John Major of Britain was the first of a chain of foreign leaders to telephone with words of support. George H. W. Bush called from the Oval Office the morning of Tuesday, August 20, and for the first time Yeltsin aroused his admiration. “After hearing Yeltsin’s voice, Bush began to believe that there might yet be a hero in this drama, one who would actually vanquish the villains—and it was not Gorbachev, but Yeltsin.” If he won out over the tanks, the American told Yeltsin, Russia would “pave its way into the civilized community of states.”88 Bush clandestinely ordered U.S. national-security agencies to provide Yeltsin with signals intelligence from intercepts of Soviet military sources, and had a communications specialist from the embassy go the Moscow White House to help the Yeltsin group secure their telephone calls.89
That afternoon Yeltsin blazed away at the concourse in front of the White House, this time with loudspeakers to amplify his voice: “You can build a throne out of bayonets, but can you sit on it for long? I am convinced that there is not and will not be any return to the past. . . . Russia will be free!”90 By telephone and through mediators, he proselytized military officers, after which Generals Yevgenii Shaposhnikov and Pavel Grachëv, the commanders of the Soviet air force and airborne troops, agreed between them to have Shaposhnikov send two jets to strafe military vehicles in the Kremlin if the White House were stormed. The pop groups Helios, Mister Twister, Metallic Corrosion, and Time Machine rocked it up in the square. Poet Yevgenii Yevtushenko did a reading for the crowd, stand-up comedian Gennadii Khazanov performed impersonations of Gorbachev and Yanayev, and the master cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich lionized the opponents of the coup and waved a Kalashnikov rifle. Tension was astronomically high that evening, when soldiers accidentally killed three young male civilians.91 Yeltsin was nonplussed that the coup makers did not attack or even seal off the White House: “How could Kryuchkov be so blockheaded as not to understand how dangerous such indecision could be?”92 The GKChP blinked first. At three in the morning of August 21, Kryuchkov decided not to storm the White House, concluding that the carnage would be politically unmanageable. The blockade was lifted in the afternoon and the troops began to evacuate Moscow. By midnight the putschists were behind bars—arrested by agents of the RSFSR procurator general—and Gorbachev, the emperor who had no clothes, was back from Foros, escorted by Vice President Rutskoi of Russia. Descending the stairs of the plane, Gorbachev thanked Yeltsin and, tone-deaf to the end, spoke of being “an adherent of socialism.” On August 24, at the funeral for the three young men who died, Gorbachev was ill at ease, while Yeltsin movingly asked the parents’ forgiveness for not saving their sons’ lives.
Russia had entered an intermezzo of duopoly,
Capitalizing on the legitimacy gap, Yeltsin compelled Gorbachev to annul his post-coup decrees on leadership of the national-security agencies and appoint men Yeltsin trusted. Gorbachev had made General Mikhail Moiseyev, who was complicit in the plot, acting defense minister on August 21. On August 22 Moiseyev was called to Gorbachev’s office and found Yeltsin next to the Soviet president and commander-in-chief. “Explain to him that he is not minister any longer,” Yeltsin barked at Gorbachev. “Gorbachev repeated Boris Nikolayevich’s words. Moiseyev listened in silence, and off he went.” The dovish Shaposhnikov, sight unseen by Yeltsin, was made minister of defense, and Vadim Bakatin, whom Gorbachev had fired as interior minister the winter before, was made chairman of the KGB.93 On September 1 a Shaposhnikov order cleared by Yeltsin abolished the political directorate of the armed forces, long an implement of party control.
