Foreword
The attempted coup against the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, began on the evening of Sunday, August the 18th, 1991. At the behest of the State Emergency Committee, the KGB corralled the president at his dacha in Foros and cut off his communication links to the rest of the country. The coup attempt collapsed three days later. On the Wednesday afternoon that it collapsed with the first arrests of the fleeing members of the committee which had tried to seize power, I was down on the Ring Road near the Old American Embassy wandering around with a couple of friends. It was the site of the brief spate of fighting in which three people had been killed during the night. Sergei Gerasimenko, the driver at a fledgling business run by one of the people whom I was with, joined us. Learning that he had been there and had witnessed most of what had happened, I asked would he mind writing it all down while it was still fresh. He consented. Moreover, he had his friend and fellow driver Alexander Kirsanov make a cassette recording of his own impressions of that night. Their two stories, the chapters 'The Driver' and 'Nobody's Calling Me a Hero', are the result and they form the heart of this document. All the other material, either consciously or unconsciously weaves itself around these two chapters.
The confrontation that night on the Ring Road brought a focus to the coup which opposed itself to the figure of Yeltsin as the centre of events, a focus of people rather than politicians. Though Yeltsin led the resistance to the State Emergency Committee, he was nevertheless besieged in the White House, helpless but for the largely unintended heroism of the thousands of people who took to the streets in his defence. People who were moved for the most part less by any of the senses which lend meaning to politics and the state - duty, patriotism, civic and national pride - than by simple anger, outrage, curiosity and disgust.
Though the vast majority of Soviet citizens still treated the old powers warily, fearing them, for those people down at the White House these grey old men who had ruled with impunity for so long had been stripped of their aura of immunity by the preceding six years of Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika. No longer were the Soviet Army, the Party and the KGB [1] seen as the repository of all that was best and worst about the Soviet Union, a curious blend which had fostered awe, respect, love and fear since 1917. Gorbachev, the man largely responsible for this demystification of the Soviet State and its instruments, was himself now becoming their last victim. Ironically in surviving the coup attempt he went on to become a victim of the effects of the very policies of openness and reconstruction for which the State Emergency Committee tried to remove him.
Glasnost had opened up the Soviet Union to other ideas and ideologies which in turn had generated new sympathies and allegiances. No longer were young people restricted to the liturgy of the Party. Images of other worlds, particularly the West, had become the new icons. Icons which focussed on the self, the right to self-expression, the right to ownership, the right to choose how one lived, where one lived, the right to travel, the right to choose one's place of work, one's forms of leisure. A focus on the self had replaced the communal values of the Revolution and their hypocritical institution in the double standards by which the elites and the rest lived in the Soviet Union. And it was this that the people who came out onto Freedom Square on the 19th to the 21st of August 1991, were defending.
But it was a focus on the self that could only be expressed as selflessness. There was a sense of community and camaraderie on the barricades which overcame every form of difference imaginable. And this was evident in the incredible range of people who came down to the White House. Old people, young people, workers, students, soldiers, even officers of the KGB were at the barricades in direct defiance of their boss, a member of the State Emergency Committee. And all of them were there because enough was enough. The State Emergency Committee was not going to define how they should live. They wanted the right to choose for themselves. And they were willing to fight for it. Even if it meant that they died.
And in the end three of them did. The deaths themselves were the result of confusion and stupidity as much as anything else. But they lent a symbolic focus to the resistance which gave it coherence and solidity on that crucial night of August the 20th when tension reached a peak before the coup collapsed. Face to face with this solidity, the tanks, the soldiers and the KGB troops did not fire on the people. The Emergency Committee wilted and then dissolved. The people had remained united and presented an image of solidarity to the Emergency Committee which it could not face without seeing its own poverty, corruption and unfitness for the role it had taken upon itself.
Whether in the end those to whom the mantle of power then passed will do any better remains to be seen. And two years after the coup, most of its achievements have in many ways still come to nothing. But at the time there was hope and there was a sense that somehow some way would be found out of the economic and political crises which had been the mainstay of everyday life in the Soviet Union over the last few years and continue even as the Soviet Union has disintegrated.
This hope and optimism were the direct result of the people standing up and demanding that they too be given a say in how they live their lives. It was a humble demand but a powerful one, a demand which implied the right to experience oneself as the subject of power and not only as its object. The power implied in this demand crushed the coup. It lent the people an authority, for just a few days, that no election, no democracy, no Bill of Rights, could ever give. The dignity of ordinary people shone in a way it rarely does in a world washed over by media driven images which exclude all but a privileged few.
However, there was another side to the coup. After all, as Alexander Bovin, the country's leading political commentator, pointed out at the time, the majority of people across the country was certainly on the side of the Emergency Committee and would have been quite happy to see Gorbachev rot in Foros forever and Yeltsin rather than the coup leaders in prison. Here the question is not so much of the right to be oneself. Rather it is the recognition that whatever the merits of this newly found sense of self so critical to the advocates of change, the general direction which change was (and still is) taking excluded the vast majority from whatever rewards change might offer. This is not to dismiss Gorbachev's reform out of hand as misguided. But rather to state that for the majority, the price was simply too high and that they believed that something else less dramatic might not prove just as productive if not more so in the longer term. There was a sense that too much was happening too fast. Massive anxiety about widespread poverty at best and social chaos at worst was becoming the norm. For these people, the majority, the State Emergency Committee represented not so much a return to the structures of the past, nor even a legitimate alternative to a Government that was ruining their lives. What it represented was a stabilisation, a redefinition of social goals which acknowledged the massive failure of Perestroika to make their lives any easier.
Clearly Gorbachev had failed them as a people. Despite the fact that they had elected Yeltsin, and it was this in the end that prevented them from actively supporting the State Emergency Committee, what could he offer them that was not worse? These people, the 99% who for the most part remained quiet over the three days of the coup struggling with an allegiance to Yeltsin who had offered so much hope, also have their dignity. The State Emergency Committee had clearly usurped power. But on the other hand Gorbachev had betrayed them, and they were not about to feel any pity for him now. They accepted the ascent to power of a clique which had no right to that power with the same stoic resignation as they then accepted its demise three days later knowing full well that it only meant that their lot was likely to get worse.
But this document is not about Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Nor, strictly speaking, is it simply about the coup. Rather, the coup became a way for different people from different walks of life in Moscow to write and talk about themselves. By focussing on a single event their narratives were lent the coherence necessary for a story to evolve.
Anya Chernyakhovskaya and Nikolai Lamm were indispensable in the telling of this story. Both of them worked indefatigably writing, gathering photographs and collecting and editing material. Anya is a journalist, radio correspondent, and writer. Nikolai, who tragically passed away in 1999, was a writer, poet and translator. More importantly, Nikolai was a friend, as is Anya. Without their energy and enthusiasm, this story would never have been begun, let alone finished. Moreover, it was largely their acute sense of whom it was and was not worthwhile interviewing or inviting to write a chapter that resulted in the rich mixture of opinion and experience the document contains.
The story told here only takes sides in as much as the people who wrote or were interviewed themselves express a particular political or ideological inclination. In a sense it is a diary of passions, reflections and actions which on their own amount to little. Yet in their incidental and mostly unimportant nature, they provide a clue about life here in Moscow which is missing in studies that focus only on the central figures in political life and the public side of social life.
The story however does not lack its share of 'personalities'. In particular, Alexander Bovin, former chief political commentator for the newspaper Izvestia [2], played an important role in discussion of the capital's politics until he was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Israel in mid-December 1991. Colonel Viktor Alksnis, a charismatic figure on the right, is also visible in the day to day life of the city. Another contributor of note is Alexander Prokhanov, the man credited with unintentionally providing the clarion call for the coup with his appeal 'A Word to the People'. He is Editor in Chief of Den (The Day), a nationalist newspaper which describes itself as 'the spiritual opposition' to Yeltsin's government. In contrast to Prokhanov, there is Andrei Dyatlov, Assistant Editor of Rossia, the official newspaper of the Russian Supreme Soviet. Andrei spent the whole three days of the coup inside the White House and his hasty notes taken at the time are an invaluable insight into the work of Yeltsin and his supporters during the coup, as well as a necessary chronology to the other chapters of the book. More than anyone else, Yelena Bonner and her late husband, Andrei Sakharov, embody the ideals which were at stake when the State Emergency Committee took power. She is profiled by one of her closest aides and her speech at the White House translated.
Now, when the coup has become an historical juncture that marks the end of Soviet history, whatever signs or warnings that might be read into the material presented here have gained, rather than diminished in value. Certainly the political situation is more complex now and the economic situation worse than it was at the end of August, 1991. The Soviet Union has disappeared. The Communist Party has disintegrated into a number of splinter parties and has lost most of its leading personnel who have taken political refuge inside the apparatuses of the new states. Gorbachev has resigned as President of what had become a defunct country and is busy working at establishing himself as a political commentator and elder statesperson of what was once Soviet politics. However, his voice, as it was during the coup, remains isolated and of little interest to the people whom he once governed.
When the coup collapsed, Yeltsin and the other government and republican leaders reaped the benefits of the aftermath, emerging vastly more powerful and better positioned to implement the reforms from which they had always accused Gorbachev of backing away. It is too early to judge whether they will fare any better. But whatever is in store for the people of Moscow, there is no doubt that it will be at best difficult, at worst unbearable.
John Jirik
Notes
[1] KGB - Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti - Committee For State Security