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PART ONE - THE ROGUE STALINIST
The POD: August 18, 1991
I won't do anything on the pre-August coup for Zhirinovsky or anything on his Presidential run in 1991 either since there won't be any POD there. The POD will come on August 18, 1991...
PART ONE - THE ROGUE STALINIST
60 Minutes on CBS News - “The Madman of Moscow?” from March 13, 1994
Portions of a Mike Wallace interview with Valentin Pavlov, former Prime Minister of the Soviet Union.
Courtesy of CBS
Mike Wallace: Mr. Pavlov, I want to make sure I understand you correctly. You are saying that President Zhirinovsky was part of the failed 1991 August coup plot?
Valentin Pavlov: He was aware of it.
Wallace: By aware you mean collaborating?
Pavlov: He was not part of the plot, but he knew it was coming. And he was supportive.
Wallace: He supported the coup?
Pavlov: Yes. He was going to openly support the coup. Up until the day of the coup, everything was going according to plan. It was arranged.
Wallace: It seems rather incredible that one of the most virulent anti-communists in recent memory would be in support of a hard line communist coup.
Pavlov: It was arranged.
Wallace: But some critics are wondering about the timing of these accusations. With the recent Constitutional crisis in Russia and the elections last year, critics are wondering if this is just a political attack on the Russian President-
Pavlov: The world needs to know. It was arranged.
Wallace: So what went wrong? How did Zhirinovsky end up going from collaborator to champion of Russian democracy in three days?
Pavlov: General Varennikov. That goddamned fool had to ruin everything.
What ultimately became clear after the final meeting of the planned “State Committee for the State of Emergency” (GKChP) in early August 1991 was that most of the coup plotters regarded the most serious threat to come from Yeltsin, and few paid little attention to the numerous inconsequential political parties that had competed in the 1991 Russian presidential elections. However, this indifference was hardly the unanimous consensus.
“General Valentin Varennikov was one of the few veterans of the Great Patriotic War who was part of the coup,” commented Jack Matlock, former ambassador to the USSR, “and he was an unapologetic admirer of Joseph Stalin. He regarded the existence of a quasi-fascist party in the Soviet Union to be offensive, and he believed that since Stalin would hardly tolerate the existence of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, neither should he.”
Although almost all of the members of the GKChP regarded Zhirinovsky as a mild irritant at best, the man who many in Russia would soon come to refer to as the “Rogue Stalinist” decided to take matters into his own hands when Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and Vice President Gennady Yanayev seemed uninterested in taking any actions against Zhirinovsky.
“Keep in mind that while General Varennikov was part of the coup, he was not a member of the GKChP,” added Matlock, “he had absolutely no knowledge of any plans involving Zhirinovsky, had there been any. He acted alone, and in the end, his acts led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
UIS Presidential Candidate Vladimir Putin in an interview with the BBC on August 1, 2011
Discussing his controversial statement that Russia would have been “better off” had the failed 1991 coup succeeded.
Putin: He (General Varennikov) truly believed Zhirinovsky was a threat. He was a student of German history and in particular Germany in the years leading up to World War II. He knew that Adolf Hitler entered the National Socialist party as a mole, planted by the Government. No different than how Zhirinovsky became a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. He knew that from 1924 to 1930 Adolf Hitler had initially never garnered more than 7% of votes in an election. When Zhirinovsky won 8% of the votes in the 1991 election it terrified him. He truly believed that they needed to stop him.
BBC: So it proved particularly tragic that his attempts to stop this madman ultimately became the catalyst that put him in power.
Putin: Tragic, yes. But in the end history will judge General Varennikov as one of Russia’s great patriots. He was, after all, the one who first said that Russia was nursing a wolf cub. But sooner or later it will become a wild animal and woe to Russia if the wolf is still in its house when he reaches adulthood.
Ultimately, there was little question that despite the fact that General Varennikov was head of all Soviet ground troops in the USSR, he elected to recruit only men he trusted directly with the arrest of the leaders of the independent political parties. Few questioned that he was deeply concerned that his actions would be discovered not only by supporters of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the military, but also by the members of the GKChP, who he feared might interpret his actions as a “coup inside a coup”.
“It was foolish to send only four men to arrest as volatile a man as Vladimir Zhirinovsky,” commented one former aid to Varennikov, “and to send four Azeri soldiers into a Zhirinovsky political rally that had turned into an all night drinking party was beyond idiotic.”
The order was to seize the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party at his home in the early morning, before he had a chance to process what was happening. But the mission started off poorly after the lone soldier who received the order, Corporal Vahid Hasinov received a phone call shortly past midnight to arrest Zhirinovsky at his home.
“Corporal Hasinov was an obvious choice for the General to call since the General was not in Moscow but in Foros when he finally decided to unilaterally arrest Zhirinovsky,” commented another former Varennikov aid, “Hasinov served under General Varennikov in Kabul two years previously when the General was the personal representative of the Soviet Defense Minister. He could have been able to convince the Corporal of his identity over the phone, that this wasn’t some sort of joke.”
Many argued that General Varennikov may have in fact planned to arrest Zhirinovsky days earlier but had been fearful of revealing his plan too early. Regardless, it proved catastrophic for his plans when the young Corporal had trouble convincing his fellow troops that the order was legitimate.
It was noted in General Varennikov’s trial three years later that members of the Corporal's unit testified seeing him arguing with three other soldiers in Azeri for nearly three hours before the four men left in the early morning.
Most believe that the order to arrest Zhirinovsky required Corporal Hasinov to maintain secrecy, even from fellow members of his unit. As a result, many historians believe that it was for this reason that Hasinov selected Private Orucov, Private Salahov, and Private Khanmammadov to help him carry out the order. As the only other men in his unit who were fluent in Azeri, they could have discussed the order without fear of other soldiers overhearing the discussion.
By the time they had reached the Zhirinovsky home, over three hours had passed since the order was issued and nobody had bothered to confirm if the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party was even home. As fate would have it, Zhirinovsky had attended a small political rally the night before near Gor’kiy Park and never left.
“Early on many Zhirinovsky rallies involved a lot of vodka,” commented Lieutenant Vitali Vaulin, who was present at the Gor’kiy Park rally on August 18, 1991, “and often we would spend the entire night drinking and cursing the f-----g Chechens, and Jews, and all the other goddamned trash that we were told for seventy years were our f-----g comrades.”
Reports would later indicate that when the Corporal Hasinov and the other three Azeri troops discovered that Zhirinovsky wasn’t at home, they started to panic. They began to pound on the doors of neighbors and grabbed pedestrians demanding to know the whereabouts of Zhirinovsky.
“Undoubtedly they were scared of telling General Varennikov,” commented one neighbor, “because they looked terrified when they discovered he was not home.”
When they finally discovered the whereabouts of Zhirinovsky, and that he was across Moscow at Gor’kiy Park, nearly five hours had passed since the order had come in, and the General himself had already seized Gorbachev in the President’s dacha in Crimea.
“The coup was already underway when those poor men stumbled into that rally at Gor’kiy Park just past six in the morning," commented a lieutenant who served with the four men, "they were tired and perhaps blind to the scene that had surrounded them."
“When we saw those four Azeri pigs walk into our rally…well all two hundred of us wanted to tear them apart right then and there,” commented Vaulin, who in turn would fire the first shot of what Zhirinovsky would call the second Russian Revolution, “and then they opened their f-----g mouths.”
“Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky,” Corporal Hasinov said to the man standing on the podium, “you are under arrest for treason.”