Anthony Easton offered insights on the coup here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/17558.cfm
There was a follow-up by a site member on a
forum.
August 1991 Coup
attempt "The failed coup against Gorbachev occurred on August 18,
1991" My wife and I were returning from a couple of months in Eastern
Europe, mostly in Russia. Our hosts were Ham Radio operators that had invited
me to tour Russia. My call sign was well-known worldwide and that is why it
happened.
We later learned how the Coup was stopped.
Our Russian Ham Radio friends just happened to have a Ham Radio station in the
building where Gorbachev was located. The telephone and power lines had been
cut to stop the military from learning of the Coup. One of our Ham friends was
able to get a message out that quickly got to the military. They showed up and
stopped the Coup.
A few months later one of those Russian
Hams was visiting the USA and came to California. We hosted him and he
explained how it all happened.
This will be very hard to believe, but the
only reliable communication in Russia was Ham Radio. Private people had an
underground system that actually worked. They also knew that the propaganda was
crap because they could talk with us anytime that they wanted. However, we
learned that it was mostly them listening to us talk on Ham Radio amongst
ourselves that they learned about our lifestyle.
Nothing there worked. If it weren't for the
"black market" there would have been nothing to eat. I could tell
stories for days about life in Russia. We stayed in private homes for most of
our time.
Easton responded in an email to me.
This is correct. Ham
radio was critical to provide the general population with the truth to counter
the continuous lies of the Soviet State. As an Amateur Extra Class "ticket
holder" myself, I too know the power of Ham Radio operators in keeping
freedom alive worldwide. Amateur Radio is a vital force in the world today, and
with the ability to bounce signals off the moon and Ham Radio satellites,
individual transmissions are difficult to monitor and control in all but the
most totalitarian state (like North Korea today).
In the Soviet state dacha in the Crimea
where Gorbachev was vacationing when the coup was attempted, the LOCAL
telephone service and power were indeed cut. This was easily done by a couple
of dozen renegade security forces reporting to one of the Coup Plotters sent
from Moscow.
However, neither domestic nor international
telephone circuits in and out of Moscow were cut or affected in any way. All
ordinary rotary-dial "black telephone" proletariat traffic was
maintained as normal. Nor was the Communist Party's secure touch-tone "Red
Phone Network" affected in any way. This was a separate modern national network
of 50,000 telephones -- similar to the American military's Autovon Network
(see:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autovon). I have
direct knowledge of this.
Information on the Gorbachev "house
arrest" was, in fact, known instantly by multiple civilian and military
Party authorities in Moscow as well as at the regional command centers of both
Internal Security and Military Defense in Ukraine. This happened within minutes
of the incident occurring. Gorbachev's sudden and unauthorized detention was
not a surprise to the Party. It was only a surprise to the 97% of the
proletariat who were not members of the Communist Party. For the 97%, however,
Ham Radio was truly the people's information and communications pipeline.
The Coup Plotters did NOT, for example,
have my powerful friend, the head of the Moscow Telephone Company, on their
side. Nor many other key players who needed to agree to make the coup a
success. The coup was an ill-thought-out project by a group of renegades. It
was NOT in any official way supported by either the Alpha Forces Commandant,
the Atomic Forces General, or the KGB Directorates.
The half-dozen Coup Plotters were on the
periphery of real power, although some were closer than others to the KGB para-military
enforcement units. They had blindly hoped that their actions would quickly win
acceptance by their Central Committee comrades.
But they forgot to take into account the
real-world mechanisms of asserting power -- especially in an uber-bureaucratic
state, the USSR.
So, this is what happened "on the
ground" in Moscow: Orders were given to a number of key people personally
by the Coup Plotters,-verbally, to do certain things. This included shutting
down our Moscow cable TV system - while it was being watched real-time by the
Central Committee members in their apartments adjacent to our Central Committee
hotel "headend".
Some forces loyal to the Coup Plotters did
follow their verbal orders, violating protocol. These orders were issued beyond
the powers of the Coup Plotters' official authority as listed in the Chart of
Command of the USSR. The Coup Plotters did have armed guards with them who were
loyal to them, but of course in those days, every member of the Central
Committee with any power had similar armed personal protection forces.
Hmmm... So what can a good Comrade do faced
with such a dilemma...?
The solution I personally know of was that
the Russian "Director General" in charge of our J/V CATV system
replied, loosely: "But of course, Comrade, we will follow your orders.
But, as you understand, this is the Soviet Union, and we operate along
well-established lines of Protocol. We need to have these orders in writing,
signed and with the appropriate seals of authority included. Upon receiving these
documents, we will, of course comply immediately".
The Coup Plotter returned to his office and
ordered the documents to be prepared for delivery with due haste. By the time
that this was expected to happen (24 hours later), the coup had collapsed, the
plotters arrested, with one having committed suicide before capture.
Under Yeltsin's command in the Moscow
"White House," as the head of the Russian Federation unit of the
USSR, and with his own armed 'National Guard,' Yeltsin was able to personally
stop the coup process by using his own chain-of-command authority -- with the
necessary written documentation and orders being provided -- to ignore the
verbal orders of the Coup Plotters.
The result?
Once again, the old Soviet truism:
"Paper trumps People" was proved true. Standing on an Alpha Group
tank in front of the White House provided a popular image broadcast by the
International News networks with their cameras stationed on the roof of the
International Media Center just across the river. Everyone saw what was
happening around the world, and in the living rooms of our Central Committee
apartments. Yeltsin was a brilliant politician! But he also was a smart
bureaucrat who knew how to work the System (i.e., the Party which was, of
course, above the State). The Comrades saw the world's condemnation. They
blinked. The news embargo never happened for those who mattered.
One could argue that the real reason the
Coup failed was that the specific ego's involved ultimately didn't understand
how the system really worked. As the soldier in charge of a crack troop of
Alpha Guards, whose orders would you obey? The written (and documented) orders
of Yeltsin, or the verbal command issued by the Minister of Agriculture and his
buddies? In the end, it is the paperwork that survives which gives
justification to the bureaucratic phrase: "But I was only following Orders
-and they were Written and had the appropriate Seals!"
And that night we dialed up and logged into
our Moscow-based billing server from California and collected Visa/MC/Amex
payments with no interruption of service at 9,600 bits-per-second. Our fax
lines worked fine, too. Our Moscow regional Cable TV System never went off the
air.
If there is a "Moral" to the
story, it's this: If you REALLY want to do a successful coup, you MUST
absolutely, positively, and ruthlessly kill all communications channels among
the people who hold real power.
And that doesn't mean the non-Party member
"ordinary citizen" in the USSR. It means your fellow Comrades in
power at the top of the Party.
Since Coup Plotters weren't, in their heart
of hearts, really serious or bloodthirsty enough, the Coup was doomed to fail.
That's what I told the CNN interviewers while the Coup was still unfolding.
Business continued unaffected as usual, and
in a few months, many (most?) clever members of the Central Committee became
rich "privatizing" the USSR carcass by transferring the State
ownership of the means of production to their own private pockets. Under
Yeltsin, billionaires were created overnight. A society of slaves was converted
into a society of consumers who were free to leave the country with newly
minted international passports. Trickle-down economics worked to do its thing
to eventually help the proletariat in the hinterland.
Now there are hundreds of local and
international TV channels carried on dozens of national Cable TV Systems, and
RT (the Kremlin-owned international version of "CNN") is carried on
Cable TV Networks in 100 countries. Private cellular telephone systems and
high-speed Internet connections operate nationwide. The 4 tallest skyscrapers
in Europe are in Russia, and inter-region high-speed trains zip along at twice
the Amtrak speeds.
But is Russian life any better?
The average Russian "voter" likes
Putin because the citizen is wealthier, lives longer, can travel abroad, and is
free to raise his family without constantly repeating the great lie of the
failed Soviet "people's paradise". Russian birthrate is beginning to
rise again. The old USSR is once and truly dead and buried.
I used to say that Russian
"Democracy" would evolve into an Italian-like system, with 100
families in charge instead of 10. But I was wrong. Today, the "Chairman of
the Board," the world's richest man, controls the company business through
his gaggle of Vice Presidents and "friends of the family."
And what happened to the good old
Communists? The lower-level Party members made do. Some not so well. The
Party's bank accounts had long been transferred overseas and looted by the top
comrades. The Party money was never recovered by the Russian State. The smart
ones at the top became the new "Biznessmen". Many moved to the
Riviera with riches beyond imagination The game continues.
In the end, a "chicken in every
pot" trumps the dead, cold hand of state "socialism" every time.
Sometimes it just takes a little time -- in the case of the Soviet Union
roughly 70 years. I like to think that the miracle of modern global
telecommunications - especially the visual power of real-time television --
helped the Genie to escape the bottle in the USSR, and in the process broke the
bottle itself. Without firing a shot.