President Mikhail Gorbachev moved swiftly to reassert his control Thursday, appointing new heads of the KGB, armed forces and Interior Ministry, but admitted that his own serious errors of judgment had contributed to the coup that briefly forced him from power.
Gorbachev sought to re-establish himself at center stage at a globally televised news conference, providing a dramatic account of his 72 hours in exile in the Crimea.
”You will kill yourselves, but the hell with you,” the Soviet president said he told the men who bypassed his guards and entered his government-owned vacation home Sunday afternoon.
Even as Gorbachev was acknowledging his mistakes, Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin was busily consolidating his role as the nation`s dominant politician, by all accounts at Gorbachev`s expense.
Yeltsin, who had already issued decrees unilaterally reserving Russian control over armed forces stationed across its vast soil and over the entire national broadcasting authority, ordered the Communist Party on Thursday to disband its cells in the armed forces and declared that Russia had saved the Soviet Union from totalitarianism.
Although both Gorbachev and Yeltsin sought to portray their relationship as one now tested by the crucible of the coup, they seemed to be on a collision course.
As Gorbachev was speaking at the news conference, an estimated 100,000 people at a Moscow rally were hailing Yeltsin-once portrayed as Gorbachev`s archrival-as the Soviet president`s savior and a national hero.
The crowd moved through the center of the city in a victory march that ended in Red Square, where they saluted those who defended the country`s fragile democracy and condemned as ”hangmen” those who schemed for power.
Some even called on Gorbachev to resign. Others, not much more mildly, said he should go back on vacation.
At the end of the day, after twilight fireworks lit up the sky, a crowd watched as five giant cranes pulled down the hated statue of Felix
Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, from its pedestal in front of KGB headquarters.
Then they splattered the walls of the building with graffiti, an action which only a week ago would have been unheard-of.
The events in Moscow coincided with new developments in the Baltics. Lithuanian lawmakers banned the republic`s Communist Party, claimed ownership of its property and ordered the prosecutor to ”bring to trial all those who have acted against the laws of the republic of Lithuania.”
Another Baltic republic, Latvia, said it was seeking the arrest of Alfred Rubriks, its hard-line party leader, whom Gorbachev denounced for supporting the coup. Latvian legislators also were considering banning the party.
Earlier, in his press conference, Gorbachev himself described in detail how the leaders of the failed coup had isolated and intimidated him and his family at their Crimea summer home.
Surrounded by armed KGB agents and naval ships offshore, betrayed by the chief of his household guard, his phones cut off and confronted with a demand that he resign as president, Gorbachev told the conspirators that he refused to cooperate with them and that their escapade was doomed to fail.
He acknowledged that the psychological pressure had left his wife, Raisa, and daughter, Irina, deeply shaken. Although not revealing the exact nature of her illness, Gorbachev said he ”hoped” his wife would recover soon.
He said the one who coped best with the situation was his young granddaughter Anastasiya. ”She didn`t understand a thing,” the president said. ”She just ran around asking to be taken to the beach.”
The Soviet president revealed that he kept in touch with what was going on in his country by listening to broadcasts from the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corporation on old radio sets his guards found in a storage room and put in working order.
As Gorbachev resumed his office, the week`s monumental events continued to move swiftly.
Of the eight coup leaders, five were arrested, the Associated Press reported.
They are former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, former Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, former Vice President Gennady Yanayev, Oleg Baklanov and Alexander Tizyakov.
A sixth, former Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, was hospitalized. Vasily Starodubtsev, chairman of the USSR Farmers` Union, was being sought.
The eighth, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, reportedly committed suicide by shooting himself in the head as he was about to be arrested Thursday.
Two others involved in the coup were also ordered arrested: the commander of Soviet ground forces, Gen. Valentin Varennikov, and Gorbachev`s own chief of staff, Valery Boldin.
Anatoly Lukyanov, the speaker of the Soviet parliament and a lifelong friend of Gorbachev, was suspended from his duties while an investigation began into his part in plotting the coup.
Gorbachev appointed Leonid Shebarshin, one of Kryuchkov`s deputies, as the acting head of the KGB. He named Gen. Mikhail Moiseyev, former armed forces chief of staff, as acting defense minister and Vasily Trushin as the temporary interior minister.
This was the first time since he came to power more than six years ago that Gorbachev publicly admitted mistakes, confessing to poor judgment in appointing and supporting those who eventually sought his demise.
”I must say that what we have been through in these recent days has been a difficult lesson, first and foremost for me particularly as regards the choice of the country`s leading figures,” he told a global TV audience.
He also defended the Communist Party, discredited in the eyes of millions, and said he would work to purge that once-omnipotent institution of ”reactionaries.”
But his expression of continued allegiance to the party could hurt him politically. The party is broadly suspected as a behind-the-scenes factor in the failed coup, and millions of Soviets have proven by voting reform candidates to office that they blame the party`s decades of totalitarian rule for the USSR`s staggering social and economic woes.
Yeltsin, who quit the party months ago, lashed out at it again Thursday. In his decree banning the party from the armed forces, he said flatly that the party had been part of the coup attempt.
”Party leaders in the armed forces supported the coup d`etat and took part in it,” Yeltsin said in the decree.
Another ex-communist, former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, criticized Gorbachev for not taking part in the celebration in Red Square marking the coup`s failure.
”Health may have been an issue, but even an unhealthy person should have come,” Shevardnadze said after the rally. ”The president of the country should always be with his people.”
