COUP D'ETAT REPRESENTS NAKED INTERESTS Munich, August 19, 1991 (RI/Elizabeth Teague) (This piece was prepared for publication in The Wall Street Journal Europe) "Fascism shall not pass!" "Freedom!" "Yeltsin!" Those were the cries heard in downtown Moscow on August 19. Thousands of people crowded into Manezh Square in the shadow of the Kremlin walls to protest the coup d'etat that ousted Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev earlier that morning. In so doing, the protestors defied the ban on strikes and demonstrations declared by the self-proclaimed "State Committee on the State of Emergency in the USSR"--the handful of eight men that has seized power in the USSR. Who are the eight men who have elected to take matters into their own hands? Without exception, they are hardliners. All but one (a representative of the collective farm peasantry) have direct links with the military, the secret police, or the defense industry. The majority are in their sixties. All but two are ethnic Russians (Oleg Baklanov is Ukrainian; Boriss Pugo is Latvian). All, without exception, are unpopular figures with the general public. All are members of the CPSU. And yet there is no one on the Emergency Committee who is there purely because of his Party affiliation. The message of this fact is that the coup represents not Communist ideology, but the naked interests of the Soviet military-industrial complex. The Emergency Committee is headed by 54-year-old Gennadii Yanaev, the man whom Gorbachev nominated last December to the new post of deputy president of the USSR. Yanaev's candidacy was unpopular and Gorbachev had a hard job to force his election even through the Soviet Union's predominantly conservative parliament. Members of the liberal parliamentary opposition, the Interregional Group of Deputies, alleged that the vote was rigged. Yanaev made his career in the apparatus of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union's official trade unions--notorious for their consistent support of the interests of the state and their neglect of the interests of the USSR's long-suffering working class. Significantly, his early career saw him working for organizations that have clear links with the KGB. In 1968, when he was 31, Yanaev was appointed head of the the USSR Committee of Youth Organizations--an organization that controlled international front organizations such as the World Federation of Democratic Youth. In 1980, he became deputy chairman of the Union of Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries; both these posts would have required a close working relationship with the secret police. Yanaev's dull exterior suggests he is a gray bureaucrat. In reality he is a shrewd man who has made no secret of his opposition to Gorbachev's market-oriented economic reforms which, he warned last year, were threatening the Soviet Union with "civil war." But Yanaev has no independent power base and cannot be considered the moving force behind the coup that ousted Gorbachev. The moving force is not, in fact, an individual. It is the military-industrial complex--the network of interests represented by the military, the secret police, and the defense industry. The disintegration of the Soviet state precipitated by Gorbachev's liberalizing reforms, and the attempts to move toward a market economy instituted by Gorbachev and furthered by Yeltsin, strike directly at the interests of this complex which, until Gorbachev's rise to power, enjoyed priority access to scarce resources. The real powers on the Emergency Committee, therefore, are defense minister Dmitrii Yazov; KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov (both aged 67); and interior minister Boriss Pugo (aged 54, who is also a major-general in the KGB). Another key figure is Soviet prime minister Valentin Pavlov--an intelligent but very conservative economist who shocked the world earlier this year when he warned of an alleged Western plot to undermine the USSR's financial position. The interests of the Soviet Unions'd defense industry will be well protected by the Emergency Committee. A key member of the Committee is Oleg Baklanov (aged 59), an armaments specialist who in the 1970s was involved in the production of spacecraft and ballistic missiles. Until now he has held the post of first deputy chairman of the Soviet Defense Council--the Soviet Union's main decision-making body regarding defense issues. One of the first acts of the Emergency Committee on August 19 was to take over the powers of the Defense Council. The interests of the defense industry are also represented on the Emergency Committee by Aleksandr Tizyakov, president of the USSR Association of State-Owned Industrial, Construction, Transport, and Communications Enterprises, which represents the specific interests of plants in the defense sector. At a stormy meeting atteneded by Gorbachev in the Kremlin last December, Tizyakov called on Gorbachev to slow down his economic reforms, declare a countrywide state of emergency and pass power to a "Committee of National Salvation." When Gorbachev tried to reply, he was shouted down. The eighth member of the Emergency Committee is Vasilii Starodubtsev, chairman of the conservative USSR Peasants' Union, set up last year by Gorbachev's erstwhile opponent, Egor Ligachev, to oppose the reform of Soviet agriculture. Only a few weeks ago, Starodubtsev called openly for a "coup" to prevent the privatization of land. Both he and Tizyakov were signatories of the notorious "Word to the People," a manifesto calling for a military coup and the introduction of emergency rule that was published in the conservative newspaper, Sovetskaya Rossiya, on July 23. The members of Emergency Committee are predominantly elderly; they are unpopular with the Soviet people; they may well be blinkered by their own extreme conservatism. May they, in fact, have misjudged the mood of the population? As US President George Bush told a press conference soon after news of the coup was received, it is important not to underestimate the changes that have taken place in the USSR in recent years--changes in the levels of education, urbanization, and expectations of the general public that have turned the Soviet Union from the homogeneous, predominantly peasant society that it once was into an increasingly heterogeneous society with a growing middle class, an educated workforce, an alienated younger generation, and a growing democratic movement. Most of these social changes predate the democratization that Gorbachev launched in 1985. Coups, as Bush stressed today, can fail if they "run up against the will of the people." The resolution of the struggle between the forces of conservatism and those of reform lies today in the hands of the Soviet population.