republics’ demands for sovereignty. He was trying
to gain time.
Significantly he also turned to his hitherto con-
servative opponents to bolster the Kremlin’s fail-
ing powers. In yet another change he abolished
the Presidential Council, and brought in the KGB,
army and police to a new Security Council. New
hardliners suddenly became the president’s right-
hand men. Soon old Cold War rhetoric was heard
once again. The fourth session of the Congress of
People’s Deputies in December 1990 was memo-
rable for one astounding event: Foreign Minister
Eduard Shevardnadze publicly announced his res-
ignation in protest against Gorbachev’s reliance
on reactionary party members. He warned against
‘the advance of dictatorship’.
As the new year began, Gorbachev had few
ideas left about how to lift the Soviet Union out
of its crisis. When the military attempted to sup-
press the nationalists in Lithuania and Latvia and
snuff out their independence movements, the
people of Riga and Vilnius rallied to the defence
of their new democratic parliaments and govern-
ments. The deaths of twenty civilians only
strengthened popular defiance as the people
erected barricades, and Gorbachev claimed that
he had not ordered the bloodshed. His main
efforts that spring and summer were to negotiate
a new constitution with the republican leaders.
Even as Georgia declared its independence in
April 1991, Gorbachev’s extraordinary negotiat-
ing skills scored one final success. In May 1991
the fifteen republican leaders, brought together
by the president, agreed to form a new union.
Later, nine of those republics, including the
Russian Federation, approved the ‘principles’ of
such a treaty, which was to be solemnly signed on
20 August 1991. But the hardliners struck back.
As the dramatic events unfolded in Moscow on
Monday morning, 19 August, the whole world
held its breath.
The coup that should have been foretold caught
Gorbachev completely by surprise. It was Sunday,
18 August. Gorbachev was spending the last two
days of his vacation in his villa in the Crimea,
working on the speech he was to deliver at the
ceremony on 20 August marking the signature of
the new Union Treaty. That afternoon he was
visited by a group who represented, they said, a
State Committee for the State of Emergency; they
demanded that he should proclaim a state of
emergency and hand over power to his vice-
president, Gennadi Yanayev. Gorbachev indig-
nantly refused. He was then kept prisoner in his
own villa and cut off from all outside contact,
while the coup got under way in Moscow. Early
the following morning, 19 August, Moscow
awoke to the news that Gorbachev was ill and that
an eight-member State Committee for the State
of Emergency had taken over. Most shocking of
all, those men were not members of a reactionary
opposition but had been Gorbachev’s most recent
ministers, leaders and aides, the conservatives he
had chosen in 1989: Gennadi Yanayev, Boris
Pugo (minister of the interior), Dimitri Yazov
(minister of defence), Vladimir Kryuchkov (head
of the KGB since 1988), Valentin Pavlov (prime
minister) and three others. It was a total betrayal.
Gorbachev was imprisoned and powerless for
seventy-two hours; he prepared a videotape con-
demning the coup, while his wife Raisa became
ill from the shock.
All the action was in Moscow. The Committee
proclaimed a state of emergency and rule by
decree; demonstrations were banned; at midday
tanks and troops appeared in the streets of
Moscow and were placed around key buildings.
The junta also issued a decree that the constitu-
tion of the Soviet Union took precedence over
that of the republics; it was to be the end of any
notions of sovereignty for the republics or of a
new Union treaty. Boris Yeltsin just escaped arrest
and rushed to the Russian parliament building,
which was known as the White House because of
its white marble frontage. But the coup leaders
were inept and failed to act decisively and ruth-
lessly on that first day. They were out of their
depth, and Yanayev, the titular head, was said to
be drunk most of the time.
Yeltsin took his life in his hands when he
rushed to the White House. The most unforget-
table image of the coup was presented by Yeltsin
climbing on to a tank just outside the Russian
parliament mid-morning on Monday the 19th.
He uncompromisingly denounced the coup and