490 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
found no difficulty in embodying in the text that he was expecting to
sign on returning to the Soviet capital.^47
He chose to ignore the signs that discontent with his ideas for a
looser federation were reaching fever pitch. In the previous month
a Moscow newspaper had published ‘A Word to the People’. Among
the signatories were Varennikov and Gennadi Zyuganov, a Politburo
of the Russian Communist Party. Its content bewailed the prospect for
the USSR if Gorbachëv’s constitutional project were ever to be real-
ized: ‘The Motherland, our country, the great state entrusted to us by
history, by nature and by our glorious forebears is perishing, is being
broken up, is being plunged into darkness and oblivion.’ There was no
mention of Lenin, the October Revolution or communism. The con-
cern was patriotic: the Soviet Union, if something drastic was not
done, would soon be in pieces.^48 KGB Chairman Kryuchkov quietly
contacted like-minded fellow leaders with a view towards preventing
the signature of the Union Treaty. On 18 August Varennikov and Gor-
bachëv’s own personal assistant Boldin flew down to Crimea to seek
presidential approval for the declaration of a state of emergency.
Kryuchkov cut off the telephone links at Gorbachëv’s villa. The idea
was to present him with a fait accompli. Instead of complying with
their demands, Gorbachëv threw them out before finding himself
under house arrest. Kryuchkov and the hastily formed State Commit-
tee for the Emergency Situation on the same day announced that
Gorbachëv was ill and that Vice President Gennadi Yanaev would
assume his powers.
When the unwelcome visitors departed they took Vladimir Medve-
dev, Gorbachëv’s chief bodyguard, with them. He too was betraying his
President.^49 They also removed the apparatus with the ‘nuclear button’,
intending to hand it over to Moiseev at the General Staff.^50 The tele-
phone lines were down. No car was allowed to approach the Yuzhny
sanatorium. A triple semicircle of guard cordons cut the building off
from the world. The only route of escape from Yuzhny would have been
by sea; the road between Yalta and Sevastopol was closed.^51
The coup d’état shocked Western leaders even though something
like it had been predicted for months. Bush was astounded. He wrote
in his diary:
The new President is Yanaev . . . He was the guy that met me at the
Moscow airport. He was the guy that drove in with me. He was
the guy who flew down on our plane to Kiev. He was the guy that