Roald Sagdeyev : The Elite Soviet Space Scientist Looks at His Homeland’s Failed Coup

It was in October, 1988, midway in the history of Soviet perestroika , that Roald Sagdeyev sat alone in the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. and cast the sole vote in opposition to legislation authorizing the formation of new paramilitary forces. Those same units would later be used in violent clashes with civilians in Soviet Georgia and Lithuania. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had requested the potentially repressive measure; 700 deputies, including some reformers, thought it necessary, but it surprised few that Sagdeyev would not budge.

Although occupying an elite position as head of the Soviet space research program and as a key adviser to Gorbachev on arms control, Sagdeyev was known for pushing the limits of new thinking. He had been instrumental in securing the return of the celebrated dissident Andrei D. Sakharov from exile. In a dramatic gesture that same month, Sagdeyev had resigned his position on the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, insisting that Sakharov take his place. Later, he was elected on a slate with Sakharov to the new Peoples Congress, where he is still a deputy. They were both founders of the radical Moscow Tribunal and the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity. Sagdeyev angered the Soviet military with his opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative--SDI--and his call for deep military cuts. In an uncharacteristic move for a powerful Soviet administrator, he even demanded cutbacks in the non-military space program, his first love, in the interests of spurring the production of consumer goods.

A member of the Tatar ethnic minority, Sagdeyev was raised in Tatarstan in central Russia. After receiving his doctorate from Moscow State University, he worked in the controlled thermonuclear-fusion program at the fabled Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. From 1973 to 1988, he was the director of the Space Research Institute in Moscow, developing the scientific payload for Soviet space missions, including Apollo-Soyuz and all of the Mars and Venus missions. He directed the Vega mission to Halley’s comet and the Phobos mission to Mars in 1988.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Sagdeyev was a Soviet adviser on arms control at three summits. In 1990, both President Bush and Gorbachev called to congratulate this winner of the Lenin Prize on his marriage to Susan Eisenhower, an expert on the Soviet Union and the granddaughter of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sagdeyev has two children and three grandchildren in the Soviet Union from a former marriage. He divides his time between Moscow, where he serves as director emeritus of the Space Research Institute, and his position as distinguished professor of physics at the University of Maryland.

Question: Who are the men who made the coup? Did you have any dealings with them in the past?

Answer: Yes, (Oleg D.) Baklanov was a key leader, and I worked with him when he was the minister of the Space Industry and I was director of Space Research. In early 1986, he joined the discussion around Gorbachev on the questions of SDI. He tried to persuade Gorbachev that we could build SDI better and cheaper than the Americans. The good news is Gorbachev rejected that advice. But the bad news was that some months later he started to promote these wrong guys.

Q: Why do you think that was?

A: Gorbachev had a very bad taste for appointing the wrong people. He made many mistakes in appointments. Maybe because conservatives, reactionaries impressed on him the need to compromise. But outside of that, he’s that kind of guy; cheerful, generous. He probably somewhat later decided--oh, this guy is so smart, because Baklanov was in charge of launching big rocket boosters, and he promoted him. You launch something, and you’ll always impress. With the flame and smoke. It’s the kind of, how do you call it, pyromania? Considering the fire as a kind of god.

Q: How important do you think Baklanov was in the coup?

A: I think he was maybe the most important driving force in the coup. From conversations with my friends in Moscow, some of them are citing him as chief conspirator. He was one of the signers last December of the letter of 53 prominent men, mostly from the military-industrial complex, who called on Gorbachev to take swift measures to prevent the chaos and disintegration and establish order. The language of that letter is the same as in the coup statement.

Q: Was this a coup attempt by the military-industrial complex?

A: Yes, my theory is that they were experiencing great culture shock during the last few years. In the years before perestroika , theirs was a very simple life. They would push the button and the things would be done. And suddenly, they discovered that they are pressing buttons and nothing is done. Now there is indeed a great deal of chaos. Industry is in the state of decline, maybe even collapse. Especially in the military-industrial complex, which now is an endangered species because (Boris N.) Yeltsin and other leaders of the republics do not want to contribute money anymore. They have approximately 15 million employees in different branches with a budget which is about 25% of the nation’s budget. It is the most efficient sector of the economy, in their own criteria.

But if you would require them to convert this high efficiency into civilian areas, I think they are unable to do it. It would require a complete change of the culture and approach. So this culture shock created a kind of feeling that something has to be done.

Q: What was their model for ruling?

A: There were some very important speeches from these types of people during the last few months which promoted the model of (Augusto) Pinochet, the dictator in Chile. They had in mind a kind of black magic; a militarized administration, not involved in ideology, but just providing the firm hand and stability.

Q: How important was Gen . (Dmitri T.) Yazov?

A: Yazov is a career military general. He never had great support in the army. He was picked up by Gorbachev personally from the ranks of mid-level generals. Everyone considered him as a mild man, not military. He probably was alarmed in the middle that his role changed to become an executioner. They had to become executioners to save their skins.

Q: Didn’t they anticipate that?

A: You know, it must be such a tragic miscalculation. I don’t think they would do it if they would know what was going to happen. They probably had the mentality of a kidnaper. Kidnaping and thinking everything would be done in a sweet nice way. No shooting and they will get a nice ransom. They did not expect complications. Very often, kidnapers become murderers, even against their initial intentions. Now they are criminals.

Q: But they did it in such a halfhearted way. They didn’t arrest Yeltsin, didn’t cut off communications with the Russian Federation Building.

A: It’s probably that they wanted to show they tried to do it in a legitimate way, but Yeltsin was not forthcoming, and then they gradually escalated the demands and the threats. They underestimated the decisiveness of the people not to be intimidated anymore. They thought the people were still heavily infected with the virus of fear. But they underestimated the changed psychology of the people over the last five years. People had already obtained a very important dose of the antidote to that fear virus. That is something Gorbachev started.

Q: How are you feeling about Gorbachev now?

A: He’s paying for his own mistakes. It’s difficult to be a judge. He is a great man when you consider our initial position when he came, which was absolutely hopeless for democracy, and what we have now. But he had every indication that these guys are not agreeing with him. There were many open statements criticizing his policy coming from this very group of people.

Q: So why the myopia?

A: As he himself used to say, we are products of an epic and unable to change sufficiently. I once said his main problem was that he is so much preoccupied with perestroika for the Soviet Union and he has no time for his own personal perestroika. Slowly he was slipping back.

Q: What are his weaknesses here?

A: I had the feeling since I first met him that he believed too much in his power to convince people through discussion. Plus, he said that he would never use force. He is a missionary. And history knows the end of such missionaries. They often would be betrayed by their own closest apostles.

He probably overestimated himself. He started out his career talking to people to change their minds from the position of the boss. He was the local party boss and was talking to little guys. Eventually he has developed a deceiving feeling that he is so bright and, as the missionary, he can change people’s minds. Eventually, it became a counterproductive quality. People got tired of his nonstop sermon. As a missionary, he was rather far from practical things. He was cheated many times. The coup guys now provide the best proof. All of them were picked up by Gorbachev on an individual basis.

Q: When did you switch over to support Yeltsin?

A: I probably never disagreed with Yeltsin and have supported him since his break with the party.

Q: But Yeltsin came out of the same system that the coup guys did and yet rejected it so completely.

A: This is probably the most difficult to explain. It was a combination of many factors. I think he was from the very beginning a true believer in the new thinking and perestroika. He took the sermons, these prayers of Gorbachev, as instructions for implementation, and then he discovered that the other guys around Gorbachev were behaving differently. He became indignant early, not against Gorbachev but against those other guys.

Q: What do you think will happen now?

A: It was very smart for Yeltsin to support Gorbachev being restored to his chair as president; to restore the constitution and constitutional president. So that means for one more year, he would be able to keep his chair. And then after the Union treaty would be signed and a new constitution would be developed, he would have to face an election and then it is very difficult to predict. The latest public opinion poll just a few days prior to the coup indicated that Gorbachev had the support of about 20% of the people. I don’t know what would happen now. He might be considered as a martyr, a victim, after the coup, kind of bring back the aura around him.

Q: And Yeltsin’s future?

A: He now faces a much more difficult test for him, which is to build a new economy. He has never had a chance to do it. It is not simply to display personal courage, to deliver a very brave speech. It is everyday work. Nobody probably knows how to do it. People would have to sacrifice because no one would bring a market economy and an affluent society without going through a deep minimum in standards of living for many.

Q: Do you think this is the end of the Communist Party?

A: I think they are a politically dead body now. It was the only political force in the country that did not condemn this coup.

Q: Do you think it was the instigator or just stood on the sidelines?

A: I think they were probably on the sidelines, but they hoped very much that the coup would succeed. All the other political forces denounced it. Gorbachev now has got a very rare chance. His ticket is renewed for I don’t know how long. It depends on how he will react to the attempted coup. I am quite worried about his adherence to the Communist Party. It was the only political force in the country that silently betrayed him.

Q: ( Gorbachev ) committed himself, at that press conference , to a democratic socialism . Is there any life in that idea in Russia now?

A: I think that the biggest crime of the Communist Party, aside from its direct crimes like terror, ruining the economy . . . is that they discredited the very word of socialism. (Gorbachev) has a real chance to do something to indicate that he is not going to stay with the traitors and at the same time, if he is a faithful believer in socialism or social democracy, how he would practically do it and what kind of framework he would keep.

Q: And what happens to the military - industrial complex?

A: A big problem. The military industry is a huge empire in Russia; the army, mostly the generals, and KGB and 25,000 nuclear weapons.

Q: Where was the suitcase ... for pushing the buttons? Who controls those weapons?

A: Gorbachev mentioned in his press conference that he was even cut off from the famous suitcase communication system to the weapons. Very frightening. You have to assume that the leaders of the coup had effective control over the nuclear weapons. This is what makes such a type of coup very dangerous. It’s the first time in human history when organizers of a coup could also seize the buttons that control the weapons of mass destruction.

I think what happened--when they arrested Gorbachev, from that very moment, they switched all the electronic keys from him to somebody else, to someone who was declared commander in chief. From what we heard, they probably had a special technique to do it without Gorbachev’s consent. This makes everything so dangerous. The worst-case scenario, in deterrence planning, is the leaders could have committed suicide this way. I think this is why the trial of these guys should be done openly and internationally, because they are criminals, not only before the Soviet people, but they are international criminals.

Q: What have we learned from this about the situation of nuclear deterrence? No one mentions that.

A: We have let ourselves be hypnotized into forgetting about this nuclear arsenal. I think START is necessary and I support it and it should be ratified as soon as possible, but it is so modest. It is only bringing us back to the early ‘80s when we already had enormous overkill. I think what happens in the Soviet Union indicates that nuclear superpower could be hijacked just like any kind of airplane. We need to move boldly further beyond the START treaty. Keep people conscious about the nuclear arms and their danger.

Q: What is your feeling now?

A: The fate of democracy is still endangered, and this struggle between forces of democracy and reaction have been going on for a long time in the Soviet Union.

Q: Is it over?

A: It could be the decisive political victory of democracy in the Soviet Union already. Now is the next phase. We need economic recovery, which will also be very difficult.