We had no idea what to expect when we landed. I assumed we would be sent back to Frankfurt, and was planning to head for Lithuania, where friends could help me cross the border. Instead, there was an unusual absence of lines at the airport — the only people trying to get into Moscow during the coup were journalists. I flagged down a car to get into the city, and we quickly passed the first sign of the military takeover: an armored personnel carrier by the roadside. It had broken down. "Morons," the driver snarled as we drove past the soldiers. I began to wonder if this coup was as inexorably destined for victory as I had thought.
The putsch had been a total surprise, although it should not have been. By 1990, Gorbachev's perestroika was more uncomfortable balancing act than dynamic reform program. He often seemed overwhelmed at the complexity of the task he had taken on. Reform had been premised on the assumption that dismantling the repressive apparatus of the state, admitting to the horrors of the past and trying to rectify them would strengthen the legitimacy of Gorbachev and his brand of modernized socialism. It did the opposite. The masses turned against the system and Gorbachev himself, whom they labeled a "boltun," a wind-bag. The Communist Party and the rest of the Soviet ruling class — the Armed Forces, the defense industries, the KGB — could see where events were leading, and were becoming increasingly anxious.
The turning point, in fact, came not in August but in January of1991, when Soviet tanks moved into Vilnius in a bloody but unsuccessful effort to crush the Lithuanian independence movement. There I saw soldiers take over the country's main TV tower, waving to us as they raced to the building. I watched a tank effortlessly flatten a heavy truck that had been pulled across the road to block its path, and stared at the dead bodies of young people who a few hours earlier had been dancing in an improvised disco at the foot of the TV tower. After the attack, we journalists spread out across the city, fearing a KGB round up (staff at our Intourist hotel had warned us), and took refuge in the apartments of local people, who took us in without question. There, a few nights after the massacre, I watched Gorbachev talk vaguely but ominously on TV of the need to introduce controls over the media. Gorbachev's performance that January sealed his fate. Instead of investigating the attack, dismissing and punishing top commanders, he buried his head in the sand. The KGB, the military and the party leaders did not miss the message: Try a power play and you will not be punished. Succeed and he may back you.
The mood in the Gorbachev camp after Vilnius was bleak. Some wanted to leave him. Others stayed on, trying, as one put it, "to glue back together whatever we can" of perestroika. Life took on a faintly unreal quality. Between then and August, I saw a lot of one man who was, in the official hierarchy, among the top four or five leaders of the Soviet Union. (In fact his powers were more modest, though his access to information was extremely wide). We would sit in his massive office at the Kremlin, often for a couple of hours at a time. At times he seemed stunned by the way the world he had once thought unshakeable — and which had given him prestige and considerable comfort — was dissolving around him.
I had to keep reminding myself that a year or two earlier, these conversations would have spelled the end of this man's career, and perhaps even prison for treason. We would go through the various institutions of power, discussing who was still with Gorbachev, who had already turned against him. This week I looked back through notes of one such conversation. The military commanders have not yet gone, he said almost dreamily that April. The Communist Party has, though. And the KGB is behaving with a "strange artificial neutrality," he remarked: It no longer kept the Kremlin informed about what was going on in the country.
Although we now like to remember August 1991 as a comic affair, there was no reason at the time for thinking it would end that way. The military had already drawn blood that year in the Baltics. Many of its leaders were horrified at the collapse of their super power. Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB and later to be the moving force in the August coup, had all but accused Gorbachev of high treason in a closed session of parliament. But still, the putsch fizzled. The first ominous lull turned quickly into a baffling loss of momentum. Soon after the events, the story leaked out that the putsch leadership was less a junta than an all-day vodka party. Most of the eight leaders are said to have spent three days dead drunk. This may be so, but it was not key reason for failure. The junta suffered a failure of nerve, but its biggest problem was a lack of decisive leadership. By his one act of defiance on the first day of the coup, Yeltsin claimed the initiative. If the junta had included someone with Yeltsin's determination, the outcome of the coup may have been very different.
Yeltsin was not only brave; he was very lucky. The world's media focused on the crowds outside the Russian White House, where he was holed up. The atmosphere there was indeed inspiring —thousands of people prepared to shield with their bodies their last hope for change. Yet these many thousand people were a tiny fraction of the city's population, And there were few such demonstrations in other cities and towns across the USSR. Most people were sitting and waiting. Would the military have moved against the White House if someone had given the order? Some would have, I think. Not all, but enough to break the resistance. Ekho Moskvy, the outstanding news radio that the Putin administration has been doing its best to gut this past year, reported during the coup that some of the units moving into Moscow were in a very aggressive mood. As I heard this I was reminded of conversations a few months earlier, after the Vilnius killings. Then hospitable Airborne commanders based in Lithuania had remarked quietly over lunch that they could have "finished the job" — captured the Lithuanian parliament — in less than an hour. And the Lithuanians had been far better prepared than Yeltsin's supporters.
In fact when Yeltsin decided to attack the same building in 1993, he showed how easy it was if you were sufficiently ruthless. He had tanks shell it from a distance. And again, in that incident, he showed the importance of decisive leadership. Yeltsin had to pull himself out of profound, paralyzing depression in order in order to cajole military commanders into attacking, but he eventually scraped together the forces he needed. Well over100 people died in the attack, though no-one really remembers now and the world did not seem particularly concerned at the time.
Strangely enough, of course, the coup leaders' rather hazy plans sound like what Vladimir Putin is trying to achieve. A little more discipline, more state intervention in the economy, law and order. I sometimes wonder if that is why, when Putin wanted to carry out a small covert operation of his own — an intensive series of interviews that led to his campaign biography early last year — he chose a large high-walled brick building on the edge of the city. A strange choice, you would think: It was in the same venue, on August 17 1991, that the coup leaders had convened to launch their operation. Those old men now live mostly in quiet retirement. One, former Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, recently turned out to greet the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Yazov is apparently a big fan. Kryuchkov is still around too, unrepentant, and occasionally willing to talk about Putin. He was quoted as saying the president was doing a very good job.