Moscow, December 25, 1991

One important reason for the failure of the coup was the speed with which information spread about what was happening. The coup leaders had summoned television chief Leonid Kravchenko in the early hours of Monday morning to prepare the broadcast of the declaration of the state of emergency and impose tight control on news. But every editor and senior official in television headquarters at Gosteleradio, the state television and radio company, could watch CNN in their office. As the day went on, they learned from the American network and from their own reporters on the streets of the mounting resistance at the White House.

People around the country who had rigged up an aerial knew that the putsch was being opposed. Ekaterina Genieva, director of the Library of Foreign Literature, who used the facilities of her building near Taganskaya Square to bring out an anticoup news sheet, acknowledged that from the start “we knew what was happening in our country from the Western media.” “This was a hugely important story and time for CNN,” said Eason Jordan, then CNN international editor. “In a sense, CNN was a major factor in ensuring the Soviet coup failed.” CNN’s bureau was almost across the street from the Russian White House, and when Yeltsin made his dramatic stand on a tank, the pictures were sent via satellite to Atlanta, beamed back to Soviet television at Ostankino, and sent by microwave to the network’s subscribers in the Kremlin, the foreign ministry, and several hotels. Televisions around Moscow center could pick up the microwave relay.

On the morning of the coup, media analyst Lydia Polskaya pushed the button for the fourth channel where she could normally get CNN and was stunned to find the Americans reporting as usual. Nursultan Nazarbayev watched CNN round the clock from his office in Alma-Ata and was able to judge quickly that the junta did not merit his support. U.S. secretary of state James Baker acknowledged that the White House used CNN as the fastest source available to get its message of support for Yeltsin to Moscow. “Praised be information technology! Praised be CNN,” wrote Eduard Shevardnadze in Newsweek after the coup failed. “Anybody who owned a parabolic antenna able to receive this network’s transmissions had a complete picture of what was happening.”¹³ The coup plotters were faced with insubordination from within Ostankino itself. News director Elena Pozdnyak refused an order to take out Yanayev’s trembling fingers and the derisive laughter of the journalists from the broadcast of the press conference.¹⁴

Gorbachev fired Kravchenko as head of state television, brushing aside his excuse that he had no alternative but to obey the emergency committee as Gosteleradio was under the guns of the KGB. The president asked his one-time friend Yegor Yakovlev, to whom he had not spoken for nearly a year, to take his place. The progressive former Moscow News editor astutely got Yeltsin’s blessing before accepting. Yakovlev restored banned programs, rehired journalists who had been dismissed for refusing to accept censorship, and started getting rid of the KGB spies posing as correspondents for the broadcasting organization in Russia and around the world.

One of Yegor Yakovlev’s priorities was to get Gorbachev onto international news broadcasts to demonstrate that he was still in business as Soviet leader. He found willing allies in CNN and ABC, which were competing in the aftermath of the coup to get access to Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Both presidents agreed to a request from ABC to appear at a joint televised “town hall” meeting in Moscow on Monday, September 2, conducted by Peter Jennings, to be shown in both Russia and the United States.

When ABC News president Roone Arledge boasted publicly that “this historic live broadcast will provide a forum for Americans from every part of the country to ask questions of these two leaders at this critical period of history,” the competitive CNN president, Tom Johnson, and Eason Jordan took the next flight from Atlanta to Moscow on August 29 to “snag the interviews.” To their delight, Yegor Yakovlev made Gorbachev available a day before the scheduled ABC program for an exclusive half-hour interview, conducted by Steve Hurst and also shown on Soviet television.

The interview was an opportunity for Gorbachev to boast of the restoration of his political fortunes. That day he had convened a meeting of the presidents of ten of the fifteen original Soviet republics, including Yeltsin, and they had agreed to form themselves into a state council, with Gorbachev at its head, that would revive talks on a new union treaty.

He was taking control again, he insisted. His new alliance with Yeltsin, he told CNN’s Hurst, was “unbreakable.”

Chapter 18 DECEMBER 25: DUSK