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During the past two years, my sense that an explosion was imminent grew ever stronger. One word came increasingly to mind: "dictatorship." Finally, at dawn on Aug. 19, I was awakened by the voice of an announcer declaring a state of emergency. Everything that I'd feared and that I'd warned about had come to pass.
Today I am writing in Moscow to the sound of funeral marches for the three young men who died defending Russia's White House. The evolution of the reform process culminated in a revolution, and a personal revolution for me as well.
I knew the signatories to the document issued by the "State Committee for the State of Emergency," from Baklanov to Yazov. With some exceptions, I had already counted them among our enemies. But mistrust and speculation about the possibility of a looming dictatorship is one thing; it is another to have precise and irrefutable proof. I didn't have such proof until the coup. Still, a politician is justified in guid ing himself by his intuitions. He must reveal his fears to his colleagues, his society and indeed to the whole world. This I had done,
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But what had I left undone? [Two weeks ago] there was no time to think about that. I went to our Democratic Reform Movement headquarters to cheer on the Organizing Committee. Astonishingly, I was able to drive right up to the building. It was clear which way Moscow itself was going to vote. The mass of people that had become a nation had already jammed the tank treads.
We gleaned information from the reports of the station Moscow Echo. The publications banned by the junta joined forces to put out a so-called "collective newspaper." Workers from Izvestia's printing facility copied various Russian government documents with a manual press. With its courage, its inventiveness and its contempt for the conspirators, this independent journalism illustrated the triumph of ideas long stifled by the system: freedom of information is an inalienable aspect of freedom and democracy. Praised be information technology! Praised be CNN. Anyone who owned a parabolic antenna able to receive this network's transmissions had a complete picture of what was happening. Meanwhile, Leonid Kravchenko's servile television broadcasts emitted murky waves of lies and disinformation.
I have never lived through anything like what I would experience in those hours. At the approaches to the White House, soldiers let us pass unhindered. A young fellow in a khaki uniform embraced me and whispered, "We will defend you!" A colonel shouted after us, "Tell Yeltsin we won't let them storm the White House!" Young men
who had linked arms pushed a path for us through the heavy crowds. Some women wiped the rain off my forehead with their kerchiefs.
My reflections inevitably lead back to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, his destiny and odyssey. Who is to blame that our paths diverged? No matter how sternly I judge myself, I cannot find any guilt in myself. I did everything I could. More than a year ago, I shared with him my conjectures that ultrareactionary forces were consolidating, clearly gravitating toward a reactionary suppression of perestroika. All through 1990, I had been warning him. Had I not spoken out from the podium of the Congress of People's Deputies, after exhausting all private opportunities and resources, in order to say that a dictatorship was coming.?
I did speak out, but what of it? I should have stated that the president is deaf and blind, he cannot see or hear anything. I already knew very well that Mikhail Gorbachev is extremely choosy in his response to coup things that happen without his knowledge or agreement. With some he may be unusually patient or indulgent; with others, intolerant or irritable. Some destroy his life achievement virtually before his eyes, and he seems not even to notice. Others attempt to save this achievement, but run up against his lack of understanding.
In my case, he said that he saw absolutely no threat of dictatorship.
I recall Oct. 15, 1990, the day the announcement was made that Gorbachev had won the Nobel Peace Prize. In the hours when Gorbachev was accepting congratulations, his foreign minister was in the Supreme Soviet, fending off attacks from the Soyuz group which accused him of the very same things that had led the Nobel Committee to award Gorbachev the prize. The next day, I called Gorbachev and congratulated him on the prize. He thanked me and said that I shared it with him. I had no need of this private recognition or any public tribute to my real or imagined merits. The only thing I needed, wanted and expected from the president was a clear delineation of his position, a direct rebuff to the rightwingers, and an open defense of our common position.
I waited in vain.
On July 23, 1991, the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya carried an article with the headline A WORD TO THE PEOPLE, which in my view was a call to rebellion. Among those who signed this incendiary manifesto I found the names of all those who had for many years overtly or covertly acted against the legitimate government, organized smear campaigns against us, slowed down the execution of the decisions we had made, and had called Gorbachev, Yakovlev and myself "the Knights of Malta" [a reference to the U.S.-Soviet summit in Malta, where Gorbachev made compromises disliked by the conservatives]. Heroes of the Soviet Union and Heroes of Socialist Labor, generals from the infantry and from literature proposed a plan of action. The article even mentioned people who were willing and able to take the helm of power. Two of those who signed this piece wound up in the lists of dictators, and a third went to Gorbachev in the Crimea with an ultimatum.
Despite the increasingly visible right-wing reactionary front, what did the president do? He went on vacation. What did we do, his former friends and comrades in arms who did not want to cover for the actions of the "gang" surrounding him?
Everything, even resigning from the team, was in vain. The president always remained deaf to the advice of the people genuinely loyal to him. Thus in June 1991, I felt I had to call for the unification of the country's democratic forces, for the creation of a legal opposition. I was motivated by the thought that an organized democratic opposition should become a bulwark to those few reformers who still remained in the leadership. The elbow with which the president tried to prop himself up on the right was obviously slipping out from under him.
How did he reply to me and my friends? How did the leadership of the Communist Party respond? With threats of a party inquisition and punishment. New insults and insinuations. Persecution of the most prominent party members devoted to democracy. But the Democratic Reform Movement, which we had founded in spite of the president's wishes--and even with his obvious opposition--did not weaken, but grew and spread. And the right-wingers, seeing a threat to themselves, concentrated their fire on its initiators and leaders.
We were attacked, but Gorbachev was silent. Yes, he was busy with the drafting of the new Union Treaty. Yes, he himself suffered attacks and humiliations, but even so, with amazing stubbornness, he refused to see that the ring of the coup was closing in on him.
Did he not see it? Or did he not want to see it? Or was it something else? I don't know.
As a man and as his former comrade in arms, I agonized through the 72-hour nightmare of Gorbachev's confinement in the comfortable palace jail of Foros. He was a prisoner of the junta. But when he returned and spoke at the press conference, I saw that he was still a prisoner-of his own nature, his conceptions, and his way of thinking and acting. And now I am convinced that none other than Gorbachev himself had been spoon-feeding the junta with his indecisiveness, his inclination to back and fill, his fellow-traveling, his poor judgment of people, his indifference toward his true comrades, his distrust of the democratic forces and his disbelief in the bulwark whose name is the people, the very same people who had become different thanks to the perestroika he had begun.
That is the enormous personal tragedy of Mikhail Gorbachev, and no matter how much I empathize with him, I cannot help saying that his tragedy almost led to a national tragedy.
In the final analysis, the people who defended Gorbachev were those he had betrayed, mistrusted or seen enemies: Boris Yeltsin, the people of Russia and Moscow, the democratic movements and parties, his former comrades. And I take enormous satisfaction in this, despite the tragedy of the situation, because the outcome confirmed the rightness of my chief principle: only the policy that is morally correct is victorious; only the idea based on the highest value of human life will triumph.
The coup plotters took many things into account, except the most important: the years of perestroika had rid us of fear, and we were different people now. And since we were different and they had remained the same, they could not conquer us. I am certain that the end of the military coup will be the beginning of a new country, a new community of proud, strong and free people and a new world community. During those days I was convinced anew how many of us there are, and how we are united in the thirst for honor, dignity and truth.
We cannot succumb to euphoria. Everything may still turn out differently. Anything is possible in the hours and days of the death throes of a system pitched in its final battle. And eight conspirators are not the whole conspiracy. They are not the entire dictatorship. They could not have succeeded in launching their dark intention if they had not relied on a fair number of their supporters. I am not calling for a witch hunt, the settling of political scores or political revenge, but only for justice. "Mercy to the defeated" has been a component of a moral policy. But we have no right to forget how many "defeated" there still are among us. Only then will the politics of conspiracies be doomed, just as its champions and adherents are doomed.
I'd like to think that Mikhail Gorbachev has also become a different person. It cannot be otherwise. He endured a hard trial--standing at the edge of death, betrayed by his colleagues, and fortuitously saved. Such events leave their traces-and they must do so.
The danger is great. The conspirators brought about a chaotic, irrational development of events; they've set a fateful pendulum in motion. They must be stopped at any cost, so that the country and the world can be saved and further human suffering avoided. Law must speak, not arbitrary will. We cannot take the enemies of democracy as our models. I wouldn't want my prophecies to be confirmed yet again.
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