Almost a month before the coup, on July 23, one of Moscow's leading conservative newspapers, Sovietskaya Rossia, published a curious and strident call to arms. 'A Word To The People' was signed by twelve prominent right-wing figures: a mixed bag of writers, artists, politicians and representatives of the military and industrial sectors. Despite its tortured style 'A Word To The People' could not be ignored. Media extensively commented on it, many calling the article a warning shot which the conservatives fired across Gorbachev's bow as the battle for the Union Treaty was nearing its climax. Whether it was a clarion call for the coup, which some commentators later suggested was the case, will never be known. Nevertheless, of its twelve signatories, two, Vasilii Starodubtsev and Alexander Tizyakov, were members of the State Emergency Committee. While a third, Valentin Varrenikov, was later implicated in the coup and charged with complicity.
Sovietskaya Rossia did not byline the article whose author was later revealed as one of the signatories, Aleksander Prokhanov. 'A Word To The People' is reproduced here in full because of the significance of its insights into the mood of the forces which a month later were to come to the fore.
A Word To The People
Dear Russians! Citizens of the USSR! Fellow countrymen!
A huge and unprecedented grief has befallen us. Our fatherland, our country, our great state given us in safe keeping by history, nature and our glorious ancestors, is dying. It is disintegrating and sinking into the darkness of non-existence. And this death is accompanied by our silence, our connivance and consent. Have our hearts and souls so turned to stone that not one of us has the strength, courage and love for the fatherland that moved our grandfathers and fathers to lay down their lives for this country on the battlefields and in gloomy torture chambers, who from their prayers, burdens and revelations, their great labours and struggles, fashioned this mighty power and for whom their native land, the state, was the most sacred object in their lives?
What has become of us, brothers? Why is it that cunning and pompous lords, crafty and cunning turncoats, greedy and wealthy money-grubbers insult us, mock our beliefs and play on our naivety. They have seized power, they pillage our wealth and steal the people's homes, factories and land? Why do they dismember our country, pillory us and pull the wool over our eyes, cutting us off from our past and depriving us of our future? Why do they doom us to a wretched rotting away in slavery and subjection to our all-powerful neighbours? How has it happened that at our stormy meetings, in our irritation and impatience, in our yearning for change and desire for the well-being of the country, we have let people take power who don't love their country and who kowtow to their foreign benefactors, there, abroad, seeking counsel and encouragement?
Brothers, we are waking up late. We are late in noticing our misfortune. Our common home is already burning on all four sides, and no longer will water be enough to put it out. Must we shed our blood and tears to quench this fire? Shall we allow civil discord and war for a second time this century? Shall we again throw ourselves under that cruel grindstone we have never really escaped, where the bones of the people will be ground down and the backbone of the country broken for a second time.
We appeal to you with words of the gravest responsibility. We appeal to representatives of every profession and stratum, every ideology and belief, all parties and movements. Our differences are nothing in face of our common misfortune and pain, our common love for the Fatherland, united and indivisible, uniting our fraternal nations in a powerful state without which our lives are nothing.
We are waking up and remembering. Young and old, we stand behind the fatherland. We say "No!" to the wreckers and thieves. We shall end our retreat here. Here, we shall make our stand.
We are forming a national movement. We call to our ranks everyone who recognises the terrible disaster which has befallen our country.
We call on workers to join us. Today's pharisees promised them abundance and a just reward for their work. But now they are being driven from their factories and mines. They are being abandoned to hunger, deprived of their rights and doomed to cheerless queueing for hand-outs, scraps of bread and the charity of the rich and the powerful.
We call on the industrious peasantry. They have been exhausted by ignorant authorities. Their fate today is being decided by yesterday's wreckers of the villages and creators of utopian programs which have shackled the grain grower to a one-sided exchange and doomed the fields to desolation, abandoning to extinction the few left feeding the country.
We appeal to engineers whose hands, minds and talent created a unique technological civilisation and a powerful industry which guaranteed our well-being, the defence of the people and put the fatherland into space. This technology was exhausted. It needed modernisation and renovation. But after six years of neglect, nothing but fine phrases, it has ground to a halt and is ruined. Now we are a country of stilled industries, idle power stations and confused and underpaid engineers excommunicated from their work.
We appeal to scholars who have worthily advanced the development of our patriotic science and stunned the world with the fruits of their labours. In their laboratories and institutes, they have stored up discoveries for a breakthrough into the 21st century, where we had hoped for a worthy place in civilisation. Instead of this, demagogues and malefactors are destroying this priceless accumulation of knowledge. They are breaking up the research collectives, closing scientific institutions and shutting the door on the development of space research, nuclear technology, the latest in chemistry. Our best minds have been doomed to wasting away, to fleeing their native borders for flourishing countries where their talent will feed not their own, but others' development.
We appeal to the army which won the respect of all humanity for its selfless and heroic feat in saving Europe from Hitler's hordes, to an army which has inherited the best qualities of the Russian, Soviet, armed forces and stands ready to oppose any aggression. Our glorious defenders are suffering hard times. It is not the army's fault that it has been forced to hurriedly abandon its garrisons abroad. It is not the army's fault that it has become the object of unforgivable political speculation, the target of the lies and slander of irresponsible intriguers. No-one will succeed in turning the armed forces into an amorphous mass, sullying its name and sundering it from within. We are convinced that the warriors of the army and the navy, true to their sacred duty, will not permit a fratricidal war and the destruction of the fatherland. They will prove a reliable guarantor of security and a bulwark of all the healthy forces of society.
We call on artists and writers. They have salvaged scraps of a culture from the ruins of devastated classics. They have given the people forms of the beautiful and the good. They had looked forward to a reflowering of the arts, but instead have been rewarded with poverty and the reduction of art to a pitiful farce for the amusement of merchants and the rich, while the people, cut off from their souls, deprived of their ideals, subject to the rule of immoral and cunning men, are departing the stage of history, becoming bit players, a cheap labour force for foreign factory owners.
We appeal to the Orthodox Church. It has suffered its own Calvary. But after the suppression and slaughter, it is slowly rising from the grave. The Church, whose spiritual light shone in Russian history even in its gloomy depths, is still weak. It is suffering from dissension and hurting in the dioceses and parishes, not finding a worthy bulwark in strong and powerful authority. Let it hear the voice of the people calling for salvation.
We appeal to Muslims, Buddhists, Protestants, believers of all denominations, for whom belief is a synonym for goodness, beauty and truth. Today they suffer cruelty, deformity and lies which destroy the living spirit.
We appeal to parties, large and small, to liberals and monarchists, to centralists and champions of the land, to poets of the nationalist idea! We appeal to the Communist Party, which bears all the responsibility not only for the victories and defeats of the last seventy years, but also for the last six tragic years during which it led the country at the outset, but then relinquished power and gave it to frivolous and incompetent parliaments which have set us at each others' throats and given birth to thousands of stillborn laws of which only those survive that deliver the nation into servitude and dismember the tortured body of the country. Communists! Whose party destroys their own leaders: one after another they toss in their party tickets and rush into the camp of the enemy. They betray, distort and demand the gallows for their recent comrades. Let Communists hear our call!
The young, our hope and beauty, have been seduced and delivered into the service of false idols. Now, idle and talentless, they are doomed to drugs and crime.
The elderly, our wisdom and pride, faultless workers who have fed us tirelessly and unstintingly, yet suffer beggary and outrage in return. They are besmirched by the slops of the press and television which seeks the destruction of memory and the sundering of generations.
Our young veterans [of the war in Afghanistan], internationalists, soldiers marked by their selflessness, humanism and superior morality. They have been branded guilty for no reason.
Women are denying themselves their highest natural right - to add to posterity - out of fear of breeding poverty and swelling the army with soldiers of a civil war. They are fearful of their love, motherhood...
Everyone, whether in the cities and villages, on the steppes or in the forests, or on the shores of the huge oceans washing this land - we are waking up, we stand for unity, we shall be a bulwark against the destroyers of the Fatherland!
From this moment we shall set out on the path to the salvation of the state. We shall create a national patriotic movement where each, possessing their own will and influence, will unite in the name of the highest goal - the salvation of their native land.
We shall unite:
To halt the chain reaction of the fatal collapse of the state, the economy and the person;
To further the strengthening of Soviet Power, turning it into a genuinely popular power and not a feeding trough for atavistic speculators ready to sell all and everything for the sake of their insatiable appetites;
To prevent the flames of national discord and civil war being fanned.
We shall spare no effort in effecting reforms which are capable of overcoming the unbearable alienation of man from the power of labour, propriety and culture, of giving him the living conditions and space for self-expression he deserves. We shall vigorously support progressive innovations directed at advancing our society, at scaling the contemporary heights of scientific and technological progress and at liberating the minds and energies of the people so that each might live according to their labour, conscience and justice. And we shall oppose projects which drag the country backwards, into the murk of the Middle Ages, where the cult of money, power, cruelty and lust reigned.
Our movement is for anyone to whom the destructive urge is alien, anyone who burns with the desire to create and refurbish our common home so that each nation, large or small, each person, old or young, might live in harmony, comfort and happiness.
We don't have time to amuse ourselves with illusions, naively trusting in the perspicacity of our latest Messiahs with their flippant promises of one or another panacea to cure all our ills. It is time to shake off our torpor and for all our nations together to search for a way out of this dead end. Amongst the Russians there are statesmen ready to lead the country to a sovereign and proud future. There are expert economists capable of resurrecting our industries. There are thinkers, sculptors of the spirit and visionaries of the national ideal.
The Soviet Union is our home and fortress, built by the supreme efforts of all its peoples and nations, a bastion from shame and slavery in times of black invasion! Russia - our only and beloved! - is calling out for our help.
Yurii Bondarev
Yurii Blokhin
Boris Gromov
Vyacheslav Klykov
Aleksander Prokhanov
Valentin Rasputin
Vasilii Starodubtsev
Aleksander Tizyakov
Valentin Varennikov
Eduard Volodin
Lyudmila Zykina
Gennadii Zyuganov