Zhanna

I work not far from Parliament House in the children's section of Soviet All-Union Radio, the main radio station. When we first found out about the coup we were dumbfounded. Then we began discussing how to set up an underground radio station and on what wavelength to transmit.

But all this was a sort of hysteria, we really didn't mean what we were saying. We never did get around to organising our secret transmitter.

Instead we all went down to the square in front of the White House. We didn't even take our portable tape recorders with us. There was a weird emptiness in my head, I was thinking why bother recording the events of a coup for my children's programs? In other words, I was thinking in habitual categories when, according to the rules of war, I should have been thinking differently and simply interviewing everyone I could lay my hands on, for the benefit of history and so that the truth might one day be told.

But we did take provisions to the lads down at the barricades. Strange as it sounds, that Monday, the first day of the coup, they still handed out our weekly food parcels at work. There wasn't anything in it that you'd go out of your way to buy. Just a smattering of food for which you would otherwise queue all day and then say 'thank-you very much'. Even if it did, as in this case, include dried seaweed, which I'm sure no one really eats. As it was, we took our parcels of powdered milk, biscuits, sausage and dried seaweed down to the demonstration.

On Tuesday, and we hadn't talked amongst ourselves beforehand about doing this, we all turned up with food from home for the people who had spent the night at the barricades. Pickled cucumber, more sausage, freshly baked cabbage pastries.

Somehow I felt less afraid knowing that the people who were trying to defend us had something to eat.

Zhanna