Word: yanayev
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...Peter Frank, a Soviet expert at Britain's University of Essex, "the reactionaries' interests and Gorbachev's are now in harmony." As evidence, Frank points to the composition of the new policymaking Security Council announced recently in Moscow. In addition to the President, its members are Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and Prime Minister Pavlov, both hidebound bureaucrats; Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, a professional diplomat with little political clout; Interior Minister Boris Pugo, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, all hard-liners; and two token moderates, former Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin and Yevgeni Primakov, a Gorbachev adviser...
...halfheartedly carried out: had the plotters acted with half the acumen and ruthlessness of the routine Latin general or African strongman seizing power, they might have succeeded. But some appeared to be more terrified than any of their prospective victims. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and Vice President Gennadi Yanayev, the ostensible head (really figurehead) of the so-called Emergency Committee, reportedly spent most of the three days of the coup dead drunk. Though Yanayev pulled himself together long enough to hold a press conference the first night of the coup, he and some other members of the committee looked scared...
...said to have begun plotting in December 1990. If so, eight months later they still had not organized the most obvious, and essential, opening moves: arresting, or preferably killing, potential opponents (some supporters of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev operated unmolested from a Kremlin office almost next door to Yanayev's); assuring themselves of the loyalty of military units and then moving them into position to crush resistance speedily (army and KGB units flatly refused to storm the White House, the marble-faced Moscow headquarters of the Russian republic and the center of resistance); and cutting the communications of resistance leaders...
...They gave me two options -- to hand my office over to ((Vice President Gennadi)) Yanayev and give the nod to the state of emergency, or to step down. They even tried to threaten me. I told them, 'You guys must have known I wouldn't agree to either. You're staging a coup d'etat. What you are trying to do with your committee is anticonstitutional and unlawful. This is adventurism that will result in bloodshed and civil war.' The general started trying to prove to me that they would see to it that such a thing wouldn't happen...
Former Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and then Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov were deep into the toasts at a party at Pavlov's dacha when they were suddenly summoned to the Kremlin to take part in the coup. Pavlov, who turned up semi-coherent at one meeting of the plotters, was eventually hospitalized for "hypertension," sometimes a euphemism for imbibing too much distilled potato spirit. After the putsch fizzled, Yanayev was found unconscious on his office floor among empty vodka bottles. Said Kuranty, a radical daily: "We could have had a government by drunks...