The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

for seryozha, who had spent a summer in the castle-like dacha where Gorbachev was held hostage, the failed coup offered an unremarkable spectacle. He knew the girl whom the entire country watched coming out of the airplane draped in a blanket. He was used to seeing his intimates on television. What struck him more was the short conversation his father had with him. Anatoly said that he had spent the three days in front of the White House. He said it with disgust: he had hated feeling helpless, unarmed in the face of tanks.

Seryozha's grandfather Alexander Nikolaevich had been at the Moscow City Council building, where the local government was organizing its own resistance effort. He had addressed the crowd. "The most frightening thing that could happen, has happened," he said. "Never before has our land seen days so tragic."⁴² But while Gorbachev thanked Yeltsin and his allies for their help in resisting the coup, he had no words of gratitude for Alexander Nikolaevich. He did not see his old ally when he returned to Moscow, and when questioned during his press conference, he reproached Alexander Nikolaevich for having caved in to the hard-liners and resigned from the Party. It seemed there might not be a place for Alexander Nikolaevich in the leadership of this new country to which Gorbachev claimed to have returned.

But what country was this? "Does the Soviet Union still exist?" became the conversation opener of the day, the week, and the autumn. The Soviet Union seemed to exist, but its form was elusive. Yeltsin's Russian Republic summarily subsumed some of the Union's governing mechanisms. Yeltsin also plainly strong-armed Gorbachev into canceling some of his first post-coup appointments. Most important, he made Gorbachev appoint an outsider of Yeltsin's choosing to run the Soviet KGB and then added the dismantling of the agency to the man's job description.⁴³ On August 23 and August 25, Yeltsin signed decrees that suspended the activities of both the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Russian Republic's own Communist Party.

On August 27—five days after the coup—Yeltsin appointed Boris Nemtsov, Zhanna's father, to run the Nizhny Novgorod region. Only three of Russia's eighty-nine regions had leaders who had been elected, their posts newly created during perestroika: the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad and the president of Tatarstan. The rest of the regions were still run by Party structures, which were now literally, physically being abandoned. Yeltsin began appointing presidential "representatives" to these regions, signing off on dozens of names a day—mostly people he did not know, who had been hurriedly recruited by his staff. Nemtsov was an exception. Yeltsin knew him and liked him, and after spending three days in the besieged White House together, they started playing tennis with each other whenever they could. Nemtsov was thirty-one, and he would now be running Russia's third-largest city and the surrounding area. This was one of Yeltsin's more considered appointments.⁴⁴

The union treaty, meanwhile, was crumbling. Gorbachev continued negotiating, but so did Yeltsin. The Russian president pressured the Soviet one finally to recognize the independence of the Baltic states. Even the republics that had seemed to favor the Union before the coup now declared independence. Gorbachev, however, kept trying to convene meetings on the treaty. But Ukraine, the second-largest republic, now boycotted them. Finally, on December 7, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus convened a meeting at which they devised the formal dissolution of the USSR and invented a consolation prize, a vague entity called the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev was not invited, and was not even the first to know: he was informed by the Belorussian leader only after Yeltsin had called the American president, George H. W. Bush, to notify him. Gorbachev raged to reporters a few days later: "I don't think our people understand yet that they are losing the country. The country will not exist!"⁴⁵

Less than two weeks later, on December 25, Gorbachev addressed his countrymen as president for the last time: "In light of what's happened, with the foundation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am resigning my post as president of the USSR."⁴⁶ The Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Masha and her mother were on the train to Poland, valid passports of a nonexistent country in Tatiana's bag.

six

THE EXECUTION OF THE WHITE HOUSE

seryozha remembered this. He was on a Metro train, on his way home from school, and when the train emerged from the tunnel onto the bridge over the Moscow River, Seryozha saw tanks. He got off at the next stop to board the train going in the opposite direction so that he could ride over the bridge again and look at the tanks. Then he did it again, and again, and again, until it was dark.