RL 310/91 August 22, 1991 MOSCOW PRELUDE: WARNING SIGNS IGNORED Scott R. McMichael There were a number of indicators in the months preceding the recent coup in Moscow that suggested a putsch was imminent. Not the least of these were the notorious "A Word to the People," signed by two generals, and an interview in May in the reactionary journal Den' that hinted broadly at the need for military rule. Other actions by conservative military and political leaders also indicated that a putsch was coming and that the key question was simply when it would be launched. Although the three-day coup that stunned Moscow and the rest of the world took many Soviet observers by surprise, there were abundant signs in the months and weeks preceding the coup to suggest that a putsch was imminent. In the previous year to eighteen months, there had been lively, if infrequent, discussion in the Soviet press about the possibility of a military coup. Most observers, however, discounted the possibility, noting that the Soviet armed forces have a long, consistent history of submission to the ruling authorities. Typically, the Soviet military leadership was quite reluctant to enter the discussion, avoiding even the hint that a military coup could come to pass. However, this reticence faded during the spring of 1991 and the topic was approached more openly during the summer. At the same time, increasing evidence appeared that key members of the KGB, MVD, armed forces, and hard-line CPSU faction were working together in opposition to fundamental governmental policies in order to weaken Gorbachev and keep him from carrying out his program of economic, military, and political reform. Two items, in particular, which appeared in the Soviet press in the last few months, suggested that a showdown was approaching between Gorbachev and his hard-line opponents. One of the items in question appeared on the front page of Sovetskaya Rossiya, the flagship newspaper of Soviet hard-line politics, on July 23, 1991.1 Entitled "A Word to the People," this short article constituted a sensational and desperate appeal, primarily to Russians and secondarily to all citizens of the USSR, to rise up in defiance of the current government of the state, to resist those in power "who do not love the country and who are dooming us to a miserable existence of vegetation in slavery and subjection to our all-powerful neighbors." Relying on the most immoderate, chauvinistic language imaginable, the authors created the dark image of a state that is perishing, "sinking into nonexistence," because of the intentionally destructive, foreign-directed activities of crafty, pompous masters, clever and cunning apostates, and greedy, money-grubbing capitalists. "Our home is already burning to the ground," the authors warned, "the bones of the people are being ground up, and the backbone of Russia is broken in two." Even the CPSU was admonished for giving up power to "frivolous and clumsy parliamentarians who have set us against each other and brought into force thousands of stillborn laws, of which only those function that enslave the people and divide the tormented body of the country into portions." No democrats these. Condensed to its essence, the appeal had two primary themes. First, that Russia as it is now configured (i.e., the USSR) must be preserved at any cost. Second, that the time has come for all citizens who really love "Holy Russia" to unite, take the path of national salvation, and repel the destroyers of the homeland. The appeal contained the clear implication that a delay in action could be fatal. Two other features distinguished this declaration. First, it included a scarcely disguised appeal to the armed forces to be prepared to be the means by which the homeland would be preserved intact. "We are convinced," stated the authors, "that the men of the army and navy, faithful to their sacred duty, will not allow a fratricidal war or the destruction of the fatherland, that they will step forth as the dependable guarantors of security and as the bulwark of all the healthy forces in society." Second, the appeal was signed by twelve prominent Soviet citizens, including Army General V. Varennikov, commander in chief of Ground Forces, and Colonel General B. Gromov, a deputy minister of internal affairs, two men well positioned to plan and direct the use of MVD and army forces in the event of a move to displace the current regime. Varennikov's command included the elite airborne units that had been used prominently in all the breakaway republics. (Although technically a component of the Ground Forces, airborne units are controlled operationally by the MVD and must be released by the Ministry of Defense to a specific ground force command.) Gromov, of course, was associated with MVD mobile troops and the special-purpose police detachments. Both men also were physically present and played important roles in the military crackdown in the Baltic republics in January, 1991, and thus had recent experience in the coordination of military force against government power. Neither of these men played a visible role in the failed putsch, although it is a safe bet that Gromov was a participant, given the seizure by OMON detachments of communications facilities and border posts in the Baltic republics during the coup. Varennikov, if not a participant, can certainly be assumed to have been a sympathizer. Moreover, the signatures of Varennikov and Gromov on the appeal implied the tacit support of their seniors, Minister of Defense Dmitrii Yazov and Minister of Internal Affairs Boriss Pugo--both members of the Group of Eight, the coup leadership. Such a link would tend to argue that the four were coconspirators. The letter did not seem to generate much public support, although there was one troubling response. On July 30, Soviet Liberal Democratic Party leader V. Zhironovsky (a failed candidate for the RSFSR presidency) confessed his support and stated that "when those determined to stop the slide of the country into the abyss come to power, a military coup will be the last step to save the state."2 Varennikov and Gromov were not the only powerful members of the Soviet military and security services thinking about the unthinkable--a military dictatorship. A very disturbing article with this theme appeared in the May issue of Den', another hard-line publication.3 The article, entitled "A Visit to General Rodionov's Office," recorded a round-table discussion between four men--Deputy Chairman of the Defense Council Oleg Baklanov, Commander in Chief of the Navy Admiral of the Fleet V. Chernavin, Commander of the General Staff Academy Colonel General I. Rodionov, and Den' Chief Editor A. Prokhanov--meeting in General Rodionov's office to discuss the state of the country and its military establishment. After characterizing Gorbachev's policy of defense conversion as irrational and "criminal" ("breaking the bonds of the defense industry," "murder of the army") and describing five axes of attack taken by the government against the armed forces, the discussants turned to the question of a military dictatorship. Although these men took care not to advocate a military dictatorship, their comments created the distinct impression that military rule might be inevitable and that the armed forces would be well-suited for this role. For example: Chernavin: I am sure that the army is not contemplating a dictatorship....I would say that society itself is burdening the army with functions that are not characteristic to it....One can assume that only the army will remain capable of maintaining public order, will use air bridges to connect regions, will feed the population from its strategic reserves, will combat epidemics and outbreaks of violence in the event of general chaos and at the same time will maintain external security. It is simply society, having lost its ability to govern, that is itself delegating this function to the Army. Is this really a military dictatorship? It is a burden, a heavy and horrible burden! Baklanov: The army, if it has to take the responsibility for governing the economy, transportation, and society as a whole could only maintain that governing role for a certain period of time and at an extremely low level. The army would be interested in transferring this government to civilians and promoting the restoration of civilian structures as soon as possible. In general, enormous organizational experience has been accumulated in the armed forces and the defense industry, of which society can take advantage....[The armed forces have demonstrated the ability] to create an entire economy, an entire science, new mines, new cities, new cadres of workers and engineers, to form an infrastructure, and to provide regulation and command control to millions of components: technological, social, and psychological....Therefore, the defense industry has much greater organizational experience than, say, newly appointed politicians who are incapable even of ensuring garbage collection on the streets of Moscow, cannot feed or clothe the population, or plan a city management strategy. Rodionov: And I still need to say: despite the entire antiarmy uproar, the army remains the people's favorite offspring. The people have developed a certain skepticism towards many structures, but not towards the army." The question undoubtedly underlying these comments was what should be done if these functions were to be delegated to the army by default, by a society and government no longer able to function, even though the army was said to be devoid of political will to initiate a move to take power? Sacred duty and genuine experience would, of course, demand that the military save the country. If questions like those above were being discussed openly, one may well wonder what kinds of deliberations were taking place in private. Baklanov, of course, turned up in the Group of Eight. Given his position as deputy chairman of the State Defense Council, many have surmised that he was one of the key instigators of the failed coup. Rodionov is notorious in the West as an unreconstructed Stalinist. Both Rodionov and Chernavin will probably be replaced in the shake-up brought about by the attempted coup. Without doubt, these kinds of articles and other public and semipublic statements by other key leaders opposed to Gorbachev, served to condition the audience, sow the seeds for a bitter crop of retribution, and establish a framework for the eventual involvement of the armed forces in a post-perestroika crisis regime. Greater openness in discussing the possibility of military rule was accompanied by evidence of a significant, increasing level of antireform activity, independent of, and contradictory to, government policy, directed by an informal alliance of leaders of the KGB, the MVD, the armed forces, and the CPSU. Many examples from the past year could be cited. Nuclear testing, for example, was carried out in Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya (invoking sharp protests from Kazakhstan and the Nordic countries, respectively) apparently without the consent or knowledge of the republican or all-Union authorities. Several Western newspapers carried articles during the Gulf war alleging that, despite denials by the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Soviet armed forces had provided assistance to Iraq in the form of military advice, supplies of materials, and satellite intelligence. The Ministry of Defense and the General Staff came quite close to overturning the CFE Treaty after it had been signed by their insistence on a fraudulent interpretation of the counting rules to be used. The issue was resolved only after the personal intervention of Presidents Bush and Gorbachev. At the same time, the evidence is clear that commanders in the military districts encompassing the breakaway republics were acting under independent instructions to assist antirepublican forces in those areas--the self-proclaimed Dniester SSR in Moldavia, the South Ossetians in Georgia, and the Azerbaijani forces in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. The Baltic republics, of course, have been victimized by a steady stream of violence by detachments intended to provoke the republican governments to rash responses. It is not credible that Gorbachev approved these actions. During the summer of 1991, the army-KGB-MVD troika undertook a well-orchestrated effort to weaken Gorbachev domestically and to humiliate him internationally. In the first week of June, for example, two actions were taken to embarrass him on the eve of his visit to Oslo to accept his Nobel Prize. The fist of these was the release of the official report of the USSR prosecutor-general General on the violence connected with the military crackdown in Vilnius in January, 1991. The report exonerated Soviet troops and attributed the fourteen deaths that occurred during the takeover of the television center to actions taken by local militants. On the same day, Soviet troops set up about fifteen checkpoints at important sites in Vilnius and detained two members of the Lithuanian National Defense Department. As a result, Gorbachev was peppered with embarrassing questions about these events during his stay in Norway. Beginning on June 8, OMON forces carried out a series of attacks against border posts in all three Baltic republics. Naturally, official spokesmen and public organizations in the Nordic countries reacted quite negatively. The Economic Community also delivered a verbal note of protest to Moscow on June 15 regarding these attacks, but it had no effect: several more raids on border posts in Lithuania and Latvia were conducted on June 16, 18, and 21.4 On June 17, Gorbachev faced another challenge, this time from his own prime minister, Valentin Pavlov. Appearing before the Supreme Soviet on that day, Pavlov asked the legislature to grant him emergency powers similar to those held by the president in order to deal more effectively with the country's economic problems. Pavlov claimed that authorization of such powers was necessary because it simply was not possible for Gorbachev to carry out all the responsibilities delegated to him. During the debate, in what appeared to be premeditated, coordinated performances, Yazov, Pugo, and KGB Chairman Kryuchkov spoke out in Pavlov's favor. Yazov testified bitterly that economic difficulties and political turmoil were threatening the state's security. For his part, Kryuchkov linked some of Gorbachev's policies with plans of US intelligence agencies to disable the Soviet economy and break up the Union.5 According to a US news report claiming insider information, Pavlov's gambit was accompanied by KGB, MVD, and army troop movements in and around Moscow.6 The four men involved, of course, were to make up half the membership of the Emergency Committee in August. Several days later, on June 24, Colonel General Burlakov, commander in chief of the Western Group of Forces in East Germany, sent a letter to the German Foreign Ministry in which he threatened to slow down agreed Soviet troop withdrawals because housing under construction in the USSR, funded by the German government, was not producing apartments rapidly enough to accommodate the returning officers. According to reports from Bonn, the German government viewed Burlakov's letter as an "independent military initiative," designed more to exert pressure on Moscow than on Bonn.7 One Western analyst concluded that the letter seemed to be intended "to embarrass Gorbachev in front of Western leaders, in general, and the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, in particular."8 Significantly, two days later, OMON detachments moved into Vilnius once more, this time to occupy the telephone exchange for no apparent reason. The timing of these events, again, was propitious; they occurred precisely when Gorbachev was wrangling an invitation to the Group of Seven economic summit in London in July. The obvious goals were to embarrass the Soviet president and undermine his efforts to obtain commitments for Western aid at the talks. A yet bolder stroke took place on July 31, as President Bush arrived in Moscow for his summit with Gorbachev. On that day, unidentified assailants attacked a Lithuanian border post and gunned down eight guardsmen; one survived. Again, the attack was clearly timed to complicate the Bush visit by creating an incident that would force the two presidents to take note publicly in some fashion of the struggle between the center and the Baltic republics, thus driving a wedge between the United States and the USSR. Finally, in August, Aleksandr Prokhanov again attempted to stir the pot by declaring that it was time "to seize power by the throat," and Gorbachev's former close aide and confidant Aleksandr Yakovlev warned of the distinct possibility of a "state and Party coup." The CPSU leadership itself stayed on the sidelines during the putsch, but the Group of Eight were all hard-line Communists and members of the CPSU Central Committee. From that point of view, public perception in the Soviet Union will conclude that the CPSU was simply waiting to reap the benefits should the coup succeed. What conclusions and observations can be drawn from these disturbing developments? First, it seems evident that the coup leaders were laying the organizational groundwork for a move against Gorbachev. The population in general and key figures, in particular, were under pressure to take one side or the other. At the same time, the anti-Gorbachev alliance was gaining experience in working together. In particular, the mechanisms that were established and in operation on the periphery to undermine the governments of the nascent republics could have been replicated in Moscow at the appropriate time. The primary unsettled question was timing. When should the plotters move? Should they wait for the typically severe Russian winter, given the growing evidence that this year's harvest will be smaller than last year's? A bad harvest, energy shortages, and problems with food distribution would have conditioned the public further, and bad weather would have kept them off the streets. It seems likely, however, that the plotters had their hand forced by the plan announced by Gorbachev in July to sign the new Union treaty on August 20. That was an event that needed to be prevented, since, once signed, the Union treaty would provide a severe legal obstacle to restoring the primacy of the center over the republics. Inching forward during the spring and summer, the conspirators were forced to take the fatal giant step in August, probably sooner than they would have liked. Gorbachev's absence from Moscow made the decision easier to take. Of course, the timing was wrong. Moreover, as events proved, they also seriously miscalculated the degree of support they would receive from the armed forces, the security organs, and the public at large. However, given more time and worsened living conditions, the coup might well have enjoyed a higher chance of success. Instead, the tracks that the plotters left in the sand eventually led to disaster for them and for other anti-Gorbachev, antireform elements that will certainly remain under cover in the near future. ^ 1 "Slovo k narodu," Sovetskaya Rossiya, July 23, 1991, p. 1. 2 TASS, in English, July 30, 1991. 3 Den', No. 9, May, 1991, p. 1. 4 See "Weekly Record of Events," Report on the USSR, No. 26, 1991, pp. 30 and 32. 5 Alan Cooperman, "Soviet Military Chief Warns of Crisis Ahead," The Washington Times, June 25, 1991, p. 9. 6 Bill Gertz, "Power Struggle in Kremlin Was Eye-Blink from Violence," The Washington Times, June 25, 1991, p. 9. 7 See Douglas L. Clarke, "Soviet Union Threatens to Halt Troop Pullout From Germany," Report on the USSR, No. 28, 1991, pp. 9-12. 8 Stephen Foye, "Gorbachev's Return to Reform: What Does It Mean for the Armed Forces?" Report on the USSR, No. 28, 1991, p. 7.