Konstantin Smirnov
August 20, 1991
I had to have a short article ready for the next issue of Ogonyok, the popular and hard-hitting weekly, by eleven that morning. I had been sitting at the computer since nine.
Obviously I wasn't in a position to analyse the events going on around me, it was all too close. At best I could splash some colours onto the page recording my impressions of yesterday's events, of the two press conferences I had managed to attend; one given by Eduard Shevardnadze at his Foreign Policy Association and the other, the somewhat comical press conference at the Foreign Ministry Press Centre given by the gang who had seized power.
At ten the phone rang. It was Aunt Lucy. For some reason I no longer thought of her as Yelena Georgievna Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov. Over the two years I had known and worked with her the formality had left our relationship. Now, it was just Aunt Lucy. She sounded as spry as usual, despite an almost sleepless night. Tanya, her daughter, and their friends had spent the night at the White House from where they had rung Aunt Lucy hourly with updates.
And when they weren't ringing her, there was a constant stream of calls from home and abroad, journalists pestering her for interviews which she handed out left and right. Though I know her unbelievable tenacity, she still surprised me, just as she had the whole of the two years I have known her; at her age, anyone else would have buckled after a sleepless night coupled with the emotional overload of what was going on. Six heart attacks, degenerative blindness, and permanently injured in WWII, it's absolutely beyond me how she copes. I began bleating something about the conspiracy collapsing, trying to play things down, pacify her, somehow take the edge off the emotional heat of it all. She laughed good-naturedly: "Sure", and demanded fresh news. We swapped information. And then I asked, as diplomatically as possible, whether she intended going to the demonstration scheduled for midday at the White House. Again, and just as good-naturedly, she berated me for even daring to doubt her intentions: "And I want to speak!" Which is what finally floored me. I know something of her pathological dislike of speaking in public. Yet demands for her to speak never cease. Her hoarse smoker's voice is familiar from television and radio. "But, but how do you intend getting there?" I spluttered. I knew her car had been commandeered to ferry gas-masks to the White House. "I'll crawl if I have to!" she rasped. As a result of her heartwarming obstinacy we agreed that in an hour and a half, after I had finished my article, I would call for her and drive her to the demonstration. "You'll be late as usual...", she finished caustically. I put the phone down, stung.
Right at the appointed time, I rang the doorbell of her apartment on Chkalova Street. I had first come here two or so years ago to see Andrei Dmitrievich. Sakharov, father of the Soviet H-Bomb and thorn in the side of the Party and Soviet Government for more than twenty years. In 1980, he and his wife had finally been exiled to Gorki for their outspokenness. They were not released until December, 1986, when Gorbachev invited them both to return to Moscow.
When I first met Andrei Dmitrievich, Aunt Lucy had not been in Moscow, she was visiting their children in America. At the time I would never have dreamed that we would become such good friends, or that one day I would write about her as a woman who had shaken the foundations of an empire.
Bonner, chain-smoking, came to the door and invited me in. She was giving an interview to Dmitrii Zakharov from 'Vzglyad' ('Point of View'). In October 1989, as the Second Congress of People's Deputies approached and it had become clear that Gorbachev's popularity was on the wane while Sakharov was being lauded as one of the most popular delegates to the Congress, 'Vzglyad' had been planning to do a live interview with Sakharov but was ordered to keep him off the show. [8] Sakharov died two months later, at home on December the 14th, during the Congress. In December 1990, 'Vzglyad' was finally banned from the air altogether for planning to air an interview with Shevardnadze after his sensational resignation at the Fourth Congress of People's Deputies when he publicly warned of the approach of dictatorship. Now it was not Sakharov, but his widow who would take up the fight against that dictatorship.
As soon as I arrived at her apartment, she wound up the interview with Dima, excused herself, and then she and I climbed into the back seat of Ogonyok's black Volga and sped off towards the White House.
Since I had already driven around the day before and tested all the approaches to the Russian Parliament, we more or less made it all the way to the barricades at the Comecon building opposite the White House without any problems apart from the traffic congestion. Aunt Lucy took my arm and we slowly made our way through the crowd flowing in the direction of the swelling demonstration up ahead. Slowly, because of her heart condition in the first place, and secondly because she had sprained her ankle on a recent trip to Denmark. People recognised Bonner every step along the way. They hugged and kissed her, greeting her profusely, while one woman even started crying at the sight of her hobbling along, heading straight through the crowd for the entrance, but nevertheless having to stop every ten paces to get her breath back. Aunt Lucy had never taken much notice of doctors' warnings about the dangers of smoking. Once, after a heart operation, the first thing she had done after coming out from under the anaesthetic was light a cigarette. Chastised by the doctor she retorted that ever since her time at the front during the Great Patriotic War (WWII), smoking had been her favourite medicine.
By the time we got to the building itself, the demonstration was rumbling and growling on every side, its conductors roaring and waving from the balcony above, threatening the coup leaders with every possible form of retribution.
We went up to the nearest door, but the guard there would not let us in despite the fact that I offered Aunt Lucy as proof of my right of entry, a calling card which had worked on every other occasion. Bonner was even pleased at being stopped for once: "See, no exceptions". While I was ringing the guard's bosses and explaining who we were, she sat on the bench in the entrance, next to the policeman guarding the door, smoking and dropping the ash into the palm of her hand. Finally someone with sufficient authority called the vigilant officer to the phone and we were let in and directed to the balcony where the speakers were gathering.
The architect who designed the Russian Parliamentary building must have been a seer, something of a Nostradamus. From the outside, it is a harmless enough looking building. But inside, it reminds one of the Minotaur's lair. This seer had evidently foreseen the ascent of Yeltsin to power, the subsequent coup and the possibility of the White House being stormed by Spetsnazy, Soviet special forces. It could only have been with an enemy in mind that so confusing a path had been laid. To get to the balcony on the first floor, Aunt Lucy and I had to go up to the sixth floor where we got lost in the chambers of the Upper House before we found a second lift which would take us down to the balcony. It was a good thing too that the architect had put in lifts. The poor Bolsheviks defending the revolutionary headquarters at Smolny in 1917 had been forced to climb up and down the stairs.
Incidentally, yesterday I had seen another concrete sign of progress. Yeltsin had read his declaration of defiance from a tank, not like Lenin who had issued a similar call to arms seventy-four years earlier from an old armoured car badly in need of a polish.
Finally we found the door for which we had been looking. Behind it, we could hear the roar of the speakers and the thunder of the crowd. People, some of whom we recognised, were jostling around it. But on seeing Bonner, whom I was now propelling along in front of me to clear the way, they parted. With me following obediently, Bonner pushed her way through and we came out onto the flagstones of the balcony.
I immediately flinched. A good one hundred camera lenses swung our way and bore down on us, lenses whose owners formed a deep semi-circle around the entrance to the balcony. I was well aware of how famous Aunt Lucy was, but this level of attention surpassed anything I could have imagined. I doubt that even the Pope gets a welcome like this when he speaks at St Peter's. I saw a couple of friends and asked what was going on. They explained, half apologetically, that the photographers were attacking everyone who came through the door since it was rumoured that Yeltsin was about to appear and everyone wanted the best shot. Guiding Aunt Lucy through them, I barely had time to take her overcoat before she was swallowed by the mob around the microphone who had either finished speaking, or were waiting to speak.
Suddenly the public address system rang out with an announcement that Yelena Bonner was going to speak. It's difficult to convey the effect these words and her appearance had on the crowd thronging beneath the balcony. An electric tension crackled through the air, as though her appearance had charged the air with the spirit of Sakharov. But it was not only that. It was not only that Aunt Lucy was the widow of Academician Sakharov. It was that she was Yelena Bonner, whose name in itself is consonant with a whole generation of the human rights' movement, regardless of her proximity to Andrei Dmitrievich.
Earlier, in the lift, seeing her agitated state, I had tried to make it as easy as possible for her, muttering something along the lines of "Don't worry, it'll be alright". And she snapped: "But I'm not worried!", meaning that she wasn't thinking about herself and the risks she was taking with her health even being there. She had misunderstood me. I was worried about her speaking, about what she might say. She gets carried away sometimes, switches into oratorial mode and loses perspective on the occasion. We had argued about this, but to no avail. Her years as a dissident had hardened her to such criticism. But this time Yelena Georgievna pitched it perfectly.
It would have been impossible to prepare such words beforehand. On paper they would have looked humble enough. But delivered now, they were given a life of their own. It was as though the gods had settled on a person at the very moment when that person's emotions and spirit were perfectly pitched, when the pulse of their mind and heart beat as one in a rhythm all of their own. This rhythm flowed through her intonation, in the tears breaking through her words, in the very order of the flow of words which opened up new meaning in what had already been said so many times that day. Her soul was singing and it was echoed in the chorus of souls singing below. At that moment everyone was united as one and she was in total control. As easily as her words lifted us to the heights, they could have dashed us to the depths.
Bonner spoke not only from the heart, she spoke with the whole of her being. A lump stuck in my throat as I listened to her. And I could see that the thousands of people standing rapt listening to her were feeling the same. When she finished there was a momentary and hushed pause over the whole of the crowd. Then the whole square erupted into applause, shouting, whistling, a thunder which echoed off the whitened walls of Parliament House and reverberated on and on.
Listening to the thunder of the crowd as it roared and washed around me, I knew that these leaders of the coup, these latter day 'saviours of the fatherland' were out of step with their times. Their cause was spent. The coup was a mistake. It was already as good as defeated. All that remained was to mop up and start anew. The people had spoken. And it was no longer ordained that others would take their place. After forty years on this earth, forty years living here in this country, I suddenly saw the face of my people. I suddenly recognised, for the first time, that my people exist, that they live, despite everything. And in the end it was this recognition which was dearest and most important of all that I learned during those three August days.
Aunt Lucy walked out of the jam around the microphone and came over to me. Somehow she seemed to have shrunk, as though the last few minutes had aged her. I said nothing, just nodded to her and offered her a cigarette, flicking my lighter. She sucked on the cigarette greedily and cast an inquisitive glance at me through thick glasses. "Ok!" I said, giving her the thumbs up. Then she was all alone with me. One amongst dozens of other celebrities, from Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev to Yevgenii Yevtushenko. It was strange to see them all gathered on the one balcony. I put her coat around her shoulders and stepped to the side, only to hear someone say: "No way, old man. Sakharov never died. He's alive in her. What can Yanaev do to her? What's a half dead Yanaev, compared to a living Sakharov? It's a joke."
And then I took her home.
It was August 20, 1991. Rain was beginning to fall.
[8] Kaiser, Robert. G. (1991). Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure. New York: Simon & Schuster, p.304.