By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — President Boris Yeltsin's attempt to overthrow the Russian constitution was prepared in consultation with Western leaders, and went ahead with their firm support. The coup was not, as the Western media have sought to suggest, a response to moves against Yeltsin by the full Russian parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies. Indeed, the work of sounding out leaders of the "G7" nations and gaining their approval was under way at least a week before the Congress convened on March 10.
These points emerge unmistakably from reports in international news sources during the past few weeks. A study of the world press also shows that before the overturn was carried out on March 20, an intensive effort had been mounted in the West to prepare world opinion for endorsement of the coup by Western leaders.
The plan to overturn the constitution and institute one-person rule can be traced back to March 3, when German Chancellor Helmut Kohl arrived in Moscow for talks with Yeltsin. On March 10 the London Financial Times reported:
"Mr Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, has written to fellow Western leaders, urging their support for Mr Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, in his constitutional struggle, according to diplomats in Bonn.
"In particular, Mr Kohl has passed on a query from Mr Yeltsin asking for confirmation of Western political support if he is forced to introduce emergency measures in Russia. The letter, sent directly to Western leaders in the Group of Seven industrialised states, including US President Bill Clinton, President Francois Mitterrand of France, and Mr John Major, the British prime minister, reports Mr Yeltsin's confidence that the Russian military will support him if he seeks emergency powers, the diplomats said."
A statement by the press office of the German embassy in Moscow, reported on March 16 in the English-language Moscow Times, confirmed that Yeltsin had raised the possibility of introducing direct presidential rule during an hour-long meeting with Kohl.
On March 12 the Congress of People's Deputies adopted its resolution which reined in the extraordinary powers Yeltsin had been granted in order to launch economic reform. The work of priming the Western public for an unseemly spectacle — their "democratic" leaders applauding a series of flagrantly unconstitutional actions — then shifted into high gear.
US President Bill Clinton made a carefully restrained statement in which support for Yeltsin was qualified by an indication that the US would work with whichever authorities emerged from the crisis in Russia. By design, Clinton's aides were less circumspect. An unnamed senior administration official was quoted in the International Herald Tribune on March 13 as saying that the US considered the Russian constitution — an extensively amended version of a document originally adopted in 1977 — to be a meaningless relic of the era of Leonid Brezhnev. The US administration's only misgiving about a Yeltsin coup, the official suggested, was that it might need to be enforced by violent means, placing Clinton in a deeply compromising position.
"If Yeltsin suspends an anti-democratic parliament, it is not necessarily an anti-democratic act", the source was quoted as saying. "If he suspends an anti-democratic parliament and throws a lot of people in jail and troops sympathetic to Yeltsin spill blood, that's a different situation."
The British government avoided direct comment, but its position was made clear in newspapers close to the cabinet. "The British fear Ruslan Khasbulatov, Russia's parliamentary speaker", the Sunday Times confided on March 14. "Yeltsin's survival at the cost of calling on the military is regarded as a lesser evil."
If political leaders in the West were all but explicit in urging a coup, the political establishments were positively baying for blood. "'If our guy does it, it isn't a coup,' was the general Washington line as Yeltsin and the Russian parliament approached high noon", the Los Angeles Times remarked. The establishment press worked at massaging public opinion. "It is a welcome sign that after initial hesitation, Washington seems to have realised that the success of democracy in Russia may require resort to methods that in the West would be unacceptable", Harvard Professor Richard Pipes intoned in the New York Times. "It should persist in this course ..."
"The West may have to choose between an anarchy created by totalitarians and an autocracy run by democrats", the London Financial Times argued in an editorial. "There can be no guarantee that supporting the government will work, but the West has too much to lose not to give vocal and effective assistance up to and including the point where the president concentrates authority in his hands."
By the morning of the coup, even the Washington Post — which likes to present itself as the US's leading defender of democratic values — had abandoned all restraint. "The West need give Mr Yeltsin no lectures about protecting the rights of a partially corrupt, partially obsolete legislature", an article stated. "Charles de Gaulle warned that to make an omelet one has to break eggs. Mr Yeltsin may need to follow de Gaulle's recipe if he is to save the Russian omelet of democratic reforms. The West should spare Mr Yeltsin legalistic, squeamish lectures about human rights."
When the Russian president went on television that evening to claim "special powers", it was almost an anti-climax.