Biohazard

On the morning of the day the Soviet Union began its final passage into history, I had an appointment with my doctor. I was dressed and preparing to leave home when the telephone rang. It was seven o'clock. Joel Taylor's secretary apologized for calling so early.

"Are you still planning to go to the health ministry for your meeting?" she said.

"Of course," I answered testily. "Why shouldn't I be?"

"Don't you know what's going on?"

"No."

"Turn on your television," she said. "I'll call you back in a few minutes."

I turned on the TV. A ballerina was pirouetting in Swan Lake. The same grainy version of Tchaikovsky's ballet was on every channel. I wondered why no one had bothered to obtain a better print of the movie: they had shown the same version when Brezhnev had died, the unmistakable signal that a major state event had taken place.

An announcer came on the air, speaking in an arch Soviet verbiage that had been absent from our newscasts for months. A Committee for the State of Emergency had just been formed, she said. Soviet citizens were asked to remember their duties to the Motherland and stay calm. The ballet resumed. Taylor's secretary called back. "What's going on?" I asked.

The bulletins had started at six o'clock that morning. Gorbachev had fallen sick at his state dacha in Crimea, where he was on his annual holiday. He had handed over power "temporarily" to the GKChP, she said, using the Russian initials for the emergency committee.

"I'll still be there," I said, and hung up.

I sat back on my bed, too angry to speak. I'd been following the political events with interest during that surreal summer. In late July, President Bush had come to Moscow for another summit with Gorbachev. On August 2, Gorbachev announced his intention to sign a treaty granting the Soviet republics startling new powers, including the right to collect taxes — the most radical change in the federal structure of the Soviet Union in decades. He left on August 4 with his family for Crimea. The official signing ceremony for the treaty was to be held on August 20, the day he planned to return from holiday. This was the nineteenth, and Gorbachev would not be coming back tomorrow — if ever.

Lena was propped up in bed next to me, watching the TV with a fixed gaze. Another announcer was reading "Order Number One" of the GKChP. We were informed that all government institutions had been placed under the authority of the emergency committee. Political parties, strikes, and demonstrations were banned. The names of the committee members stunned me at first, and then they seemed infuriatingly logical.

Gennady Yanayev, the pasty-faced bureaucrat whom Gorbachev had appointed vice president earlier that year, was the acting president. He was joined by Defense Minister Marshal Dmitri Yazov, a beefy general whom Gorbachev had plucked from the ranks to shake up the armed forces in 1987, and KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, who had recommended the closure of our biological warfare program. The other conspirators were Anatoly Lukyanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet and one of Gorbachev's oldest friends; Oleg Baklanov, chief of military industries at the Central Committee; Boris Pugo, minister of internal affairs; Valentin Pavlov, the prime minister; Alexander Tizyakov, president of the Association of State Enterprise; and Vasily Starodubtsev, head of the Union of Collective Farm Chairmen.

It was a collection of nonentities from a Soviet Union that had seemed to be on its way out: men of the type I had dealt with throughout my career. Baklanov was closely connected with the inner circle that managed Biopreparat. I had no doubt in my mind that they represented a collective disaster.

"Do you think Gorbachev is really sick?" Lena asked me.

"About as sick as I am," I said.

Slava was waiting outside in the Volga. He took me to the Army General Staff Hospital, but we said little.

Later that morning, at Biomash, hardly anyone spoke. People walked past me with their heads down. Our institute's Communist Party chief was pacing in front of my office. He gave me a meaningful smile.

Only the previous month, I had ordered him to move his papers and staff out of the building, in line with a decree from Russian president Boris Yeltsin banning Party cells from government agencies in Russia.

"What do you want?" I said.

"Well, you've heard the news, haven't you?" he said. "We've won!"

"Who is 'we'?"

"The Party… normal government," he said with enthusiasm. "We're ready to move back into the building whenever you are."

"No you won't," I said.

The smile died on his face. "What?"

"You will never come back. This is what Yeltsin ordered, and he is the president of Russia."

"You're going to regret this," he said menacingly.

"Get out," I said. "Go to hell."