Then there was the absurd press conference by the GKChP, where some of their leaders were clearly drunk –the Vice-President of the USSR, Gennady Yanayev, sat there with his hands shaking – and the Vremya news programme, where they slipped in a report about what world leaders were saying about the coup and the total confusion in the army and militia. The Soviet Union was falling apart like the cardboard decoration at the end of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Invitation to a Beheading; like Tsarist Russia did in October 1917, which was described so exactly by the philosopher, Vasily Rozanov, in his diary, The Apocalypse of Our Time:
Russia faded out in two days. At the most, in three. It would have been impossible to close down even Novoye Vremya as quickly as they closed down Russia. It was amazing how it all fell apart at once, into small particles, into little pieces…. There was no longer an empire, no longer a church, army, or working class. And what remained? Strangely, nothing at all.[7]
It was made of cardboard, it was false; it didn’t even frighten anyone any more – neither the Lithuanians nor the Americans. Standing on its sanctimonious morality and its cheap vodka, the Soviet Union was dying, just as it deserved, looking ridiculous and funny, in the end not even capable of carrying out a military coup. It was the end of the world as described by T S Eliot: ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’, and it left a sense of absurdity.
But there was another, even stronger feeling across those three days. It was a feeling of happiness, which I experienced in the human chains around the White House, the joy of freedom and recognition. Never again in my life would I come across so many people I knew all in one place: people I’d been at school and at university with; friends and relatives; neighbours and work colleagues; and not only from Moscow, either. It was an evening for meeting people, a gathering place for the Soviet middle class; for people who had grasped the idea of perestroika and who didn’t want at the first shout to go back to Sovok,[8] as they contemptuously called the Soviet Union, back to ill-fitting Soviet suits and communal flats. We still didn’t know at that point what we stood for or who we were with, but we had tasted freedom and we didn’t want a return to the past.
Towards the end of the second night outside the White House, the carnival atmosphere disappeared and was replaced by a sense of alarm. Rumours began to spread that planes had landed at Kubinka military airfield, just outside Moscow, carrying the Pskov Airborne Division, and that they were on their way into Moscow to break up the defence of the White House. There was a call for volunteers to form a human shield across the Novy Arbat Bridge on the further approaches to the White House, and thirty men stepped forward. We stood on the bridge alongside the Ukraine Hotel. It was a chilly, starry night; a light mist rose from the river. We stood tensely looking down the empty Kutuzovsky Prospekt, expecting that any moment we would see the lights of the military trucks carrying the paratroopers. And it was at that moment on the bridge, in the area where I was born and where I grew up, just a hundred metres from my primary school, shivering from the damp or from something else, linked elbow to elbow with my fellows in the chain, that I felt myself to be a citizen of this country. The memory of the place and the feeling of the small Motherland came together with the sensation of history and human solidarity. In the years which have passed since I have never again had this feeling. People who stood on the Maidan, Independence Square, in Kiev in 2004 and 2014 have also spoken about this sensation. August 1991 was truly Russia’s Maidan, where Russian civil society was born, and which gave legitimacy to the authorities at that time.
Morning came. The paratroopers had been stopped by order on the outskirts of Moscow. The mist disappeared, the GKChP members were arrested. On Lubyanka Square, in front of the KGB Headquarters, they pulled down ‘Iron Felix’ – the statue of the founder of the Soviet repressive organizations, Felix Dzerzhinsky. The empty Soviet cartons were carried away by the wind and a real, tough, but free life began. More than a quarter of a century on, it all seems like some ancient fable. The spring of history, pressed down as far as it could be in those days, has sprung back and returned to its normal position. Today it seems that, as a result, it wasn’t Yeltsin who triumphed, but the GKChP: all the democratic gains that were made in the country have been turned back. In effect, a one-party system has been reinstated with the lifelong rule of one man. The economy and society are being militarized, and the country is run by Chekists. All that remains for history to come full circle is to return the statue of Dzerzhinsky – which has been well preserved in the ‘Muzeon’ Moscow sculpture park – to its plinth on Lubyanka Square. Little has remained of that heady sense of freedom from those August days, apart from an internal freedom which it is difficult to take away. But even so, the sense of the absurd and of falsehood has only strengthened.
Falseness is the main thing produced by the actions of the authorities in August 1991 and today. Today’s Russian state is, in essence, as empty and illusory as its hopeless predecessors in the GKChP, who couldn’t even organize a coup d’état. Incapable of carrying out reforms, or even mass repression, all they can do is carry out media shows, like making nuclear threats to the West, simulacra, such as the pirate ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Lugansk, and lies, which they throw out onto social networks in the West.
From the point of view of the big picture of history, what is going on today is simply a continuation of August 1991, yet another stage in the long process of the end of empire, which is happening in a nonlinear fashion, through fevers, collapses, amputations and remissions. In the past, it happened by breaking up demonstrations in Alma-Ata in 1986, in Tbilisi in 1989, Vilnius and Riga in 1991 and by a peaceful rally around the White House in August 1991. Today, it is in South Ossetia, a part of Georgia that has been occupied by Russia, and Crimea, which has been annexed by Russia: the empire is dying, painfully and awkwardly. Eventually, a Russian national state should emerge from these transformations, which, like France and Britain, has lived through its post-imperial trauma and is able to live at peace with its neighbours and remember its own roots, including how it was born on the barricades around the White House in August 1991.
A HOLIDAY WITHOUT TEARS
One of my earliest childhood memories is linked to 9 May: I’m drawing tiny leaves on a laurel branch. It was a card for my grandfather in honour of Victory Day. These were Brezhnev’s times, when they started to set in bronze the cult of Victory Day, covering it with decorations, orders and laurel wreaths, hence the branch in my picture. I probably also drew the sun, a red star, and maybe a rather clumsy dove of peace – but I never drew a tank.
I remember marking Victory Day during my student life, the time of perestroika. After 1 May, the city was empty and clean, the lilac was in bloom, the trolleybuses seemed to smile and my feet carried me of their own accord to the Bolshoi Theatre, where they hadn’t yet dug up the old square in front of the building and they were playing wartime music. You could wander among the people gathered there in their parade uniforms, some celebrating, some sad, who each year would get together in ever-diminishing groups beside a board bearing the name of their military unit. It was indeed the ‘holiday with tears in their eyes’, as Victory Day was painfully and accurately described in a well-known Soviet song; we all understood that this was nature passing on its way and we tried hard to preserve in our memory this place and this mood, like distant music, like the fading scent of the lilac.
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Vasily Rozanov,
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