Anya Chernyakhovskaya
I have just come home from the funeral. Along with hundreds of thousands of other people we have been burying the three men - Dmitrii Komar, Vladimir Usov and Ilya Krichevskii - who died in the tunnel in the centre of Moscow on the night of August the 20th, 21st.
They did not know one another. But when the troop carrier which had momentarily come to a halt again jerked into movement, Vladimir Usov, who had rushed to the aid of Dmitrii Komar, was crushed under the APC's track and a few moments later Ilya Krichevskii was shot dead.
Their deaths changed nothing on the battlefield. But their spilt blood brought us all a little closer together.
It took the funeral procession almost the whole day to walk from Red Square to Vagankovo Cemetery. We walked in a veil of silence. Alongside me was a taxi-driver struggling to keep his anger to himself. On the other side, sixteen year old Lena and her boyfriend Kostya walked hand in hand. They had spent the whole three days of the coup at Parliament House. To Lena's surprise, their parents had not been angry. Ahead of me was a group of journalists, friends. They weren't there on business, but because we all knew what it had been like to work as reporters prior to the advent of glasnost and perestroika six years ago. And we all felt a debt to these people for the price they had paid to prevent the return of those days.
My neighbours were walking in the cortege several metres to my right, he a doctor, she a pensioner, and their son who had dropped out of school but was a talented painter. With him was his friend. His friend had rushed to Moscow from the Crimea where he had been holidaying on the Black Sea in order to fight at the barricades. The Crimea is the playground of the Soviet rich and famous. Foros, where Gorbachev had been held under house arrest for three days earlier in the week, is in the Crimea. Even in the middle of winter, plane tickets out of there can usually only be reserved a month in advance. Sasha found one, unlike many other people, including leading members of Moscow society who tired us long ago with their endless trumpeting about their commitment to democracy. Later, they excused their absence from the capital during the coup for want of a ticket home.
When thousands of boots are shuffling along the road and there is no other sound, the silence indeed becomes palpable. For a moment I felt that image from the GULag welling up - an armed guard with his German shepherd, the accursed warning breaks the tension of the silence: "A step to the left, a step to the right - the guard will shoot without warning." The infamous blessing of the prison convoys.
But we weren't in the GULag now, Stalin's network of forced labour and prison camps stretching the length of the country which even today has not been fully dismantled. We no longer wanted to be an obedient herd on its way to the slaughter-house. And with our resistance to the coup, we had already taken a huge step away from the path the Party and state had laid out for us.
The funeral procession reached the White House around lunchtime. A frightened cry of "Doctor!" rushed along the columns. My girlfriend, a first aid attendant, swore softly with frustration - she had forgotten to bring her first aid kit with her - and rushed in the direction of the cry. Nervous tension, the heavy atmosphere and fatigue were taking their toll. An elderly lady had fainted. Several minutes passed by, then a flask of water and some tablets appeared from somewhere in the depths of the crowd.
We pushed on to the cemetery. Five days had passed since the beginning of events. Only five days. But what days...
In true fascist tradition the bastards had acted in the middle of the night, the time of thieves and babes troubled by burgeoning dreams.
We were at our dacha thirty-five kilometres out of Moscow. The electricity had gone off over the whole settlement the night before. We had gone to bed early. At seven I woke and went outside to greet another sunny day. Seeing me, our neighbours ran over with the news. Despite the declaration of a state of emergency, they had decided not to wake us earlier. They themselves, a young couple with a new baby, had only heard the announcement an hour earlier on the radio.
"Gorbachev isn't President anymore. There's been a coup."
It sounded ridiculous. Absurd. How could anyone but Gorbachev be President? We still weren't used to the idea of democracy which might have made us feel that we had elected him and that he might lose an election or even step down. To us, Gorbachev occupied his place as the country's and Party's leader as firmly and timelessly as did the ruby red stars on the top of the Kremlin towers.
On the other hand, and for exactly the same reasons, it was logical. If Gorbachev was to go, it would have to be a palace coup (or death). Such had been the way with our dear and beloved leadership for the last seventy-four years.
There still wasn't any electricity, so we could not turn the television on. And then it suddenly became clear why there was no electricity. We remembered what we had been taught about 1917. First of all, Lenin had seized the telegraph, telephone, post, and the railway stations. Back then there was no television. But had there been, Lenin would not have forgotten it.
A quiet panic gripped our summer home. Here we were in the middle of the forest, with two young children, without electricity, just a battery-powered transistor. The only channel we could find was Channel One, the government channel. Every half hour it repeated: "President Gorbachev is unable to fulfil his duties due to ill health..." Something calling itself the State Emergency Committee was in power.
There was a feeling that we were at war. As though the radio was telling us to keep calm but warning us not to go out of our houses for fear of getting shot. We didn't know what to do.
Then we managed to pick up the independent radio station, Echo Moscow. But Echo Moscow could not tell us anything we already didn't know from the state radio. Though unlike the state radio, at least Echo Moscow had kept its sense of humour intact. The popular song "We're Waiting For the Change" was being played.
But it wasn't the change for which we had been waiting.
Now, for a moment I stop writing. My mind flashes back one week. Terror washes over me. It wells up from the subconscious. It is programmed into our genetic code - the terror of '37, of '49, all the last years of Stalin's dictatorship, when the whole country, one sixth of the earth's surface, was one giant GULag.
I kept trying to push out the intrusive and persistent thought that it was a pity I hadn't memorised the prison jargon published in one of the weeklies a while back. It might come in handy now.
My head is spinning. Broken phrases from what I had read by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yevgenii Ginzburg, Lev Rasgon. Solzhenitsyn was far away, safe in Vermont in America, Ginzburg ("The Hard March") was dead. But what was our dear Lev Rasgon thinking now? He survived eighteen years in the camps and then became a writer. Now, he is almost eighty, yet his mind is still sharp and he remains a wonderful raconteur. In spring, just months ago when he had been interviewed on television about the GULag, he had been saying that nobody would dare do anything like that again to the people.
And then only last Sunday, John, a friend, had visited the dacha. We were out picking mushrooms in the woods when the conversation turned to exactly that, the possibility of a coup and a return to the past. Then, when it had only been an abstraction, I had been willing to entertain the notion. Fairly quickly we found ourselves wondering not so much whether there would be a coup, but what life was going to be like after Gorbachev had been removed. Even though it was only a game, thinking of our Stalinist past sent shivers down my spine. But John was insisting it would only be like the latter years of Brezhnev at worst, or if Alksnis got his way, something like China today. Later, on the dacha porch where I would be sitting a week later trying to remember the prison jargon, we were sitting playing scrabble. The thought of Stalin's camps would not go away:
"Why don't you think it's going to be like it was back then?"
John had tired of this, it wasn't his world after all. He was an observer, no more no less, what could he really know about how we feel. He was bored by this insistent worrying which meant nothing to him and brushed my question aside:
"It won't. That's all. Why go on about it?"
And I decided to drop it, without asking my next question - couldn't he see a Tiananmen Square in the making here? He was the one who had lived in China, leaving a couple of days before the tanks crushed the student demonstration there. Couldn't he see the same thing happening here?
We returned to the game. I felt ashamed that we Russians had to go on doubting and worrying about everything, never trusting in a better future. Even if in the past we had been lied to nine times out of ten and cheated out of our freedom, surely there was still that one chance in ten that this time it would be different. And even then everything moves so slowly, Russia is so big, too big.
But now Echo Moscow had interrupted its music with an announcement: tanks were standing, motors idling, on Ryazan Highway, a major road into Moscow. Katya and Vitya, playing out some banal scene from a war film, were clinging around my neck shouting: "Mama, don't go!"
It was strange. But the only thing moving in me apart from will and desire were literary associations crawling out of the recesses of my mind. Trying to think of what was happening, how it had happened and where it would take us, I could only think of a tale by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, called 'The New Robinsons'. It had been published about a year and a half ago and at the time had read like a dirge of unrelieved pessimism and desperate forewarning. The plot was simple. After certain events life in the city had become impossible for a number of reasons - personal safety, living on a subsistence level, a complete lack of personal freedoms. A family saves itself by fleeing deep into the woods where it finds refuge in a bear's lair. Here they gather wild berries, catch game, live off mushrooms, berries and roots - anything rather than fall into the hands of the authorities. And if Alexander Kabakov's tale 'The Missing Man' provoked a storm on its appearance, then Petrushevskaya's parable passed almost unnoticed. Though on the strength of its plot it was no worse than Kabakov's prosaic vision of post-coup Moscow and surpassed it in its realism and lack of pretension.
Mechanically I open the cupboard door to see what food stocks we have. Two kilograms of flour, one kilogram of salt, ten bottles of preserves. I slam the door angrily: "What the hell am I doing!?" Perhaps none of us will need it anyway. They feed you in prison. But wait on, if they haven't already arrested all of us, then maybe there's still hope, maybe it's worth trying.
We drive into Moscow, along the same Ryazan Highway where the tanks should have been. No tanks.
In the city too, on the face of it nothing has changed. The shops are open. And as they were before the coup, they are either empty or there is an enormous queue for whatever crumbs are being sold. The Metro and the buses and trolley-buses are running. The telephone is working. You can even ring inter-city or international.
But the fact that the phone is working doesn't make me feel any better. If anything, it worries me more. A coup is a coup. But this is Russia, and in Russia, nothing is ever as it seems.
I drop into the local post office. It's like a dream. The manager comes out from the back and turns to the people, all old women and men, queueing up to subscribe to next year's newspapers.
"There won't be any Vechernaya Moskvy [Evening Moscow] or Komsomolskaya Pravda [Komsomol Truth]!"
An old fellow in a crushed cap asks in agitation:
"But what about Krasnaya Zvezda?"
The manager turns on him:
"For God's sake, shut up! Nothing's going to happen to your dear Krasnaya Zvezda with this mob in power!"
Krasnaya Zvezda, the army's paper, always agitating for something or other. Well, now it had got what it wanted. I suppose subscriptions to it will skyrocket. The old man calms down. But now the manager is looking worried. Perhaps she has said too much? The old man could be anyone. Who might he be under the new regime? I could see her insides curdling. With that same terror that perhaps her father and mother had experienced personally way back in 1937. No doubt there were friends and family whom she trusted enough to speak openly with behind closed doors. But not here in the post office, even today. And though the people had no respect for informers, a breed that for some reason still hadn't become extinct after six years of Perestroika, there was no doubting that they would flourish under the rule of the Emergency Committee.
There is a notice hanging on the service window at the telegraph counter: 'For technical reasons the telegraph will not be working on August the 19th, 20th and 21st.' I draw far-reaching conclusions from this - what sort of 'technical reasons' could last three days? This is getting too complicated.
And later, after it all and thinking about this notice, how did whoever had written it guess that the coup would collapse after three days? On August the 21st, at the same time as the provisional government was being deposed, our telegraph went back on line.
But on Monday the 19th, apart from our mysterious telegraphist, who could possibly have foreseen this? Only the Lyobavicheskii Rabbi living in New York it seems. Moscow's Hasidic Jews telephoned him and he replied: "Don't worry. It will all be over in a couple of days." In a matter of hours, his words, whispered from mouth to mouth, spread a soothing balm across the city. Even closet anti-Semites felt some affection for the Rabbi at that moment. After all this was the man who had foretold the exact day of Saddam Hussein's defeat.
This is the way it has always been over the last few years. As the pessimism bites ever deeper, any rumour has inevitably spread like wild fire throughout the city. And I am still surprised that so-called 'eye-witness' accounts of 'maniac rapist soldiers' and 'looting and pillaging teenagers armed with Kalashnikovs' didn't start doing the rounds during the coup. Perhaps it was simply all over too quickly.
In fact by the evening of the first day of rule by the State Emergency Committee, a day of broken and anxious conversations, turmoil and the absence of any news whatsoever about the fate of Gorbachev, a strange sense had begun to grow inside me that this whole thing was a show. There was something unreal peeping out from behind all the machinations and manoeuvres of the Emergency Committee despite the tanks and soldiers on the streets. Kids playing soldiers?
An old acquaintance is recounting a conversation he had in a shop that morning. A saleswoman, too young to know what it had really been like, asked him facetiously:
"Grand-dad, will the Emergency Committee let us go dancing?"
And he answered heatedly:
"There'll be plenty of dancing now..."
One should not tempt fate, but there had not been any blood on that first day. We all know about Pinochet in Chile, who drowned his country in blood. And we didn't need to be reminded that August the 20th had been the date our tanks, backed up by the East Germans and the Poles, rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968. Perhaps that was why I was now thinking of a certain Russian writer who said of the works of a contemporary of his: "He tries to frighten us, but we're used to it".
By Tuesday, fear had begun to give way to bewilderment and even faint hope. APC and tank drivers on battle alert pulled their lumbering behemoths up in the centre of town. Within fifteen minutes people were feeding the soldiers ice-cream and pizza. These soldiers were meant to be killers. But it didn't seem that way as they were tucking into the slabs of pizza being offered from bright red and white cardboard 'Pizza Hut' boxes - an image from the very heartland of the enemy of whom the Emergency Committee were so afraid.
On the Ring Road the tank drivers were more interested in making money than launching any assault. For ten kopecks (the metro cost fifteen at the time) they were letting kids get inside these growling mechanical monsters. The kids squeal with delight, jump around on the armour plating and try to push the cannon around.
The tanks dangle around the streets of Moscow like a raggedy necklace. Cars, squeezed up, rush under their protruding barrels. Girls are flirting with the soldiers from the better regiments. Older women feel sorry for the bedraggled ranks, hardly the image of warriors. They are feeding them with food from home. And as they hand out the food they gently ask them to go somewhere else.
The people in the rain at the White House are feeling a lot calmer than the vast majority who have stayed at home with the doors locked, getting drunk on a cocktail of telephone calls and rumours mixed with a dash of truth bubbling out of the TV and radio.
In the middle of the night a girlfriend rings me, frightened half to death:
"My friend has just rung me, she said they've already arrested Yeltsin."
I try to calm her down:
"Don't panic. I've just been listening to Radio Liberty. They would have told us if Yeltsin has been arrested."
She sighs with relief:
"Thank God! Mama and I were sitting here thinking it was the end."
I ring a friend. We had agreed a few days ago to meet on the 20th. Now I was unsure not only whether we would be meeting, but also whether there was any sense anymore in discussing our plans for publishing a new children's book or doing a couple of interviews for a radio show we had been making. Nevertheless, a certain inertia forced me to follow through on these things (or perhaps, it was a desire to hide, shield myself from our collapsing world). Nevertheless, I rang, only to hear my friend's voice on the answering machine: "I've gone to the barricades. Leave your message after the tone." I tell him I shall see him at the barricades at the White House. But I never manage to find him. There were too many people for that.
A foreigner, carried away by it all, is standing on top of a makeshift barricade, a fence. She is waving a red flag, most likely bought in a hard currency store:
"I'm so lucky to be in Moscow now!" She is saying, her accent unmistakably North American. "I always wanted to be here, in Russia, when there was a new revolution!"
"Shit", I breathed to myself. And I had lived here all my life, and never once realised how lucky I was.
On August the 20th, I joined an underground organisation. I swore an oath never to divulge the names of the others in the group or the name of the person who invited me to join. Even now I won't say who they were. Who knows what might happen tomorrow. Perhaps our five member cell will still be needed one day.
The tasks we set ourselves were self-evident: organise the production of pamphlets, distribute them, get accurate information about what was going on inside the country to other countries, undermine the orders of the new regime in every way possible, etc.
Fortunately, we never had to act. Fortunately because there had been something awful about remembering a password and a list of hiding places, memorising the rules of the group.
What then is one to make of the saying which appeared in the wake of the coup's collapse: "Even a Junta is not all bad". Besides the fact that democracy finally had its day, these events also pointed to our inner readiness for struggle. Just as earlier, in Brezhnev's time, and Andropov's and Chernenko's, when we had copied the manuscripts of Solzhenitsyn, Lidia Chukovskaya's articles and Josef Brodsky's poems on our battered typewriters, now we had been ready, risking our own freedoms, to photocopy pamphlets and stand by the fax machine sending page after page for the sake of truth.
Neither did the Russian penchant for the 'chastushka', a four-line satirical verse, suffer during the three days of the coup. On the morning of the 21st, I heard this:
Nam poryadok obespechen
Komitet nam drug i brat
On nemnozhko Pinocheten
I sledka Khuseinovat
(Order guaranteed today
The committee - friend and brother
A touch of Mr Pinochet,
Saddam Hussein another.)
We all laughed. Though at the time we weren't convinced of anything.
The more so as by that time it had become clear that the majority of the people of my beloved much suffering Russia, it hurts to admit it, could not have cared less who in the end won the power struggle. So long as they were left alone, so long as someone was putting some sausage in the shops. This was corroborated by friends whom the coup stranded 300-km from Moscow. They swear that, yes, the promises of the Emergency Committee about filling the shops with food had been met with a certain scepticism in the village. But nevertheless everyone had run down to the store anyway on the off-chance that something edible may have turned up, and at an affordable price. And had there been something there in the village shop for those three days, then every last one of them would have supported the coup. But as it turned out, the promises of the Emergency Committee were as empty as its threats!
We spent the whole night of the 20th by the radio, switching from band to band soaking in Echo Moscow, Radio Liberty, Voice of America and the BBC. Around midnight, Echo Moscow disappeared from the air again. Perhaps they had been thrown out of the studio, perhaps they had been arrested. We couldn't tell.
When dawn broke Wednesday, I cooked thirty hamburgers and packed them in a box. Taking what bread we had, I set off for the White House to feed the people who had been there overnight.
Plastered everywhere about the metro were pamphlets giving details about the moves of the Emergency Committee and counter-moves by the Russian Government and the defenders of Parliament House. Rumours of fighting during the night and of dead and wounded were being whispered on the platform.
However, on arriving at the White House, it quickly became clear that the situation had already taken a turn for the better. And its defenders were already beginning to relax. Word had come through, the tanks were on their way out of Moscow.
People were wandering about the streets in dazed excitement, talking about what they had heard and seen. Alas, the rumours about the dead proved true. Two of them had already been identified. The name of the third was still unknown.
A bookworm friend of mine was talking about some sixteenth-century English poet who had written that a successful mutiny is not a mutiny, but a contradiction in terms.
And it was true, the eight 'true Communists' had failed! Their mutiny had been crushed. The victors were already celebrating with fireworks, emotional speeches and solemn promises of never again.
But a bitter taste still lingers. Someone was counting carefully, and the results have already been on the radio. On the first night, from ten to fifteen thousand people went to the defence of the White House. By the second night, perhaps one hundred thousand had turned up. But there are nine million people in Moscow. Not counting children and the elderly, it is still an enormous number compared to one hundred thousand.
The unwanted question poses itself: perhaps the coup failed simply because it was poorly organised? I don't want to think about it. An awful possibility, but it cannot be ruled out. Too much that is still unclear lies behind this coup. Too little is known of the coup's genesis for us to feel completely vindicated, for us to celebrate and forget. Too much dread and indifference wove themselves through people's actions those three days for us to feel convinced of the final victory of something called democracy. As Anton Chekhov said: "A man can only squeeze the slave out of himself drop by drop".
The slave has still not been squeezed out of many of us. But we shall continue this difficult and tedious task.
With some hope.
Anya Chernyakhovskaya
August 24, 1991