Coup That Wasn't Stirs Russians' Mixed Emotions

By Peter Baker Washington Post Foreign Service MOSCOW, Aug. 16 --

The hands that helped doom the Soviet Union no longer tremble. They grope for another pack of Yavas, as Gennady Yanayev lights up his seventh or eighth cigarette of the hour. But the hands are firm. So is the voice and the mind. And the convictions.

Ten years ago this weekend, Yanayev, then the vice president of the Soviet Union, seized the Kremlin from Mikhail Gorbachev, only to fumble away power with a hand-trembling performance on international television. It was the nervousness, not the alcohol, that made his hands shake like that, he says now. But he remains convinced that he did the right thing. And Russian society is not so sure he is wrong.

The men behind the failed hard-line coup of August 1991 that accelerated the collapse of the Soviet empire and ended the Cold War are not sitting in jail. They are not in exile or seclusion. They do not live a life of shame. They occupy well-appointed offices like Yanayev's, in a red-brick building in northern Moscow where he heads a foundation. One of the conspirators today leads a small political party. Another chairs a committee in parliament. Still another serves as his home region's governor.

"I haven't heard a single insult over the 10 years from ordinary people," Yanayev said in an interview this week. "Sometimes in the metro, or at the bus stop, people come up to me and we talk for an hour and they say, 'Why didn't you crush [Boris] Yeltsin? Why didn't you arrest Gorbachev? Look at what they've done to the country.' "

That the last of the Communist commissars would still play a role in public life here suggests the depth of Russia's ambivalence about where it has been and where it is going since it threw off Soviet dictatorship. Just as Russia has not completely rejected the coup plotters, neither has it fully come to terms with its totalitarian past.

President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB secret police colonel, last year restored the Soviet national anthem, albeit with different lyrics, and invited one of the coup plotters, former KGB director Vladimir Kryuchkov, to his inauguration. Just last month, Putin rejected removing Vladimir Lenin's embalmed corpse from his granite tomb on Red Square on the grounds that it would upset Russians by implying "they had worshiped false values." Last week, the governor of Volgograd proposed reviving its Soviet-era name, Stalingrad.

In this atmosphere, the coup plotters feel no need to proffer regrets. "I'm not ashamed of a single day of my life," Yanayev said, more serenely than defiantly. "Maybe I feel certain guilt" for the coup -- but only because it failed. "We never accepted the fact that we were guilty. We were acting in the interests of the country."

Anniversaries typically evoke a certain amount of historical revisionism, but recent days here have been filled with public symposiums, television documentaries and newspaper interviews that have highlighted the mixed feelings of many Russians. While most do not want to return to communism, the privations of Yeltsin's transition to an imperfect democracy and free market have lessened their ardor for the new order and generated nostalgia for the old.

The events over those three momentous days still play a powerful role in the national psyche. With Kryuchkov pulling the strings, Yanayev and other stalwart Communists tried to overthrow Gorbachev to prevent his perestroika reform program from breaking up the Soviet Union. Instead, they precipitated a revolution, led by Yeltsin, that ended seven decades of Communist rule.

At the time, only 4 percent of Muscovites expressed support for Yanayev's group, while 62 percent described themselves as supporters of Yeltsin's democrats. A poll released this week by the All Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion found that 14 percent of those surveyed now believe the coup plotters were right, while just 24 percent said they were wrong; the rest were not certain. Moreover, only 10 percent today consider the coup's defeat a victory for democracy.

"We do feel support and this support is growing bigger and bigger," said Oleg Shenin, another putsch organizer, pounding his desk for emphasis. Shenin, who was a Politburo member in 1991 and part of the delegation sent to inform Gorbachev about the putsch, now heads a splinter Communist group and predicted the Soviet Union will rise again. "We consider it a temporary defeat," he said.

The measure of public acceptance enjoyed by the coup plotters has frustrated the democrats who stood up to them. "They're state criminals," said Yuri Chernichenko, who headed a peasants' party at the time. And yet they act as if "they're all superstars. They're all in the limelight. After 10 years, they're given all these rights. Can you imagine that?"

"What would have happened if the coup happened in 1960? They would have been put in front of a firing squad," said Andrei Kosyakov, who served as one of Yeltsin's bodyguards during the '91 drama. While he says he does not think the plotters should have been put to death, Kosyakov said the leaders at least should have been banned from public life. "Since we didn't do it, they failed to understand their guilt," he said.

Gorbachev himself weighed in today, mocking the conspirators for trying to rewrite history by blaming him. "True, their hands do not tremble today any longer, so accustomed are they to telling lies," the former Soviet president said at a news conference. "Now they hide their hands; now they put on gloves when speaking."

"Don't believe them," he said. "They are liars, dyed-in-the-wool liars."

An Unlikely Ending

The world woke up to the coup on Aug. 19, 1991, when a cabal that included the vice president, prime minister, defense minister, KGB director and Gorbachev's chief of staff announced they had formed a State of Emergency Committee to restore order. While they lied and said Gorbachev had fallen ill, in fact they had cut off his telephones, stripped his nuclear command codes and isolated him at his summer home in Crimea. But they failed to arrest Yeltsin, then president of the Russian republic, which was part of the Soviet Union.

Racing to the Russian White House, then the home of parliament, Yeltsin clambered on top of a tank and rallied the nation to his side. Eventually, more than 50,000 people surrounded the White House, some of them armed, determined to stand against an anticipated assault. Three men died in a skirmish with armored personnel carriers in front of the U.S. Embassy nearby.

One of the indelible images of that period was the ill-fated news conference at which Yanayev's shaking hands convinced Russians and Westerners alike that the coup plotters did not have the will or ability to succeed. After their misadventure collapsed on Aug. 21, Gorbachev returned to Moscow, but Yeltsin was the hero of the hour. Within four months he forced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resignation of its president.

The gekechepists -- the nickname for the conspirators taken from the Cyrillic acronym of their committee -- were arrested and spent a year in jail awaiting trial. But they were eventually freed, and parliament gave them amnesty. Only one, Gen. Valentin Varennikov, refused and insisted on a trial, and he was acquitted.

It was a different ending than in many countries that have toppled tyranny. There was no truth-and-reconciliation committee as there was in South Africa after the end of apartheid. There were no real trials, as there were in other parts of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Indeed, Russia has never fully repudiated its Communist past. Soviet symbolism remains omnipresent, from the red stars that still light up at night over the Kremlin to the hammer-and-sickle decorations on the curtain at the Bolshoi Theater and the statues of Lenin in virtually every town square. Merchants on the Old Arbat, central Moscow's lively pedestrian street, sell vases emblazoned with the likeness of Joseph Stalin's face. Officials in the provinces often keep volumes of Marx and Lenin on their government bookcases.

"You can't help thinking that something has gone awry, something has gone wrong," said Sergei Yevdokimov, one of the heroes of the White House defense. "What was lacking? Why did it happen this way? It's hard to say whether there wasn't enough courage to bring things to the end."

Yevdokimov certainly demonstrated courage. He was commander of the 1st tank battalion ordered to the White House by the coup committee. When he arrived, he switched sides, and ordered his tanks to turn their guns around to protect the demonstrators from assault.

To Yevdokimov, the disappointments of the succeeding years have obscured the clarity of that moment. "We wanted more and envisioned more, especially in the economic field," he said. It turns out it was not enough to get rid of the conspirators at the top. "The main thing is that the same people remained in power -- the people who used to work in the party apparatus."

What They Imagined

Yanayev and his comrades look at the intervening decade and see a different message, one of vindication. "We foresaw that the country was going to disintegrate, that nationalists would separate it, that the country would turn into a mafia-type state," he said. "We envisioned that the people would grow poor and we envisioned that the nouveau riche would appear [and] steal natural wealth. Unfortunately, everything we warned the people about was implemented by the democrats 150 percent."

The most successful of the plotters in current-day politics is Vasily Starodubtsev, a former fighter pilot who was elected last spring to a second term as governor of the Tula region (defeating, among others, Leonid Brezhnev's grandson). Tula, 120 miles south of Moscow, is not the Soviet Union reborn under Starodubtsev; though his office faces Lenin Square just off Soviet Avenue, large, American-style suburban houses are emerging from the mud outside of town.

Like other conspirators, Starodubtsev has his own thoughts on the tactical mistakes his team made. While others now believe they should have arrested Yeltsin, Starodubtsev said the key was the media. "That was our grave mistake. Instead of broadcasting 'Swan Lake,' we should have been explaining what we were doing."

That's a mistake he hopes to rectify. Along with other plotters, he appeared at a news conference a month ago to announce that he was starting a committee to rehabilitate their reputations. "We wanted to protect the constitution and uphold the opinion of the people, to defend our people from monstrous experiments conducted on them," he said in an interview in his office today. "We cannot be condemned for that."