Moscow, December 25, 1991

As he hardened his position, Gorbachev fired the progressive head of state television, Mikhail Nenashev, a protégé of Alexander Yakovlev, and put the more subservient director general of the official Soviet news agency TASS, Leonid Kravchenko, in charge. After four years of glasnost, television had become daring and hard-hitting, and Gorbachev now saw it as a threat to the system rather than an instrument of reform.

A charming hard-liner with a boyish face, Kravchenko told state television editorial staff, “I am the president’s man, and I have come to carry out the president’s will.” Gorbachev thereafter called Kravchenko several times a day to instruct him on what political material was suitable viewing for the masses. He ordered Kravchenko to exclude opposition voices, in particular Boris Yeltsin’s. Popular broadcaster Vladimir Pozner had to resign after earning Kravchenko’s disapproval for saying on the American TV program The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers that Yeltsin was more popular than Gorbachev.⁷

The next to go was fifty-two-year-old Vadim Bakatin, the respected police chief. An enlightened reformer and talented artist, Bakatin was dedicated to getting Soviet Interior Ministry police to obey the law rather than the party. He was detested by a bloc of communists calling themselves Soyuz (Union). Their leader, Viktor Alksnis, a colonel-deputy who strutted around in a black leather jacket even on hot days, had called for his sacking, claiming he was not tough enough on separatists. Gorbachev stunned his dwindling corps of reformers by meekly obeying. He replaced Bakatin on December 2 with Boris Pugo, a softspoken balding Latvian with tufts of hair sticking up on each side in clown-like fashion. As head of the KGB in Riga, Pugo had ruthlessly kept the lid on the Latvian independence movement.

The Congress of People’s Deputies started its fourth session on December 16, with Gorbachev a prisoner of its conservative majority. Another Soyuz leader, Colonel Nikolay Petrushenko, who resembled Sergeant Bilko from the CBS comedy series, boasted in the foyer that they would get rid of Shevardnadze next, because of his role in the loss of Eastern Europe. Deeply disillusioned with Gorbachev, Shevardnadze was already determined to quit.

The white-haired foreign minister shocked the deputies, and Gorbachev, by announcing from the podium that he was resigning his post. “Comrade democrats,” he said, “you have scattered. Reformers have taken to the hills. Dictatorship is on the offensive.” With that he walked from the hall.

The next day Gorbachev nominated the least effectual member of the Politburo, Gennady Yanayev, to the new post of vice president, in a further attempt to co-opt the conservatives. Standing at the rostrum with large bags under his eyes and an unconvincing hairpiece, Yanayev declared with all the sincerity of the privileged apparatchik, “I am a convinced communist to the depths of my soul.” Even the Congress majority did not want this hard-drinking, chain-smoking propagandist. They rejected him on the first ballot. Gorbachev angrily made his confirmation a vote of confidence and got his vice presidential nominee accepted on a second ballot.

Three weeks later, Gorbachev appointed another backstabber as prime minister. Valentin Pavlov, a rotund economist who liked loud silk ties and giggled a lot, concealed a hatred for Gorbachev, whom he regarded as a man with two faces. Gorbachev claimed later that he did not know that this crew-cut xenophobe, known contemptuously as “Porcupig,” was a drunkard and a diehard communist. Pavlov almost immediately outraged the population by withdrawing all large banknotes from circulation overnight, wiping out the savings of millions of people. He justified this by citing an outlandish conspiracy theory peddled by Kryuchkov, that private banks in Austria, Switzerland, and Canada planned to dump a large amount of money on the Soviet market with the goal of producing political instability.

Completing the group encircling Gorbachev was Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov. A corpulent and salty-tongued World War II veteran with florid complexion, hamlike hands, and a bent for English and Russian poetry, Field Marshal Yazov was a true communist who lived modestly and believed that private property was the root of all evil and that only incompetence and corruption had prevented the Soviet Union enjoying prosperity.

Everything was in place for what this motley and sinister assortment of hardliners wanted—a bloody crackdown on the independence movements that were fracturing the Soviet Union. The most assertive of these were in the Baltic republics, which had been annexed by Stalin half a century earlier and longed for their prewar freedoms. Gorbachev never understood Baltic nationalism. He used a chopping motion of his hand to express his contempt for the “secessionists and political adventurers” making trouble on the Soviet Union’s western flank.