Moscow, December 25, 1991

By 9 a.m. Yeltsin had recovered sufficiently to dictate an appeal to the people of Russia to resist the “cynical attempt at a right-wing coup.” The fax machine was still working in the dacha, and within an hour the appeal was being circulated by leaflet throughout Moscow and broadcast on radio stations around the world. Gorbachev, isolated in Foros, heard about the embryonic resistance on a tiny Sony radio that he usually listened to while shaving.

The Russian president decided to make a run for the Russian White House. “Listen, there are tanks out there,” Naina protested. “What’s the point of you going?” He replied, “They won’t stop me.” As always his women made sure Yeltsin was presentable before he left. Tanya straightened his jacket so that his bulletproof vest was not noticeable. “Your head is still unprotected, and your head is the main thing,” cried Naina.

Yeltsin and Korzhakov decided to go directly to the White House in a convoy of official vehicles with a Russian flag of white, blue, and red fluttering from the bonnet of the black Chaika carrying the Russian president. Their departure was watched by a small KGB surveillance division under Commander Karpukhin that had been ordered to take up position in the woods around. Karpukhin would testify later that he had orders to arrest Yeltsin but that he let him drive away. But Kryuchkov had delayed issuing orders to arrest people on a list of eighty democrats singled out for detention, including Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev. He preferred to try at first to cow the opposition and not appear heavyhanded. It was one of many misjudgments that doomed the coup from the outset.

With Yeltsin squeezed between bodyguards in the back, the Chaika barreled unimpeded past tanks churning up Kutuzovsky Prospekt and then raced across Novo-Arbatsky Bridge and into the underground car park of the White House, arriving at around 10 a.m. In his office he found that all telephone lines had been cut but one: It had been installed the day before the coup and was not yet registered. Yeltsin was able to call allies in Russia and around the Soviet Union.

Outside the White House armored vehicles from the Tamanskaya motorized infantry division took up position but without orders of any kind. The division chief of staff, Major Yevdokimov, said he had no intention of harming any of the young men and middle-aged women who had started milling around outside the White House, furious at the idea that Yeltsin might be arrested.

Shortly after midday Yeltsin came out, flanked by bodyguards armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and climbed aboard a T-72 tank. He read his statement to about two hundred supporters, raising his voice over the sound of the heavy military vehicles rumbling past. He called for a general strike and opposition to the “right-wing, reactionary unconstitutional coup.”

After he hurried back into the White House, the crowd began to pile up concrete slabs and metal rods to form barricades. By late afternoon the numbers had swelled to several thousand.

The coup had already begun to falter. Around the city, tank crews were fraternizing with pedestrians. Pavlov’s nerves were failing him, and he started drinking large whiskeys. Yazov found him “absolutely plastered” in the Kremlin, and he had to be carried out to his car and driven home. He was in no state to take part in the televised press conference of the emergency committee, held at 5 p.m. in the foreign ministry press center.

That Monday evening, television viewers saw the committee for the first time—six men in grey-blue suits, sitting at a table on a stage with a pasty-faced Yanayev in the middle. His nicotine-stained fingers trembling, Yanayev justified their action on the grounds that normal life had become impossible. He lied that Gorbachev was “undergoing treatment” for illness. There was derisive laughter when an Italian journalist asked if they had consulted General Pinochet on how to stage a coup. The Russian and foreign reporters there managed to inform millions of viewers what state television had been withholding by asking questions about Yeltsin’s strike call and the resistance building up at the White House.

That night the Russian president bedded down in the doctor’s surgery on the third floor of the White House, where the windows faced the inner courtyard. His family were spirited from the dacha for safety in an unmarked van with curtained windows to a two-bedroom apartment in the suburb of Kuntsevo belonging to one of his bodyguards.