Mikhaleva: Hadn’t your newspaper been shut down by then?
Kucher: Yes, of course. We had actually talked to the printers, but without much success. Our paper, from the very beginning, was conceived as an alternative to the Party’s central press. We were a Russian paper. But our printer was the printing house of Moskovskaia pravda. They gave us the runaround at first, and toward the end of the day they simply said that they could not print our paper. I had hoped they would print us. So, we decided to go it alone. By ten that night, we had already produced a large stack of leaflets with Yeltsin’s first decrees. And that’s what we did every day. In the three-day period, we issued six leaflets, if I remember correctly.
Mikhaleva: How many copies did you produce?
Kucher: Not that many—all that our equipment could produce. I remember taking a stack with me to Kalinin Prospect, and people simply tore them out of my hands. I believe the reason few people got hold of these leaflets is that they would quite literally tear them apart, trying to yank them out of one another’s hands. This was an explosion of glasnost: people believed every word they read in them. We would post them where we could—in the subways, on lampposts, and so on.
Mikhaleva: When did you get the sense that the putsch was failing?
Kucher: I was afraid that the White House would be attacked, I had a strong feeling that would happen. As to the ultimate failure of the putsch, I had no doubts about that almost from the very beginning, before everybody else understood it. The reason is that I received a phone call from the United States from my friend Professor Steve Kotkin, an American Sovietologist. He called me on the evening of the 19th and asked me how I was doing, what was happening. I tried to inform him the best I could. He said, “Listen, Valerii, my prediction is that it will all end very soon, two to three days at the most, and then it’ll be all over. So, don’t worry.” That’s the kind of conversation I had with my friend Stephen Kotkin. I knew that he understood the situation here pretty well, I was sure that his prediction would come true. Jokes aside, I did not think the putschists would succeed, but I was pretty sure they would try to attack the White House.
On the 19th, we had printed our leaflets, distributed them, and then in the early hours of the morning, I left the White House and went home. A few hours later, I was back there. I saw it as my function to collect the decrees and all other information there and pass them on as soon as possible to the editorial offices, so that they could quickly print them. Nobody gave me this assignment—it all happened spontaneously.
Speaking of interesting moments, I remember that first evening, I came out of the White House to see what was going on around it, and there on the barricades, I saw the Japanese ambassador. It was the 20th. He drove up to the barricades in his embassy car. I was very intrigued by his presence there. I walked up to him, greeted him, and asked for an interview. He agreed. After this interview, we became friends. It was clear that he wanted to make a statement. The Japanese leadership had a rather strange, reserved reaction to the putsch, but he wanted to show where he stood, and it was very important for him that an editor saw him there and even interviewed him right on the barricades. For me it was important to clarify for my readers the Japanese government’s attitude to the events. He was very judicious in his remarks, as you can understand.
I had frequent meetings with General Kobets during those days, talked to him, interviewed him, saw how the security regime in the White House was growing tighter and tighter. At a certain point, a security detail took a position on the roof, and at a certain point, they began distributing bullet-proof vests. By the evening of the 20th, the internal White House radio station began its broadcasts. I have a tape of Sergei Stankevich’s report about Gorbachev in Foros. All these reports were eagerly awaited and were quickly snatched up by reporters and passed on to editorial offices. I always tried to pass on this information to my old colleagues in Magnitogorsk as well as my Moscow paper.
On the evening of the 20th, the situation was very grave. We were expecting the attack at any moment, and there were constant rumors about the “appointed hour” of the attack. Around ten in the evening, I went home to pick up my wife. I wanted her to see the White House and what was happening around there. Despite all the barriers, etc., we managed to get right into the thick of it, almost right up to the very White House. We took a walk around the barricades. I wanted to show her what was going on, because she was just holed up in our apartment on the Rublev Highway, frightened to death that something might happen to me. People were sitting around bonfires under the drizzle…. A few days later, I found out that the head of the Moscow Weather Bureau sent an official letter to Ivan Silaev denying the rumors that he was in cahoots with the junta and that it was he who used some means to bring about the rain over the White House on the 20th. It was an official letter, really, in which he denied his complicity in and ability to produce localized rainfall and asked Silaev to dispel all such suspicions. That kind of absurdity also took place then. Suddenly, many government officials began to fear that they might be suspected of cooperating with the junta.
Mikhaleva: Was there a Press Office at the White House?
Kucher: Yes. It was Sergei Stankevich, for the most part, who played the role of the Press Secretary. The important information was the decrees and official decisions, and as soon as I received them, I would pass them on to the editorial office.
On the evening of the 20th (it could have been early the next morning—I can’t recall now), I ran into Poltoranin, the Press Minister [Chairman of Russia’s State Committee on the Press], in Yeltsin’s waiting room. I said to him: “Mikhail Nikiforovich, look, we’ve started publishing a newspaper, we print it ourselves and then post it all over the city. You know, the junta banned us, but we couldn’t just sit still, so we found a way to print the most important things.”
He said that they were discussing the idea of an opposition press and publishing a joint newspaper to tell people what happened. “Get on the phone to Yegor Yakovlev,” he said. “Use the government line and call him—he’s waiting to hear from people. Send him your representative.”
This idea of publishing a joint newspaper was floating around then. I remember discussing it quite spontaneously with our correspondent, Nikolai Vishnevskii. It was he who said to me during our planning meeting at the editorial office that it would be a good idea to publish a joint newspaper with all the other banned papers. By the time we had gotten hold of the telephone numbers of the editors-in-chief, the idea, as it turned out, had already surfaced elsewhere.
After my conversation with Poltoranin, I called Yegor Yakovlev and asked him what my newspaper’s contribution should be, what we should be writing now. He said: “Call Kommersant, send your own reporter there, and then you’ll decide what you should cover. But for the time being, we’ll just publish a joint newspaper containing all the official decrees of the Russian government, and if you don’t mind, we’ll put your name down, too, as a cofounder of the issue.”
Of course, I agreed. But we did not have the time to bring out a second issue of the joint paper—the putsch was over. The idea, though, was to have one liaison person from every paper, somehow to coordinate the coverage, and to publish it under a single roof, so to speak. I liked this idea so much that I decided to set up a Club of Eleven Editors, associated with my paper, and later on, sometime after the putsch, we produced the second issue of this joint newspaper. This then was the opinion of every one of these editors about the situation in the country. Actually, we put out two issues after the putsch. That’s how the idea of the joint newspaper was realized. Of course, it had no real future: even the two issues that I put together after the putsch were a rather artificial creation. My impulse was to preserve that feeling of solidarity we all had then, but under normal circumstances, there was neither a need for it nor an inclination. We simply do not have that kind of cause today, a powerful cause to bring everybody together.