Moscow, December 25, 1991

Raisa could not sleep on their first night of house arrest. She was “tormented by bitterness at the betrayal of people who worked side by side with Mikhail Sergeyevich.” The treachery of Boldin was most hurtful to her. “We have been soul mates for fifteen years. He was like a family member with whom we trusted everything—our most intimate secrets.” Fearing they might be poisoned, she insisted the family eat only food delivered before the coup started.³

Confused, the conspirators returned to Moscow. They had hoped to intimidate the vacillating Gorbachev into signing the decree and giving their putsch legitimacy, or else step down temporarily while they got rid of his awkward rival, Boris Yeltsin. Boldin realized now that they had miscalculated. Without Gorbachev’s authority they had no mandate. He later recalled that “everything went haywire from the start.”

On Sunday evening they gathered in Pavlov’s office in the Kremlin. Yanayev was summoned to meet them. He was tipsy when he arrived. But he was no pushover. Chain-smoking and downing shots of vodka with a shaking hand, Yanayev had to be cajoled into signing the document declaring himself acting president of the Soviet Union as a result of the “illness” of President Gorbachev. He finally did so just after the chimes of the Kremlin’s Savior Tower clock sounded eleven o’clock. Kryuchkov and the other conspirators signed a decree to establish martial law for six months. Anatoly Lukyanov, whose closeness to Gorbachev deceived people into thinking he was a democrat, also arrived in Pavlov’s office. He needed no persuading to give the coup a veneer of legitimacy as congress speaker. Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, summoned back from vacation several hundred miles southwest of Moscow, arrived after midnight. He found his name on the list of committee members and crossed it off. He left for home, not to emerge again until it was all over. But he didn’t prevent Soviet embassies taking orders from the committee and disseminating its propaganda. Boldin returned to the hospital, where he was heavily sedated.

Meanwhile, Yazov issued coded telegram 8825 ordering the top military leadership to move troops into Moscow. Kryuchkov assigned a special KGB unit to place Boris Yeltsin under surveillance in preparation for his arrest.

That Sunday evening Yeltsin was in Alma-Ata, almost two thousand miles from Moscow, meeting Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. He delayed his scheduled departure to partake of a sumptuous dinner with Kazakh folk music and “colorfully dressed girls whirling around,” during which he amused everyone by playfully performing with wooden spoons on the head of an assistant, Yury Zaiganov. Well fortified, Yeltsin left just after 8 p.m. local time for the long flight back to Moscow. When he arrived there, he was driven straight to his dacha at Arkhangelskoye. No one stopped him.

Shortly after six o’clock next morning, he was shaken awake by his daughter Tanya, who flew into the room shouting, “Papa! Get up! There’s a coup!”

Millions of people in Russia would never forget what they were doing when they heard the dawn proclamation on radio and television that Monday, August 19, 1991, that suddenly reintroduced fear into their lives. Sitting in his undershirt, Yeltsin watched Yury Petrov, state television’s star announcer, broadcast a statement by an emergency committee that Gorbachev was ill, that Vice President Yanayev had assumed the duties of the president, and that martial law existed in the USSR. The announcer said that the action of political movements was to be halted, illegally held arms were to be handed in, meetings and demonstrations were banned, and the mass media was to come under emergency control. After the announcement Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake was broadcast repeatedly.

Most of the Russian leadership lived close to the Yeltsin residence, and they began arriving in a panic at his dacha. Alexander Korzhakov turned up as Ruslan Khasbulatov, the speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet, came racing across from the dacha next door. They found Yeltsin slumped in an armchair, hung over and stunned. His top aides, Gennady Burbulis, Ivan Silayev, Mikhail Poltoranin, and Viktor Yaroshenko, all came in and congregated around him. Moscow’s popular deputy mayor, Yury Luzhkov, turned up, promised to organize resistance, and left. Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of the former Leningrad (which two months earlier had reverted to the name St. Petersburg) who happened to be in Moscow that day, arrived and vowed to rally opposition in Russia’s second city. Then he, too, departed, saying, “May God help us!”

Yeltsin called Pavel Grachev, commander of the paratroops, whom he had recently befriended, to ask what was going on. The forty-three-year-old general was moving troops around as ordered, but he promised to send a squad to the dacha to ensure Yeltsin’s safety. Perhaps the plotters did not have the total loyalty of the military.