#6410
#14 - JRL 6410
Moscow News
August 21-27, 2002
THREE SUICIDES
By Roy Medvedev
Every August, Russia recalls one of the most tragic pages in its history - a coup staged by the State Committee for the State of Emergency, or GKChP. Eleven years on, those events can be viewed more impartially, and so too can their masterminds and victims. Today their death arouses, at the most, compassion and regret
The well-known historian offered MN an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Soviet Union: The Last Year of Life.
"I put too much trust in people"
Boris Pugo was appointed Soviet interior minister in December 1990, at age 53. Soon afterward he was awarded the rank of colonel general. In making those appointments, Mikhail Gorbachev made no secret of the fact that Pugos Lettish descent was as important to him as his personal and business qualities. Before taking up the main office at the Interior Ministry, Pugo had for three years been chairman of the CPSU Central Control Commission. Prior to that, first secretary of the Latvian Communist Party Central Committee and before that, chairman of the Latvian KGB. I met Boris Pugo in the summer of 1989, when I was assigned to head a USSR Congress of Peoples Deputies investigation commission on corruption. Pugo seemed an extremely well organized and decent man, but somewhat jittery and oversensitive to real or imagined attempts at belittling the role of leading Party agencies that he represented.
At the time few were afraid of Communist Party penalties or even expulsion from the Party while "partocrats" were at times attacked in the media even more vigorously than the "dumb generals." Pugo was, above all, a Communist Youth League and Party functionary, and did not particularly distinguish himself as interior minister or KGB chief.
In 1991, the course of events inexorably pushed a person like Pugo toward protest and opposition. This was clear from, among other things, his rare presentations at the Supreme Soviet. In early August, the interior minister took a vacation, going to a sanitarium in the Crimea. In the morning of August 18 he was spotted on the Black Sea beach, but in the evening of the same day he returned to Moscow, joining the GKChP without any hesitation, even though he was not a leading figure in it.
The failure of the GKChP plan became obvious in the afternoon of August 21, and the RF Prosecutor Generals Office announced that all GKChP members would be called to account. When he came home in the evening, Pugo found that all top-level internal government telephones had been cut off.
He and his wife, Valentina, went upstairs to the apartment of their son Vadim, an engineer, whose family lived in the same building on the upper floor. Their conversation was a sad one: In effect, Pugo was saying good-bye to his son and daughter-in-law, but at that stage the reference was to his inevitable arrest. Prior to that, however, Valentina had asked her husband exactly where in their apartment weapons were hidden, for she would not live another minute after he was gone.
No one knows what the couple talked about during that night. In the morning of August 22, at 9 a.m., Boris Pugo called his deputies at the Interior Ministry to ask how they were getting along. Asked whether the minister would come to the office that day, Pugo replied with a question, "Whatever for?" At the end of the conversation he asked them to give his best regards to Gen. Boris Gromov, his first deputy. Before long, Pugo received a call on the same line from Russian intelligence services: "Could we have a meeting with you?" Viktor Barannikov and Viktor Yerin, generals from Boris Yeltsins inner circle, were looking for him. Pugo said: "Come over to my place."
When they arrived, the door was opened by an old man - Boris Pugos father-in-law. "Something terrible has happened," he said. "Come in." The minister was lying on his bed with blood flowing from his temple. His wife was sitting on the floor, by the other bed. She also had a head wound, but was still alive and died at the hospital without regaining consciousness. Both had left notes before shooting themselves. "I put too much trust in people," he wrote. "I have honestly lived my life." Valentina Pugo was even more laconic: "I do not want to live anymore. Do not condemn us. Take care of grandpa. Mother." An inquiry concluded that it was a suicide.
The Pugos funeral took place in Moscow two days later, almost inconspicuously.
A Marshals Death
The day Pugo and his wife were buried, Saturday, August 24, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, 68, Hero of the Soviet Union and military advisor to the Soviet president, committed suicide in his office in the Moscow Kremlins Unit 1. Akhromeev had no weapons at hand, but he could not and did not want to wait. He hanged himself using a nylon curtain rope, one end of which he had tied to a massive copper handle on a high window frame.*
On Saturday there was no secretary in the reception room in front of the marshals office, and his body was not discovered until late in the evening, by an officer from the Kremlin commandants office who was to inspect all premises in his charge. Investigators from the Military Prosecutors Office with a video camera were immediately called to the scene. All safes were locked. There were six hand-written notes on the marshals desk - two of them for his family and one with a request to pay his debt to the Kremlin cafeteria (the money was lying nearby). A separate note explained the reason for his action. "I am unable to live on when my Motherland is dying and when everything that I have thought to be the whole point of my existence is being destroyed. My age and my entire life give me the right to leave. I have fought to the last."
Akhromeev was not a member of the GKChP. He did not learn about the creation of the committee until the morning of August 19, when he, his wife, and their grandchildren were vacationing in Sochi. But Akhromeev decided to return to Moscow, leaving his family at the sanitarium. In the evening of August 19, the marshal was at the Kremlin, where he met with Vice President Gennady Yanayev at 10 p.m. Akhromeev said that he supported the GKChPs appeal and was ready to help. He spent the night at his dacha, where his younger daughter lived with her family. The marshal worked the whole of August 20 at the Kremlin and the Defense Ministry, collecting information about the military-political situation in the country. Akhromeev slept on a cot in his office. He phoned his daughters and wife in Sochi from his office.
On August 21 it became clear that the GKChP had failed, but Akhromeev realized that even earlier. On August 22 he learned about Gorbachevs return and the arrest of Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov. Akhromeev did not meet with Gorbachev. He began writing a letter to Gorbachev as well as the text of his statement at a Supreme Soviet session, set for August 26. There were plenty of notes on that score in the notebook that was later given to his family. "Why did I return to Moscow from Sochi? No one had ordered me to come. I was sure that this adventurous plan would fail, and I saw my misgivings confirmed when I arrived in Moscow. But our country has been heading for disaster ever since 1990. Gorbachev is dear to me, but dearer still is the Fatherland. At least, let a mark be left in history: There was a protest against the destruction of such a great state."
According to the marshals daughters, Natalya and Tatyana, in the evening of August 23, their father did not look distressed. They all met at dinner; they had bought a large melon and were discussing the latest developments. The marshal went to the Kremlin at 9 a.m., promising to take his granddaughters for a walk in the evening. From his Kremlin office, he talked to Tatyana about meeting her mother, who was arriving at 3 p.m. An hour later, however, Akhromeev was dead.
As can be judged from his notes, the marshal was already considering committing suicide on August 23, but had not yet made up his mind. In the morning of August 24, radio and television broadcast a statement by Gorbachev, who announced that he was stepping down as secretary general of the CPSU Central Committee and called for self-dissolution of the CPSU Central Committee. Some of the marshals friends thought it had been the last straw - the method of suicide was too unusual for a military man.
Marshal Akhromeev was a good military leader, greatly respected in the military and in the Party. During World War II he began, in 1941, as marine platoon commander, ending up as battalion commander. In 1979-88, he was first deputy chief and then chief of the General Staff and first deputy defense minister of the USSR. He oversaw the planning of military operations in Afghanistan at all stages, including the withdrawal. Akhromeev was the chief expert at arms reduction negotiations while Gorbachev admitted that without Akhromeev the negotiations would have been less successful.
The marshal was greatly upset by the anti-military campaign conducted by a large part of the media in 1989-90 without any objections from Gorbachev. Akhromeev often took up the issue at sessions of the Congress of Peoples Deputies and the USSR Supreme Soviet. I discussed these matters with Akhromeev in his office on several occasions.
The marshals suicide was not announced on television until the evening of August 25; on August 26, newspapers reported on it in some more detail, citing the Prosecutor Generals Office to the effect that investigation was in progress. There was no obituary even after August 26. Neither the president nor the newly appointed defense minister expressed condolences in public over Akhromeevs death.
The greatest concern about the fate of the late marshal was shown by U.S. Admiral William J. Crowe, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Reagan administration. Crowe had spent a considerable amount of time with Akhromeev at various negotiations on military matters and treated him with great respect. The admiral tried calling Akhromeevs family several times, but without success. In the end he asked some U.S. journalists he knew in Moscow to find the late marshals wife and daughters in the Soviet capital and convey his condolences to them. He also asked for a wreath to be laid at his colleagues grave. Adm. W. Crowe wrote the first long obituary in memory of Marshal A.F. Akhromeev, publishing it in Time magazine.
The article in Time was accompanied by a photo that showed Marshal Akhromeev and Admiral Crowe at a military exercise watching an air assault operation. In 1991, Akhromeev co-authored - with his friend Georgy Korniyenko, a diplomat - a small book, Through the Eyes of a Marshal and a Diplomat, which was published in 1992 with the marshals name on the title page placed in a black box.
"I am not a traitor, but I am afraid"
Early in the morning of August 26, 1991, on the pavement near the entranceway to No. 13 Plotnikov Pereulok, where only the most high-ranking CPSU Central Committee officials and some ministers lived, was found the body of Nikolai Kruchina, a member of the CPSU Central Committee and administrator of CPSU Central Committee affairs, closely associated with Mikhail Gorbachev. Kruchinas apartment was on the fifth floor.
Kruchina was dead, and preliminary examination of the body and the deceaseds study showed that he had committed suicide. His wife and younger son were still in their bedrooms, and everything they were told at 6 a.m. came as a terrible shock to them. When they had gone to bed, their husband and father was still in his study. He had so much work to do that in the last few days he had hardly had any sleep. Two notes written before his death were found immediately. One of them lay on the coffee table in the hall. The other, a more detailed one, was found on his body in the course of an examination at the hospital. "I am not a traitor or conspirator," Kruchina wrote, "but I am afraid..." He also declared his loyalty to Gorbachev. He had a clear conscience and asked this to be made known to the people.
Kruchinas suicide provoked plenty of speculation. He had been in charge of all CPSU bank accounts at home and abroad. Unlike in the case of Pugo and Akhromeev, all premises where Nikolai Kruchina had worked were thoroughly searched. His apartment in Plotnikov Pereulok was subjected to an especially careful search, which was conducted by a team of criminologists under the supervision of three chief investigators from the USSR Prosecutors Office and in the presence of the prosecutor of Moscows Leninsky district. No signs of the presence of unauthorized persons were discovered in Kruchinas apartment. Neither were there any signs that any papers or documents might have been destroyed. Quite the contrary, it became clear that after August 19, Nikolai Kruchina had moved many of the papers from safes in Staraya Ploshchad to his apartment. But all of those folders with documents were in order with appropriate inscriptions on their covers and authentic signatures by the most high-ranking officials. Those materials were seized and appropriate records filed.
Nikolai Kruchinas office at the CPSU Central Committee was not quite so tidy. In the evening of August 23, Gorbachev, who had returned from the Crimea, ordered Kruchina to tie up the loose ends, in particular pay wages to Party apparatus workers for two to three months and issue them work record books. Kruchina, however, was unable to comply as the large six-story building of the Administration of Affairs on Staraya Ploshchad was closed.
After Kruchinas suicide, his office and all the other main offices at the CPSU Central Committee were sealed, including the famous Room 6 on the fifth floor of the main Central Committee building - the office of the secretary general of the CPSU Central Committee who had resigned.
The assets that Kruchina was in charge of were vast: thousands of office and residential buildings, hundreds of out-of-town dacha estates, dozens of vehicles, and a large number of sanitariums, holiday hotels, and hospitals. The Party controlled about 200 publishing houses that printed books, newspapers, and magazines. The CPSU provided considerable financial assistance to many Communist Parties abroad, funding a great number of various projects. The Partys financial operations were built not only on membership dues or proceeds from the sale of print publications. Kruchina, therefore, had serious cause to expect less-than-pleasant questioning, and not only on the GKChP case.
Fortunately, there were not many victims in the GKChP coup, but they proved symbolic. Nikolai Kruchina represented the Party; Sergei Akhromeev, the military, and Boris Pugo, the KGB and the Interior Ministry.
The young Muscovites who were buried on August 24 - also three - represented new Russian democracy. It came to us with plenty of flaws, defects, and mistakes, but it did not divide society into Reds and Whites. On various formal receptions at the Kremlin in the past two years we could see not only Gorbachev and Yeltsin but also such people as V. Varennikov, D. Yazov, and A. Lukyanov. All of these people are OAPs now, but they have yet to retire from politics. GKChP members Vasily Starodubtsev and Col. Gen. Boris Gromov, Pugos deputy and prior to that a close associate of Akhromeev, are governors.
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