Moscow, December 25, 1991

By Tuesday morning, August 20, George Bush, who initially had stopped short of condemning the coup committee—on Scowcroft’s advice he had called their action extraconstitutional rather than illegitimate so as not to burn their bridges with the coup leaders—had got a better idea of what was happening. He managed to get through to Yeltsin. “Boris, my friend,” cried the U.S. president. Yeltsin was overwhelmed. “I am extremely glad to hear from you!” he shouted in response. “We expect an attack, but your call will help us.” “We’re praying for you,” said Bush.⁴

From a balcony at the Russian White House, protected by lead shields held by Korzhakov and another bodyguard, Yeltsin read out a second statement. In it he called on soldiers and police to disobey the orders of Yazov and Pugo but not to seek confrontation.

In St. Petersburg Mayor Sobchak confronted troop commanders and persuaded them not to enter the city. At his side opposing the putsch was his special assistant, KGB officer Vladimir Putin. “Sobchak and I practically moved into the city council,” Putin recounted years later. “We drove to the Kirov Factory and to other plants to speak to the workers. But we were nervous. We even passed out pistols, though I left my service revolver in the safe. People everywhere supported us.”⁵

Putin was concerned that his behavior as a KGB officer could be considered a crime of office if the plotters won. He expressed this fear to his boss, and Sobchak called Kryuchkov on his behalf. Astonishingly the mayor was able to get the chief organizer of the putsch on the phone to discuss such a matter of minor consequence given the scale of events—that Putin was resigning from the KGB forthwith.

Kryuchkov by now seemed to realize his mistake in not securing the arrest of Yeltsin. Public opposition was consolidating around the Russian president. The emergency committee was falling apart. Pavlov and Bessmertnykh had disappeared. Yanayev was drinking himself into a stupor. The defenders of the White House now included many high-profile personalities, including Politburo veteran Alexander Yakovlev, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner. Shevardnadze was also there, asking aloud if Gorbachev himself was implicated in the coup. At five o’clock in the morning Yeltsin remembered it was his daughter Lena’s birthday and rang to congratulate her. Later he gave her a spent cartridge as a present.

That afternoon one of the military’s youngest commanders, forty-one-year-old General Alexander Lebed, went to the White House and secretly informed Yeltsin’s defenders that an attack would begin at 2 a.m. the next day. Lebed had been impressed by Yeltsin when the Russian president had visited the headquarters of the 106th Airborne Division in Tula earlier in the summer. He observed him making friends with servicemen, taking off his watch and presenting it to a lieutenant and then pulling an identical one from his pocket to give to a sergeant.

All women were told to leave the White House, and the defenders got ready for an assault. Preparations were made to smuggle Yeltsin to the sanctuary of the nearby U.S. embassy.

Meanwhile Yazov found he could not get a single military commander to lead an attack on the White House. Field Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the fortynine-year-old air force commander, quietly tried to persuade the old soldier to quit the coup committee. When Yazov asked him instead to prepare helicopters to land KGB Alpha Group troops on the roof of the White House, Shaposhnikov threatened to send a pair of aircraft to bomb military vehicles in the Kremlin. In Stalin’s days Shaposhnikov would have been shot, but under Gorbachev the conflicted military had become a debating society.

The Alpha Group mutinied when ordered to attack the White House. Alexander Yakovlev concluded afterwards that “they refused to have blood on their hands for the sake of such idiots as Kryuchkov and Yazov.”

The danger passed. In the early hours of Wednesday Yazov ordered all troops to withdraw from Moscow. The operetta-like coup collapsed. Kryuchkov telephoned Burbulis in the White House at 3 a.m. and told him they could sleep peacefully. Next morning the KGB chief requisitioned a plane to take him and other junta members to Foros to try to come to terms with Gorbachev.

The Gorbachev family had watched the plotters’ press conference on television with incredulity. “What perfidiousness, lawlessness, infamy!” wrote Raisa in her diary. “Needless to say we are ready for anything, even the worst.” She was terrified that the lie about her husband’s illness meant they intended he should actually die. ⁶

Gorbachev saw some virtue in Yeltsin’s stubborn personality at last. He told Chernyaev he was convinced that Boris Nikolayevich had shown his true nature and nothing would break him.