TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE FAILED SOVIET COUP

By Masha Lipman

AUGUST 19, 2016

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/twenty-five-years-after-the-failed-soviet-coup

Russia’s newly elected President, Boris Yeltsin, speaks from atop one of the tanks that surrounded the building of the Russian Council of Ministers, or “White House,” during the attempted coup of August, 1991.

In August, 1991, a small group of hard-liners in the Soviet government staged a coup aimed at halting the popular anti-Communist, pro-freedom tide stirred by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. On their orders, tanks surrounded the “White House,” the seat of the government of Russia (then a constituent part of the Soviet Union), which was led by Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected President. Tens of thousands of Muscovites rushed to the White House, to rally around Yeltsin and defend Russian freedom against the Communist putsch. Three days later, the putschists suffered a spectacular defeat.

It was a unique moment in Russian history, when people, on their own initiative, organized to take political action, guided by a strong conviction of what was right for their country. Andrey Desnitsky, a Russian scholar and columnist who was in his early twenties at the time, remembered those events in a piece published this week on the news Web site Gazeta.ru:

At night we heard faraway shooting, and we thought, here it is—they are beginning to storm. The square in front of the White House was packed with people. It was clear that if tanks and submachine gunners advanced, there’d be no place to hide or run away. I was scared, shaking, but . . . I think for the first time in my life I felt to be free and a citizen of my country making its history together with other citizens. And no price seemed too high to pay for this feeling.

The space in front of the White House where Desnitsky and others stood was promptly named the Square of Free Russia. The “defenders of the White House” and their sympathizers joyfully celebrated their victory, but their euphoric mood, along with the sense of moral clarity and righteousness, proved to be short-lived. Just a few years after the failed coup, less than ten per cent of Russians chose to see those events as a democratic revolution that put an end to Communist Party rule. That perception has not changed. According to a Levada Center poll, taken in August of this year, only eight per cent share this view. Thirty-five per cent say that it was just another episode in the struggle for power among the top leadership, while thirty per cent think that it was a tragedy that had deleterious effects on the state and the people. Today almost half of Russians say that they don’t know or don’t remember what happened in August of 1991. The Square of Free Russia is now a square only in name: the public is barred from the space around the White House, now the seat of the Russian Cabinet, by a tall iron fence.

The failed coup accelerated the secessionist movements in other constituent republics, first and foremost in the Baltics, but also in Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova. In a referendum in December, 1991, the people of Ukraine voted overwhelmingly for independence. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Under the leadership of Yeltsin, who had just smashed the seventy-year-old Communist regime, the new Russia faced the task of building a democratic system, a market economy, and a Russian statehood to replace the Soviet one. The collapse of the Soviet Union may not have been regarded as a tragic event at the time, but, for Russians, seeing the country’s territory shrink and its might diminish was hardly a reason for rejoicing. The fact that the U.S.S.R. fell apart was unexpected and confusing. Those who rose to defend freedom in August, 1991, wanted to get rid of the Communist regime, not to destroy the Soviet Union. To people in Eastern European countries and many in the Baltic states, the Soviet Union may have been a foreign occupier and its collapse a liberation, but to Russians it was still their country, and the sense of liberation was missing. “Free from whom?” was a question that had no answer.

The transition from the egregiously inefficient Soviet economy to a market economy gave an opening to those with entrepreneurial spirit, but the economic reforms of the early nineties also led to corruption, inequality, impoverishment, and a collapse of the Soviet life style, which may have been shabby but was at least stable and habitual. The Soviet middle-class—teachers and engineers—suddenly found its salaries eaten up by inflation, and had to look for other ways to make money. Many opted for the shuttle trade in Turkey or China—buying bagfuls of cheap clothes or jewelry in those countries and reselling them in Russia—an occupation that helped make ends meet but felt demeaning. Those who struggled to survive did not consider the experience part of the noble cause of Russian freedom; for too many, the coup in Moscow was a distant event, the hopes and enthusiasm of the freedom defenders hard to identify with. Those who benefitted from the changes—whether the unrestricted freedoms or the opportunities for enrichment offered by early capitalism—were commonly unconcerned about their less fortunate and less vocal compatriots.

In the second half of 1992, Yeltsin’s government organized a trial of the Communist Party, but the Russian people, preoccupied with economic hardship, showed no interest in learning more about the crimes committed by the regime, and the trial proved meaningless. Meanwhile, Yeltsin was facing rising opposition, not least from the former Communist élites, but also from some of those who had stood by his side against the hard-line putschists. In June, 1993, he held a referendum that confirmed his legitimacy, but public support was not overwhelming. Later that year, his opponents launched another coup. The White House, now the seat of the Russian parliament, whose leadership turned against Yeltsin, was again the scene of a clash between reformers and revanchists. This time, however, the “White House defenders” were the forces for revanchism, and the term’s association with freedom faded. Yeltsin used force against the plotters—at least a hundred and fifty were killed, and hundreds were wounded—and many of his earlier supporters turned away from him. To those who had previously seen him as a defender of freedom, human lives were a price too high to pay.

At the parliamentary elections in December of that year, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a talented populist, capitalized on the situation; he ran on unabashed ultranationalist rhetoric, and his party won a majority in the Duma. “Russia, you’re out of your mind!” a prominent liberal intellectual exclaimed on the night of the election, words that conveyed the helpless consternation of those who still believed in a Russia built on the ideals of August, 1991. When the next parliamentary elections were held, in 1995, the Communists won a plurality. The following year, Yeltsin ran for reëlection and defeated his Communist rival, but his hard-won victory, which many saw as not fully fair and some as plainly rigged, marked the beginning of his ultimate decline.

The spirit of August, 1991, was entirely lost on Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s anointed successor. To Putin, 1991 was the year when the Soviet state that he had served as a K.G.B. officer first failed him and then ceased to exist. From very early in his tenure, he sought to end overt political clashes and calm public passions. To a nation sick of turmoil and hardship, he offered centralized control and, thanks to the rising price of oil, a better life style. He made it clear that politics was not the people’s business and that independent political activism was undesirable, and the people readily complied. He tapped into the sentiments of the majority, which felt let down by democratic ideas and were increasingly angry with the West, whose models Russia sought to emulate only to find that the West took advantage of Russia’s weakness by enlarging nato and bombing the former Yugoslavia over Russia’s protests.

Putin reached out to the broad public and mostly ignored those still professing liberal and Westernizing ideas, a constituency that has long been marginalized and unpopular. In late 2011, however, it looked as if he might have miscalculated: more modernized urban Russians staged mass protests against rigged parliamentary elections and his return to the Presidency. As in August, 1991, the protesters had a sense of moral righteousness, but, without a universally recognized leader, their political purpose remained vague. They were less idealistic than those who rose in 1991, less determined, and less serious about their cause. After a few months, the protests were suppressed.

It was only after those protests, and especially after annexing Crimea, that Putin turned to the language of ideas. Today he speaks constantly about state nationalism and Russia’s greatness, and he enjoys the approval of more than eighty per cent of Russians. The fact that, twenty-five years ago, a people’s movement changed the course of history is something that he would rather erase from national memory. He rejects the idea that those events marked a historical divide. In 2012, he said, “In order to revive national consciousness, we need to link historical eras and get back to understanding the simple truth that Russia did not begin in 1917, or even in 1991, but rather that we have a common, continuous history spanning over a thousand years, and we must rely on it to find inner strength and purpose in our national development.”

Putin’s rule is not an ideological dictatorship. There remains a degree of freedom of expression, and these days those who want to remember 1991 can do so online or in small public venues, where they address the like-minded. Since August, 1991, those still true to their old ideals have joined annual public rallies to remember their victory, and to commemorate the three young men who died trying to block the way of armored vehicles in a tunnel close to the White House. The gatherings used to bring together thousands of people, but they have grown smaller over time. This year, as on previous occasions, the organizers requested permission to hold rallies at the site where the three men died, as well as at a couple of other locations close to the White House. For the first time in twenty-five years, the Moscow authorities turned down their request. The commemorators were eventually granted permission, but the reaction of the government is telling. Sadly, the organizers planned to bring together no more than a thousand people. 

Masha Lipman is editor-in-chief of Counterpoint, a Moscow-based journal published by George Washington University