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Spies Without Cloaks
The KGB's Successors
By Amy Knight PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1996 Amy Knight
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2187-7
CHAPTER 1
THE KGB AND THE MYTH OF THE AUGUST COUP
Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. (Karl Marx)
RUSSIA HAS always been prone to historical myths. Take, for example, the widely held nineteenth-century belief that the peasants were the true bearers of socialism, or the portrayal of Lenin as a deity and the Communist Party as infallible. Or consider the most outlandish myth of all, that of the "great leader" Joseph Stalin. In some cases it has taken a long time to dispel the myths. Official acknowledgment of the true extent of Stalin's crimes and public criticism of Lenin, for example, did not occur until the late 1980s. By contrast, the myth of the failed August 1991 coup attempt, presented as a victory of the democratic will of the Russian people, took only a few years to fall flat.
The aborted coup was a last-ditch effort by Gorbachev's hard-line subordinates to stem the tide of reform in the country, which they saw as a threat to political stability and to their own interests as party and state leaders. In particular, they wanted to prevent the imminent signing of the so-called Union Treaty, which would have significantly reduced the powers of the central Soviet government vis-à-vis the republics. On the morning of 19 August 1991, KGB Chief Vladimir Kriuchkov and seven other conservative members of the government, including Defense Minister Dmitrii Iazov and Minister of Interior Boris Pugo, announced that Gorbachev, who was vacationing in the Crimea, had fallen ill. Because of his incapacitation, they said, they had formed an eight-man State Committee on the State of Emergency (SCSE), headed by Vice-President Gennadii Ianaev, to rule the country. Their attempt to enforce a state of emergency and impose martial law was a resounding failure, and within seventy-two hours most of them had been arrested. The coup affair, which riveted the world for several days, had an important impact on subsequent developments, giving impetus to the breakup of the Soviet Union and laying much of the groundwork for the evolution of the KGB'S successor agencies. But, viewed from the hindsight of several years, the August 1991 events appear much different from what they seemed at the time.
Part of the appeal of the coup story was that it featured what appeared to be clear-cut forces of good and evil, battling it out. It also had a happy ending — or so it seemed — with the hero, Boris Yeltsin, standing victorious on top of a tank, and the villains, the KGB-led conspirators who had tried to seize power, being marched off to jail. But the dividing line between good and evil, reformers and hard-liners, victors and vanquished that seemed so clear in August 1991 has since become blurred.
By August 1994 all but one of the fourteen accused coup plotters had been granted amnesty, and two of those amnestied, Vasilii Starodubtsev and Anatolii Lukianov, had been elected members of the Russian parliament. The remaining defendant, Army General Valentin Varennikov, had rejected the amnesty and insisted on his day in court. After a highly publicized trial, he was acquitted of all charges. Meanwhile Yeltsin's allies in August 1991, Aleksandr Rutskoi and Ruslan Khasbulatov, who helped him defend the Russian White House, had become his bitterest enemies, even ending up in prison for a short time after their confrontation with Yeltsin in October 1993. As for the KGB, which was blamed for masterminding the coup plot, it survived the upheaval and was still in business, albeit under another name.
One hundred and fifty volumes of investigation and inquiry records, days of court testimony, and numerous eyewitness accounts in the press led many to the inevitable conclusion that things were not what they had seemed to be in August 1991. Not only had the accusations of treason against the fourteen men been effectively refuted; Gorbachev's claims that he was an innocent victim of the coup had lost all credibility; and even Yeltsin's role as the courageous defender of the White House during the August crisis appeared dubious.
Not surprisingly, public opinion about the coup had also changed. Polled on the three-year anniversary of the coup attempt, only a small proportion of Muscovites expressed a favorable opinion of its outcome. Less than a quarter of those polled viewed the changes that had taken place since the coup in positive terms, and close to one-third said they would like to return to the pre-1991 state of affairs. Almost 50 percent said that their opinion of the August 1991 events had changed over the past three years.
In fact, many Russians sympathized with the plotters all along, because they approved of their motivation, that of preventing the Soviet Union from unraveling. After the initial euphoria over the defeat of the coup had died down and people began to face the realities of a disbanded Soviet empire, disenchantment set in. Within a couple of years the Yeltsin administration itself was pushing, with considerable success, for a "reintegration" of the former Soviet republics (with the exception of the three Baltic states).
As it turned out, the crisis of August 1991 did not represent the revolutionary turning point that it was portrayed to be. A decisive break with the Soviet system of the past did not occur when the coup attempt collapsed. The system had begun to unravel well before and, as the postcoup events have shown, it has yet to be completely destroyed. What, then, was the significance of the August coup attempt? In order to answer this question, we must look at the role of a key player in the plot, the kgb, and examine its complex relationship with the political leadership both before and after August 1991.
Gorbachev and the KGB
The KGB presented Soviet President Gorbachev with one of his biggest political challenges when he embarked on his program of political and economic reform in 1987. However democratic his intentions, Gorbachev knew that he could not risk confronting the KGB head-on. So he maintained a tight balancing act during the period from 1987 to mid-1991, an act which often resulted in contradictory policies. On the one hand, he introduced glasnost, a policy of unprecedented freedom of expression in the Soviet Union; he initiated semi-democratic electoral procedures for the parliament; he allowed for the emergence of a de facto multiparty system; and he embarked on a dramatic new foreign policy, which involved a complete reassessment of Russia's relations with the West and Eastern Europe. Gorbachev's "new thinking" put an end to the militant anti-Westernism that had justified a continuous military buildup for forty years. And it set the stage for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.
These reformist policies were highly threatening to the KGB, which had relied on strict censorship, a closed political system, an extensive spy network in Eastern Europe, and a virulently anti-Western foreign policy to maintain its power and influence. But Gorbachev offset these changes by other measures, which reinforced a strong KGB. He appointed Vladimir Kriuchkov, a long-time KGB professional, to head the KGB in September 1988 and made him a leading adviser; he did not fire members of the KGB'S old guard from the organization's leadership or subject the KGB to legal controls; and he authorized the KGB, along with the regular police and the army, to use brute force in combatting nationalist unrest in places like Georgia, where Russian troops killed twenty-nine civilians in the infamous "Tbilisi massacre" of April 1989.
Gorbachev's ambivalence toward the KGB was a reflection of two underlying problems. First, the reform of the socialist system that Gorbachev started with perestroika had quickly escalated beyond his control. The system was being undermined rather than reformed. Second, Gorbachev was not strong enough politically to rein in the KGB even if he had wanted to. By late 1990 he had suffered a serious decline in popularity and in political authority. Growing ethnic unrest, a deepening economic crisis, demands for independence from the Baltic states, and opposition from within his own leadership were eroding his powers. He could not run the risk of antagonizing the KGB by giving in to democratic calls for a reform of that organization because he needed its coercive forces as a bulwark for his rule. This was a problem that Gorbachev's successor, Boris Yeltsin, was also to encounter.
As for the KGB leadership, publicly Kriuchkov and his deputies declared themselves strong supporters of Gorbachev's reforms. Kriuchkov, who had worked under Iurii Andropov as head of the KGB'S First Chief Directorate (foreign espionage), came across as smooth and sophisticated in his initial media interviews as the new KGB chief, supporting the need for a complete restructuring of Soviet foreign policy. He also welcomed the creation of a parliamentary committee to oversee the KGB and stressed the importance of rehabilitating the victims of Stalin's purges. On the basis of his public statements (Kriuchkov gave no fewer than eighteen press interviews during the first two years of his tenure as KGB chief) and his association with the "liberal" Andropov, some Western analysts even assumed that Kriuchkov's appointment was a positive sign for perestroika.
Try as they did to promote a new image for the KGB and to convince the world that their organization was drastically reforming itself, KGB officials had trouble containing their anxiety about perestroika, especially by mid-1990. They had good reason to be nervous. After all, their counterparts in eastern Europe, where communism had already collapsed, had lost their jobs overnight, and some were even facing criminal prosecution. In the non-Russian republics, nationalist groups, who saw the KGB as the ultimate symbol of Russian domination, were threatening it with force, in some cases even storming their buildings. There was also the growing phenomenon of "whistle-blowing" by disaffected KGB staffers. As a result of glasnost, these critics became increasingly vocal, revealing to the press shocking stories of the KGB'S arrogant disregard for legality. This public scrutiny was unbearable for such a secretive organization.
Although KGB officials fought back by creating a public relations center (which even sponsored a beauty contest with the winner crowned "Miss KGB"), their ultimate response was frustration and alarm. In March 1990, a group of KGB staffers at the headquarters in Moscow appealed to the USSR Supreme Soviet (the parliament), urging deputies to stop the growing crime and instability in the country by adopting laws to strengthen the KGB'S power. Kriuchkov and his deputies began complaining loudly about nationalist aspirations among non-Russians in the Soviet Union, as well as about the dangers of a free market economy. In a speech at the Twenty-eighth CPSU Congress in July 1990, Kriuchkov warned that it would be "a ruinous mistake to throw the country into the arms of the elemental forces of the market."
Gorbachev answered the KGB'S appeals by expanding police powers to ensure public order and to combat economic crime and ethnic unrest. He also increased his own authority by persuading the Congress of People's Deputies to pass a new "Law on a State of Emergency" in March 1990. The law established a constitutional basis for the president of the USSR to invoke extraordinary centralized powers. Later Gorbachev gave his outspoken support to a new "Law on the KGB," which was ratified by the Supreme Soviet in May 1991 and gave the KGB sweeping new powers. The warnings of dire consequences from ethnic unrest and the decline of law and order had clearly struck a cord in Gorbachev and his advisers. They could not afford to take these dangers lightly.
The Conservatives Coalesce
Behind the scenes, KGB and military leaders began, in the autumn of 1990, to make contingency plans for the imposition of martial law by means of declaring a state of emergency. They put their plans to the test in Lithuania in January 1991, when Soviet security and military troops marched into Vilnius and attacked the television station. Contrary to the impression he gave publicly, Gorbachev was not an innocent bystander in these events. The commander of the Russian Airborne Forces stated unequivocally in a later interview that Gorbachev personally ordered all the various "crackdowns" implemented by the KGB and military and was lying when he denied knowledge of them. Indeed, documents from the KGB archives show that Gorbachev was fully aware of the KGB'S plans for imposing a state of emergency and weighed this option on numerous occasions. The Communist Party's Politburo seriously considered evoking emergency measures in March 1991, when thousands of Muscovites took to the streets to voice their support for Boris Yeltsin.
Other archival documents — unearthed by the parliamentary commission to investigate the August coup — also showed that Gorbachev frequently enlisted the KGB to carry out "undemocratic" operations such as secret surveillance and wiretapping of his political opponents (in some cases even his colleagues). Gorbachev not only read the KGB'S reports, he made handwritten remarks in the margins. Gorbachev's defenders later argued that he did all this because he was being misinformed by the KGB. According to them, the KGB deluged Gorbachev with exaggerated reports that created a false impression of the political situation. The reports persuaded Gorbachev that things had deteriorated to such an extent and his own position was so precarious that these extra-legal measures, including a state of emergency, could not be avoided.
It is doubtful that Gorbachev was so naive that he believed everything the KGB told him, but that is beside the point, because the KGB'S assessments were probably not far off the mark. By the spring of 1991, Gorbachev was losing ground so quickly that a siege mentality on his part would have been entirely understandable. Yeltsin, who had been elected president of the Russian republic in June and thereby had gained legitimate political authority, was pressuring Gorbachev to relinquish much of his power base. Not only did Yeltsin call for an end to the Communist Party's leading role in politics, he also demanded unprecedented independence for the republics of the USSR. Under pressure from Yeltsin, Gorbachev had agreed in late April 1991 to transfer certain functions of the central government to the republics, thus surrendering substantial powers. But this was not enough. Russia and other republics began demanding nothing less than a new federal structure.
While negotiations with republican and regional leaders continued throughout the summer, without resolution, Gorbachev began meeting secretly with Yeltsin and Kazakh party leader Nursultan Nazarbaev to hammer out details of an agreement. It was formalized on 23 July at Novo-Ogarevo as the so-called Union Treaty, which was set for signing on 20 August 1991. The treaty relegated Gorbachev and all members of the central government to secondary political roles, a prospect Gorbachev can hardly have relished. He thus had good reason to avoid signing it. As for his immediate subordinates, Gorbachev's chief of staff, Valerii Boldin, recalls: "They were convinced that such an outcome would cause economic and financial bankruptcy, and wreck the armed forces and all other economic and political structures, while decimating our common culture and aggravating ethnic tensions."
The Attempt to Take Power
The initial version of the August 1991 crisis, generally accepted in Russia and in the West, was straightforward: the KGB leadership had been planning to oust Gorbachev for several months and was carefully preparing for the big moment. Kriuchkov and his colleagues believed that Gorbachev had gone too far in changing the system and thus wanted him out. They staged a preemptive coup d'état, surprising Gorbachev completely by placing him under house arrest at Foros, his vacation villa in the Crimea, on 18 August. Their attempt to seize power was a failure because of the courageous resistance of Yeltsin and his followers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spies Without Cloaks by Amy Knight. Copyright © 1996 Amy Knight. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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