town, Nikolai Kruchina, 63, general manager of the Communist Party and its finances, stepped onto the balcony of his fifth-floor apartment and leaped to his death. “We had questions for them,” a prosecutor said, “but they were in a hurry.”
From the first day of the coup, Kryuchkov and his KGB also set off in a deadly rush. According to Commersant, a Moscow business weekly, KGB headquarters swirled with activity and confusion on Aug. 19. “Most of our people could not understand anything,” one KGB operative told the paper. “The bosses issued no instructions and people simply drifted from office to office. The dumbest among us congratulated one another on having a day off.” After that, the plot quickly began to fracture. The next day this witness studied his colleagues and thought their eyes “showed a presentiment of evil, as a dog does just before an earthquake.”
A split between the KGB’s older leaders and its younger officers may have crippled the coup. After Boris Yeltsin holed up in his Russian White House, Viktor Karpukhin, leader of the Alpha Group, a special KGB commando squad, told his men that they should prepare for a night attack. According to Tass, the “shocked” commandos demanded to know where the order was coming from. They were told, “The government.” When they asked “Which government?” they once again were informed, “This is a government order.” Alpha Group was armed with bazookas and antitank weapons. “Frankly speaking, we could have fulfilled our task in 20 to 30 minutes,” one of the squad said. But the rank and file polled one another and unanimously decided to disobey. Karpukhin’s deputies then refused to issue the command for the attack. Mikhail Golovatov, the commander who replaced Karpukhin, said afterward, “We believe our refusal to obey has saved the country from civil war.” Maybe, maybe not. Disinformation, after all, is the mother’s milk of the KGB. “They called me, " said Sergei Petukhov, the Tass reporter who got the scoop.
Another group of KGB agents also balked. Yeltsin’s newly organized Russian KGB had about 20 agents in the Soviet KGB headquarters. Since their loyalty was suspect, they say, Kryuchkov did not cut them in on the plot. Nikolai Nikolayev, one of them, claimed that he had joined a rally in front of the Russian White House “because of my conscience.” Others said they funneled intelligence from the KGB directly to Yeltsin’s team. Vladimir Podelyakin, deputy director of the Russian KGB, told NEWSWEEK that some tips went by phone, some by messenger and some right under Kryuchkov’s nose. “We are professionals,” he said with a shrug. “We know how to do this.” He also maintained that a number of regular KGB agents sympathized and helped. But Commersant quoted one agent who feared that KGB generals would blame their deputies. “The swine are sure to hide behind us, so that we get beaten and they will again go scot-free,” he said.
Among disgraced members of the Communist Party, the recriminations were equally sharp. Some of the plotters swore that Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s closest personal aide-the man who kept his schedule and guarded his door against unwanted callers-had led them astray. On the other hand, Gorbachev loyalists thought he had tried to manipulate his boss. “He had Gorbachev in a stranglehold,” said one of the president’s men. Boldin had the look of a provincial hayseed, but he was simple like a fox. He accompanied the plotters who confronted Gorbachev in the Crimea and tried to convert him to their cause. When Boldin returned and told people Gorbachev was sick, the lie seemed more plausible. Only after he was arrested and clapped into jail did people remember his odder quirks. One of them was his collection of rare books. Bound in fine-tooled leather, they dealt with convoluted Masonic conspiracies like those favored by right-wing extremists.
The curious performance of Boldin and others who had been so near Gorbachev churned up a very Russian surge of conspiracy theories about the president’s own actions during the coup. Commersant published an investigative article asking why the plotters had left Gorbachev with his own well-armed security guards. Maj. Vladimir Degtyaryov, the deputy chief of frontier guards responsible for protecting Gorbachev’s dacha, said he had received no special orders between Aug. 18 and Aug. 21; nor had his regiment noticed any invasion by KGB troops. The weekly Moscow News wondered whether it was really possible for the leader of a nuclear superpower to be kept incommunicado for three days, and others raised questions about whether his phone connections could have been so easily cut off (page 27).
The conspiracy theories squared poorly with the way Gorbachev actually looked during the coup. The television show “Vzglyad” broadcast one of the four videos Gorbachev had made in captivity, when he feared for his life. Sitting in his cardigan, ashen and ravaged, Gorbachev didn’t look like he was playing games. The program also aired interviews with Anatoly Chernyayev, Gorbachev’s foreign-policy adviser; the president’s secretary; his doctor, and his new chief of security. Among other things, they reported how Raisa Gorbacheva, fearing the dacha was bugged, had waved the other captives out on a balcony for serious talks. The president’s wife also worried that their food might be poisoned. She would allow her family to eat only from stocks that had been delivered before the delegation of plotters arrived.
If the president seemed clean, removing the taint from the KGB, Army and party will surely be an impossible job. Gorbachev named reformer Vadim Bakatin to replace Kryuchkov. The new man took a quick scan and reported that he had found dossiers on “millions” of secret contacts and capers. To start the job of housecleaning, he put thousands of special troops under the command of the Defense Ministry, and promised to unplug most wiretaps. Asked what percentage of the KGB’s employees opposed his plans, Bakatin answered, “If I knew the percent, there wouldn’t be any.” He admitted the possibility of revenge or terrorism from hard-line KGB holdouts. But his own son, an employee of the KGB, won’t be among them: Bakatin fired him last week to avoid conflicts of interest. Other agents were cautious about the new boss’s threats to decimate the KGB. “Maybe he has to destroy,” said officer Aleksei Kondaurov, “but he has to destroy rationally.”
Whether the mess will now spill beyond the borders of the disintegrating Soviet empire is an intriguing question. Bakatin promised to allow the family of Oleg Gordievsky, a Soviet spy who defected in 1985, to join him in England. Further releases could prove more nettlesome. The German government asked Moscow last week to send home Markus Wolf, the East German spymaster. Intelligence sources in Bonn told NEWSWEEK that 400 to 500 former East German spies were probably still lurking in the country and they needed Wolf to ferret them out. Wolf also made a habit of gathering dirty linen on West German politicians, so his reappearance could have some unpleasant side effects. Bulgarian reformers were pressing for the return of Gen. Vladimir Todorov. They suspect him of running a death squad that assassinated a prominent Bulgarian dissident in London 13 years ago-with a jab from a poisoned umbrella tip. That case led others to remember those reports, never proven, that such a squad had helped Mehmet Ali Agca shoot the pope in 1981. So the spreading stain out of Moscow could lead just about anywhere.
