A light drizzle was falling. A twelve-wheeled, olive-green T-72 tank, No. 110, from the Taman Motorized Rifle Division, built at the Urals Wagon Works in Sverdlovsk oblast, had just rumbled toward the bottom of the stairs. Yeltsin walked slowly down the steps, grabbed a small Russian flag from a bystander, and stood in front of the machine, intending, he said, to keep it and the three or four additional tanks behind it from coming any closer. For a few seconds, he looked down the barrel of its cannon, “confident that they would not run over a president.” Only when the forty-five tons of metal screeched to a halt did it occur to him to heave himself onto the hull, something his training as a tank operator at UPI and his service as party overseer of industry in Sverdlovsk let him know how to do. Once on it, Yeltsin reached into the hatch to shake hands with the driver and gunner and improvised again.83 Perched on hardware that symbolized Soviet power—and what had been done in its name in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968, and in Kabul in 1979—he pumped his right fist twice. He then read out his appeal to the citizenry, a copy of which he had clutched in his hand as he walked out of the building, unamplified to a knot of television cameras and a sparse audience that grew from about fifty when he began to speak to no more than 150 at the end, as passersby and shoppers from nearby stores came to have a look. Nikolai Vorontsov (the Soviet environment minister), Aleksandr Korzhakov, Gennadii Burbulis, and members of his entourage scampered up the side of the tank as he spoke.
The appeal, rather like Yeltsin’s secret speech in 1987, was not particularly eloquent, and it was composed with two other people, Khasbulatov and Silayev. The values it cited were those of the democratic fragment of the fast-dissolving Soviet civilization. Russia’s new government, it said, had tried to preserve “the unity of the Soviet Union and the unity of Russia,” and it could not accept the illegal and immoral acts of the GKChP, which would “return us to the epoch of the Cold War and the isolation of the Soviet Union from the world community.”84 Yeltsin’s most musical moment, to use Anatolii Chernyayev’s phrase, was formed less by the words he spoke than by how he spoke them and where.
Within minutes, footage of Yeltsin’s stagecraft was transmitted internationally on CNN. Soviet television was allowed to show snippets only, but staffers gave friends in the Western news bureaus tapes they themselves could not broadcast, and copies were sent to the Urals and Siberia. Any Moscow family with a wire antenna could tune in CNN on their home television. Shots of Yeltsin on Tank No. 110 came in a flood when the coup was over. Indigenous viewers saw in them glimmerings of a totemic image from another revolution, tattooed in their heads by the history primers they had read as children—of Lenin at the Finland Station, returning from Swiss exile and holding forth to the Petrograd proletariat from an armored car in April 1917. Immortalized on celluloid from eye level, “Yeltsin’s rather awkward bulk makes him appear someone ‘larger than life,’ his unrefined speaking style ‘the voice of the people,’ his rather unkempt appearance a sign, not of the confusion of a politician caught by surprise but of a strong leader, righteously indignant and full of selfless resolve.”85
There were anxious hours still to come. The hoped-for general strike did not happen, although the GKChP was unable to make use of that failure. In the White House, Yeltsin and 300 to 400 followers hunkered down behind sandbags and office furniture, with gas masks and weapons at the ready. Maybe 75,000 people (in the daylight, fewer at night) massed on the streets below.86 At five P.M. on August 19, he assigned RSFSR Deputy Premier Oleg Lobov, his political client from the Urals, to institute a command center for a “reserve government” at a bomb shelter in Verkhnyaya Sysert, south of Sverdlovsk. Andrei Kozyrev, the hitherto ornamental Russian foreign minister and a fluent speaker of English, was sent to London to lay the groundwork for a government-in-exile.87 In another decree, Yeltsin reached out to the military, enjoining them not to carry out the orders of the coup makers: “Soldiers, officers, and generals, the clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country. They must not be allowed to bring eternal night.”
