Moscow, December 25, 1991

At midday on the third day of debate, June 20, Mayor Popov turned up at the U.S. embassy and asked Ambassador Jack Matlock for an urgent meeting. In the embassy library, the former economics professor with distinctive mop of white hair and bristling moustache put his finger to his lips and jotted a message on Matlock’s spiral notebook in Russian: “A coup is being organized to remove Gorbachev. We must get word to Boris Nikolayevich in Washington.” Matlock took the notebook and scrawled in Russian, “Who is behind this?” Popov wrote, “Pavlov, Kryuchkov, Yazov, Lukyanov.” Anatoly Lukyanov was the slippery speaker of the Supreme Soviet and a friend of Gorbachev since university days.⁵

Matlock relayed Popov’s message to Washington using a secure telephone system called STU-3. President Bush instructed him to warn Gorbachev personally, without mentioning the source. At eight o’clock in the evening the ambassador went to the Kremlin. He found the Soviet president alone with Chernyaev and in a mellow mood. They sat at the long table in his office. Gorbachev chuckled when Matlock told him of the warning. “I have everything well in hand,” he said. “We’ll see tomorrow.” After Matlock departed, Gorbachev poked fun at American gullibility, but he stopped smiling when Chernyaev casually mentioned that he had heard a rumor about suspicious troop movements outside Moscow.

The Popov warning came as Yeltsin, on his trip to the United States, was getting the Rose Garden treatment at the White House as the elected president of Russia, though the Americans were still holding their nose. In his speech of welcome Bush managed to mention Gorbachev favorably more times than he mentioned his guest. In the Oval Office Bush told Yeltsin of Popov’s warning. He jumped at the Russian’s suggestion that they should call Gorbachev to reinforce the urgency of the warning. CIA director Robert Gates was struck by the strange picture of “the presidents of the United States and Russia calling the president of the Soviet Union from the White House to warn him of a possible coup attempt.”⁶

When Bush called Gorbachev, he inadvertently named Popov as the sourceeven worse, he did so over a line known to be monitored by the KGB. Matlock was furious when he heard. He saw this careless intimacy as a measure of how deep Bush’s infatuation with Gorbachev had gone.⁷

After leaving the White House, Yeltsin remarked caustically on how keen Bush was to get on the phone with his friend and that he was acting as if he were under Gorbachev’s spell, like an adherent of Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a popular Russian faith healer.

Rather than thank Popov for the warning, or ask him the source and reliability of his information, the Soviet leader, when he next met the Moscow mayor, shook his finger at him and said, “Why are you telling tales to the Americans?”

Gorbachev reimposed his will on the Supreme Soviet the next day with a sustained and wrathful broadside, ending what he called the “great scandal” created by Prime Minister Pavlov’s irresponsible behavior. After he harangued the cowering deputies, Pavlov’s resolution was shelved. The Soviet president told reporters with a grin, “The putsch is over!” Astonishingly Gorbachev did not fire his comic-opera prime minister, just as he failed to dismiss the blood-stained KGB chief and ministers of the interior and defense when they lied to him about Vilnius, though he privately lambasted them as “scoundrels and bastards.”

At a subsequent meeting of the Central Committee, hard-line communists raged at Gorbachev about his inadequacy in dealing with the crisis in party authority. “All right,” he said. “I’m quitting.” He walked out. Seventy-two of the three hundred members, among them Andrey Grachev, signed a statement saying they would leave the ranks of the party also. It was a ploy by Gorbachev, and it worked. The challengers backed down. Gorbachev returned. Chernyaev gleefully noted how the gutless rabbits among Gorbachev’s most trenchant critics who longed for a return to totalitarianism “shit in their pants” and begged him to stay as head of the party. The Stalinists were trapped. If they lost him as general secretary, they lost any hold over the presidency, and Gorbachev as president could claim the loyalty of state structures. Gorbachev, however, in his desire to hold his enemies close, missed an opportunity to divest himself of a thoroughly discredited ideology. This deepened his unpopularity with the reformers.⁸

On a visit to the Bolshoi Theater that summer, Gorbachev was criticized from the stage by Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrey Sakharov, for his role in the Baltics crackdown. “They celebrate Sakharov’s legacy but they radiate hate, anger and revenge,” fumed the president to Chernyaev afterwards. “How can one deal with these people? They have already forgotten who released Sakharov.”⁹