Homage to Yeltsin, 20 years after rallying cry ended coup attempt

President Mikhail Gorbachev was struggling to keep the Soviet Union from splitting apart. He had given his grudging approval to a plan to recognise the sovereignty of Russia and the other 14 Soviet republics in exchange for preserving a central government with limited powers. The new union treaty was to be signed on 20 August.

But Communist hardliners in Mr Gorbachev’s government believed the treaty spelled the end of the Soviet Union and decided to act.

In the early hours of 19 August – 20 years ago today – they announced they were seizing power from Mr Gorbachev, who they said was in poor health and unable to govern. In fact, he had been placed under house arrest at his summer house by the plotters the day before.

As convoys of tanks began to roll into Moscow, Mr Yeltsin and his closest advisers, including senior aide Gennady Burbulis, headed for the seat of his government, Moscow’s White House, where they found crowds of his supporters beginning to gather. The first tanks rumbled up about an hour later. It was then Mr Yeltsin made the speech that turned the tide.

His improvised performance had an immediate effect. By evening, six tanks had joined his side and the crowds defending the White House continued to grow, reaching tens of thousands by the following day.

Mr Burbulis revealed this week that one little known factor which swayed the outcome was that Mr Yeltsin earlier that year had succeeded in creating a separate Russian KGB whose chief, General Viktor Ivanenko, was loyal to him.

He said: “From the first minute we arrived at the White House until the final minute when the coup plotters were taken off to prison, all three days Ivanenko was in my office and did not get up from the chair as he made call after call to his fellow officers, to those very people on whom the coup plotters depended most.”

Others worked to bring military commanders over to Mr Yeltsin’s side.

Sergei Filatov, who was also with Mr Yeltsin in the White House and later became his Kremlin chief of staff, said he organised teams which were sent to army bases to persuade commanders to ignore the plotters’ orders.

When the plotters eventually sat down to plan storming the White House, they found a lack of support among commanders across the army and KGB.

Ultimately though, it was the growing number of people who came to defend the newly elected Mr Yeltsin that ended the coup.

“We came first of all to defend our government,” said Konstantin Truyevtsev, an academic among those manning the makeshift barricades around the White House. “For me personally it was for the first time in my country that I had the possibility to choose my government and then these miserable people tried to take it away. So, I went to defend my rights more than anything else.”

The coup collapsed on 22 August and Mr Gorbachev returned to Moscow, but power had shifted to Mr Yeltsin. On 8 December, he and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus, with Mr Burbulis co-signing for Russia, dissolved the Soviet Union.

“A revolution is a mixture of spontaneous events and of what you and other people do yourselves,” Mr Truyevtsev said. “It is very dramatic.”

The mood of exhilaration was not to last. Just two years later Mr Yeltsin sent troops to fire on the same White House to subdue a rebellious Duma. His market reforms impoverished millions and he created ultra-rich oligarchs by selling off state assets in exchange for engineering his re-election in 1996.

“My biggest disappointment is that we did not manage to build on what we had achieved at the start,” Mr Filatov, who was Kremlin chief of staff from 1993 to 1996, said. “I’m very disappointed with the fact that some parts of the Constitution have almost ceased to work without being officially abolished.”

Mr Yeltsin died of heart failure in April 1997.