The Origins: Prelude to a Putsch

By STROBE TALBOTT WASHINGTON

For years, as they watched Mikhail Gorbachev bull his way through history, remaking his country, his era and himself, Soviets and Westerners alike wondered whether there was anything he couldn't do. Wasn't there some innovation so radical, or some capitulation so abject, that he simply couldn't get away with it? Like scientists pondering the limits of an anomalous but potent force of nature, Kremlinologists speculated about the existence of a "red line" that Gorbachev could not cross without reaping the whirlwind.

Could he really introduce genuine democratic choice in Soviet elections, terrifying and infuriating apparatchiks from one end of the U.S.S.R. to the other? Did he dare abandon the Communist Party's monopoly on political power? Could the system tolerate a free press? Could the Soviet people stand to hear the truth about their own past? Could they adjust to some version of free- market economics?

And what about the Soviet empire? Could Gorbachev unilaterally end the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan? Could he pull the plug on Soviet support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and pressure them into elections they would lose? More crucially, could he permit "fraternal" regimes to topple in Eastern Europe, giving up the buffer zone that Joseph Stalin had created after World War II and retiring the Warsaw Pact?

, The answer, he kept demonstrating to the astonishment of all and the dismay of many, was yes.

Many experts thought, if a red line existed, it ran along the 860-mile boundary of barbed wire, concrete and minefields between East and West Germany. Surely Gorbachev could not let the people of what used to be the German Democratic Republic defect en masse to the Federal Republic, taking their whole country with them. And even if he dared let something so unthinkable happen, he couldn't possibly accept the membership of a united Germany in NATO.

Yet, once again, he did all that, and more. In his attempt to break the ministries' stranglehold on the economy, Gorbachev made decentralization one of the cornerstones of perestroika. Under the slogan of demokratizatsiya, he created conditions around the country for popular local leaders, frequently outspoken nationalists, to defeat Moscow's minions. As a result of glasnost, the Kremlin faced up to some of the uglier truths of Soviet history, including the illegality of Stalin's annexation of the three Baltic republics.

Most important, by dismantling the Ministry of Fear, Gorbachev made it possible for people to voice their grievances against "the center" and their desire for self-determination.

Throughout 1990, Gorbachev's initiatives and their consequences, intended and otherwise, began to call into question whether the Soviet Union could survive in anything like its existing form. Gorbachev's daredevil act was veering toward a new red line: the 39,000-mile border around the periphery of the U.S.S.R. Ideology, economics, foreign policy, military alliances, they were one thing; real estate was something else. Could Gorbachev actually give up what many of his colleagues in the leadership and the Soviet power structure considered to be pieces of the motherland?

For three days last week, the answer seemed to be no. By the beginning of this year, it was clear that if Gorbachev's policies continued, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would eventually leave the U.S.S.R. and re-establish their independence. Gorbachev repeatedly said he accepted "in principle" the Baltics' right to independence. He was always quick to add his insistence that the leaders in those republics pursue their goal by "constitutional means." Everyone knew what that phrase meant: a slow process during which the central government would try to control both the throttle and the brake.

In Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, nationalists indignantly rejected the notion that they should play by the Kremlin's rigged rules. But in Moscow, Gorbachev's apparent willingness to accept even the idea of Baltic freedom further antagonized the hard-liners and set in motion the chain of events that led to last week's coup d'etat.

At first Gorbachev and the reactionaries tried to co-opt each other. One of Gorbachev's aides, fluent in the earthy idiom of American politics, paraphrases a favorite line of Lyndon Johnson's: "Mikhail Sergeyevich felt it was better to have the camels inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. He wanted to keep them where he could see them and where they would have to take his orders. He also wanted to use them to put pressure on the Balts." That arrangement was fine with the reactionaries, since they had considerable latitude in how to interpret and execute Gorbachev's orders.

Gorbachev met frequently with Boris Pugo, who had become Interior Minister on Dec. 2, 1990. In these conversations Pugo was careful to steer clear of the fundamental issue of whether the Baltic republics were entitled to independence. Instead he stayed within the bounds of his responsibility for law and order. With the Baltics acting as though they were already sovereign states, he said, the situation was "spinning out of control"; if the Baltics succeeded in defying Moscow, other republics would be encouraged to do the same.

Pugo was a Latvian who had been the KGB chief in Riga in the early '80s. He knew that Gorbachev believed all nationalities in the U.S.S.R. should be united by Soviet patriotism. In his conversations with Gorbachev he evoked this sentiment repeatedly, in effect offering himself as an example of a good Balt as opposed to ungrateful, unreasonable troublemakers like Vytautas Landsbergis, the brave but reckless president of Lithuania.

Pugo simultaneously played to Gorbachev's own Russianness by warning that the many ethnic Russians who lived in the Baltics were subject to harassment and perhaps even persecution at the hands of local nationalists. Choosing his words carefully, Pugo asked for, and received, authority to take "the measures necessary to assure that constitutional norms are upheld and the rights of minorities are respected."

On Jan. 11, something called the "National Salvation Committee of Lithuania" announced its existence, presumably to replace the government of President Landsbergis with quislings. Soviet troops advanced on the republic's ^ main television station. People poured into the streets and surrounded both that building and the parliament. Outside, citizens kept vigil into the night.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, Jan. 13, Soviet units attacked the television tower. The various assaults left 15 civilians dead, three of them mangled by tanks, and several hundred wounded. Appearing on Soviet television, Pugo charged that the Lithuanians had started the fight by "flashing bayonets" at members of the National Salvation Committee, who had no choice but to appeal for outside help. This accusation was particularly ludicrous, since the demonstrators were unarmed and no member of the committee had yet to show his face or reveal his name. On Jan. 20, a similar clash in Riga left five dead.

In the midst of this crisis, Boris Yeltsin traveled to Estonia, where he signed a "mutual support pact" with all three Baltic governments. He also urged troops from the Russian Federation stationed in the Baltics not to obey any "order to act against legally created state bodies, against the peaceful civilian population that is defending its democratic achievements."

Back in Moscow, Gorbachev was in a state of impotent fury. On the one hand, he was apoplectic with rage at Yeltsin, calling him, at one point, "That son of a bitch!" Some of Gorbachev's advisers winced when he talked this way, since he sounded like Henry II asking, in his exasperation at Thomas a Becket, "Who will free me from this turbulent priest?"

Fear quickly spread in Moscow that Gorbachev's reactionary tentmates might behave less like incontinent camels and more like attack dogs that had received a hand signal from their master. There was an anonymous threat to blow up a plane on which Yeltsin was scheduled to travel. Several ministers in the Russian Federation increased their bodyguards, started carrying sidearms, and sent their families to dachas in the country -- as though that would put them out of harm's way if the KGB decided to round them up.

At the same time, however, Gorbachev was convinced, in the words of a close aide, that the massacres in Vilnius and Riga were a "provocation" against him personally, "an attempt by reactionary forces to derail the process of reform." He publicly denied responsibility for the decision to send in the tanks and issued a new order forbidding the military to make further all-out attacks on civilians.

In retrospect, the conflagration in the Baltics bears an eerie similarity to ; what happened last week in Moscow: hard-liners attempted a coup d'etat and found themselves faced with an unexpected show of people power as well as the personal courage of Yeltsin; a popular, democratic leadership survived, albeit under siege, while Soviet armored troops milled around menacingly on the streets.

The halfhearted and inept spasm of official violence in Lithuania and Latvia was a preview of last week's drama in Moscow in another respect too: instead of being the beginning of the end -- the final, decisive crackdown that so many had long feared might be coming -- it was a standoff between the forces of the center and of secession, the forces of repression and of continuing reform. It was also an enactment of the conflict going on within Gorbachev himself.

Gorbachev was appalled at the bloodshed in the Baltics and devastated by the criticism that rained down on him at home and abroad. When he met with a group of international peace activists, instead of radiating his usual sense of command, he all but threw himself on the mercy of his visitors. He promised he was still committed to making the U.S.S.R. a "law-based society." He portrayed himself as a victim of tumultuous events and historical currents, compared himself to a voyager who was "out of sight of land." He was, he remarked, feeling seasick.

The episode further damaged him politically. By allowing Pugo and the military to use violence, Gorbachev caused many of the democrats and nationalists to give up on him. Yet by not allowing the hard-liners to finish what they had started on Bloody Sunday in Vilnius, he alienated them as well. He still commanded the middle ground between right and left, but his position was becoming increasingly lonely and precarious.

Meanwhile, there was a war in the Persian Gulf, and Gorbachev had reason to fear that he might end up among the losers. During the last five months of 1990, largely under the influence of Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Union had sided with the U.S. -- and most of the rest of the world -- in demanding that Saddam Hussein withdraw his army of occupation from Kuwait. For reformers like Shevardnadze, Saddam was a grotesque example of the kind of Third World thug whom the Kremlin had too often supported over the decades. One of Yeltsin's closest deputies, the foreign minister of the Russian Federation, Andrei Kozyrev, called Saddam "the child of our totalitarianism, who was nurtured under the care of our ideology and with the help of huge arms shipments."

At the other end of the political spectrum, Soviet reactionaries regarded Saddam as the victim not only of American bullying but also of Soviet betrayal. They saw Soviet votes in favor of the U.S.-backed resolutions in the United Nations as a symbol of a willingness to surrender Moscow's global influence and accept subservience to Washington. After Shevardnadze's resignation in December, hard-liners in the Party Central Committee and the military pressured Gorbachev to name as the new Foreign Minister a professional bureaucrat rather than a relatively independent, personally powerful figure in the Shevardnadze mold. Gorbachev obliged them by picking Alexander Bessmertnykh, a career diplomat.

However, just as Bessmertnykh took office, the coalition launched the air war against Iraq. An English-speaking Soviet major interpreted for a group of senior officers from the General Staff who had assembled in the Defense Ministry to watch the televised daily briefings from the Pentagon and coalition headquarters in Riyadh. Most of Iraq's antiaircraft batteries were made in the U.S.S.R. and manned by personnel trained by Soviet advisers. Yet the coalition's fighter-bombers and cruise missiles achieved perfect surprise, then set about to clobber Iraq with near impunity for six weeks. There was much cursing and gnashing of teeth among the Soviet officers glued to the tube in Moscow.

For them, the ground war was even worse. As the Iraqi army collapsed, a number of senior military officers told Gorbachev they feared that the U.S.-led forces would march to Baghdad and arrest Saddam, just as Uncle Sam had done a little over a year before with Manuel Noriega in Panama. That, said one general, would be "an unacceptable blow to our prestige."

In one Kremlin session, a top official of the Defense Ministry predicted that U.S. forces would "stay in the gulf region indefinitely," constituting a "new threat" to Soviet security. In effect, and perhaps in intent as well, he continued, the U.S. was taking advantage of the end of the cold war by moving its heaviest concentration of manpower and firepower from Europe to the soft underbelly of the U.S.S.R.

Thus the gulf war made the military more receptive than it might otherwise have been to appeals by reactionary elements in the Communist Party, the KGB and the government bureaucracy that they should all make common cause against Gorbachev.

By mid-spring, the hard-liners were feeling confident and assertive. Vladimir Kryuchkov, the chairman of the KGB, relished repeating to anyone who would listen the charge that the CIA had been covertly trying to destabilize Soviet society. The unmistakable implication was that advocates of radical reform were dupes, if not agents, of sinister foreign forces. In a meeting with Westerners in March, Kryuchkov stressed that there were still "fundamentally conflicting interests" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in a wide variety of areas around the world. He was making clear how little use he had for the Gorbachev slogans of "new thinking" and "mutual security." Kryuchkov also complained bitterly about "our eagerness to take historical shortcuts" -- a thinly veiled reference to the program of radical reform -- and warned that "democracy is no substitute for law-and-order."

There were still a few reformers at Gorbachev's side, such as Anatoli Chernyayev, the President's personal foreign policy adviser, and Georgi Shakhnazarov, one of the principal architects of the liberation of Eastern Europe. But both of them confided to friends that they were deeply worried. In a wry parody of Marxist-Leninist jargon, Shakhnazarov commented, "I fear perhaps the correlation of forces is turning against us."

Of the original Gorbachev loyalists and brain trusters, only Alexander Yakovlev still seemed to have much fight in him. Asked in March why he had been left off the newly created Kremlin Security Council, he replied, "It's very simple, and it doesn't bother me in the least. President Gorbachev had to accommodate our reactionaries. A certain amount of maneuvering is inevitable. But it's maneuvering on the path of the same objectives -- reform and democracy."

On March 17 citizens throughout the U.S.S.R. went to the polls to vote on a Kremlin-sponsored referendum on the future of the country. While the wording was vague, the stakes were clear: a positive vote would be taken as a mandate for Gorbachev to continue the process of redefining the relationship between the center and the republics according to his own timetable, his own political instincts and his own sense of what compromises were required with the conservatives. A negative vote might be an expression of support for Yeltsin, who has favored accelerated reform. Yeltsin had by now established himself not only as the leader of the Russian Federation but also as the principal spokesman for the eight other republics that were willing to remain autonomous (or "sovereign") members of a loose Soviet commonwealth and as the champion of the six republics -- the three Baltics, Moldavia, Armenia and Georgia -- that wanted complete independence.

The referendum resulted in something close to a draw. But the effect was to strengthen Yeltsin's position. A number of Gorbachev's aides, including his Vice President, Gennadi Yanayev, stepped up their efforts at engineering a rapprochement between the Kremlin and the Russian Federation headquarters, known as the White House. "Gorbachev can take a step toward Yeltsin," said Yanayev shortly after the referendum. "Actually, he has no choice but to do so."

Meanwhile followers of Yeltsin announced that they would hold a rally in central Moscow on March 28. In a meeting at Gorbachev's office, Pugo conjured up the specter of "neo-Bolsheviks storming the Kremlin." The rally was a direct challenge to Gorbachev's personal authority, said Pugo. Gorbachev agreed to prohibit all rallies and to back up the ban with a show of force by bringing troops and tanks into the capital.

Yakovlev tried several times to dissuade Gorbachev from this course. Rather than intimidating the democratic opposition, he warned, a showdown would confirm the widespread suspicion that Gorbachev had, in his desperation, thrown in his lot with the reactionaries. And even if disaster was avoided, a decision to pit the military muscle of the center against peaceful demonstrators would backfire against Gorbachev, strengthening Yeltsin's popular base.

This time, unlike during the Baltic crisis in January, Gorbachev took personal control of the forces amassed in the side streets around Red Square. He kept them in check, and the huge, orderly demonstration came off without serious incident.

Yakovlev commented immediately afterward that even though he was relieved Gorbachev had made sure the troops held their fire, the attempted intimidation of Yeltsin's followers was Gorbachev's gravest mistake to date. Gorbachev may have jeopardized not only his chance to make common cause with Yeltsin, said Yakovlev, but perhaps "his place in history" as well.

Gorbachev too was shaken by how narrowly disaster had been averted. For the second time, he had taken the advice of Pugo, Kryuchkov and the hard-liners -- and for the second time he had seen that their methods would have led only to blood in the streets.

"March 28 was not just a turning point -- it was the turning point for Mikhail Sergeyevich," says one of his aides. "He went to the abyss, looked over the edge, was horrified by what he saw, and backed away." In so doing, Gorbachev moved closer toward a new and fateful alliance with Yeltsin and the democrats.