A pro-democracy demonstrator pulls a Soviet soldier from his tank in front of Moscow's White House on Aug. 19, 1991, as a coup attempted to install a hardline right-wing dictatorship. Credit: DIMA TANIN / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
No headline I've ever written, no headline I've ever read, has brought me more joy than the one my father held up at Victoria train station in 1991: The Collapses.
I can still remember the angle of the summer light illuminating the Evening Standard, the broad grin on Dad's face, and the sheer relief I felt. It didn't matter that I was late meeting my family on the first day I was allowed to go on my own. I was late because I was in the crowd waiting for something. A person in the crowd said it was a shame. The voice sounded like confirmation of our fear.
Our fear in January 2021 was that an anti-democratic insurrection in one of the world's superpowers would cement its position and drag us all back down the path towards global destruction.
The insurrection of 1991 didn't work out. The scales moved. Two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the democratic movement would not be the same as it was in Tiananmen Square. One of the most hopeful decades in human history began that summer day. It was in that dawn to be alive, as Wordsworth wrote, but to be young was very good.
I didn't know that the U.S.S.R was about to end.
You're damn right I saved it. Credit: chris taylor / mashable
The one week coup in the U.S.S.R. is remembered as a blip in the decline of Communism. The dissolution of the soviet union at the end of 1991 felt inevitable. Boris Yeltsin would succeed in standing against the hardliners in the Kremlin, even if they failed. It was once again a mistake.
A dangerous myth began to take hold in the heartland of America where many didn't know about the democratic reforms of the last soviet president. They said that the threat of the Cold War had ended because of the constant rhetoric of the Reagan- Bush right. How dare you call them right-wing when they looked back to an authoritarian past? Commies are all left-wingers.
In the United States, more people died in a coup attempt than in the Soviets. This half-forgotten week that ended the "evil empire" is a good time to revisit. The fight was between authoritarians and democrats. Democracy was shaky then. democrats were incensed by the attempt to silence their voice. It was important to counter the regime's lies.
The authoritarian threat was not as defeated as it appeared. It is possible to draw a direct line between the coup of 1991 and the election of 2000 under suspicious circumstances.
Even though we didn't see it coming, we knew it was coming. Even though I was a teenager, I knew it would come. I wrote about the coup in my diary on the first day. Everyone was hoping that old soldiers wouldn't live on.
Mikhail Gorbachev testifies in Russia's Supreme Court, at the trial of the men charged with treason and conspiracy to seize power in the 1991 coup attempt. Credit: Tanya Makeeva / AP/ Shutterstock
The soldiers were fighting against something. The first soviet leader who wasn't a relic from the revolution was Gorbachev. He became a cautious reformer. glasnost and perestroika were policies that increased freedom of speech and allowed people to own businesses. He said in the spring of 1989 that he wouldn't interfere in the politics of Eastern European countries under the control of the Soviets. He brought democracy to the Soviet Union, allowing each republic to choose its own leader.
The Union treaty that Gorbachev and Yeltsin were about to sign allowed republics to control their own resources. The U.S.S.R was about to become a collection of federal states like the U.S.A., and allowing non-communist parties was the next step on the road to full democracy. Gorbachev was put under a lot of scrutiny.
The president was in his holiday home on the Black Sea to finish the treaty. Republicans told themselves that January 6, 2021, was their last chance to hold on to power, so if right-wing reactionaries wanted to keep their grip on Soviet society, it was now or never.
The coup's acting President Gennady Yanayev, right, gives his first press conference. Credit: ITAR-TASS via Getty Images
There is a mob that wants to kill the Vice President for certifying an election. The vice president of the Soviets wanted to end elections. In 1990 the Communist parliament forced on Gorbachev a hardliner named GennadyYanayev. State radio reported on the morning of August 19 that Gorbachev had taken over because he wasn't feeling well. If you will, it's a fake 25th amendment situation.
The head of the KGB was part of an emergency committee formed to deal with a manufactured crisis. They shut down non-state newspapers. They thought Gorbachev's allies would cause trouble. The committee's biggest mistake was failing to arrest Boris Yeltsin. The Russian president barricaded himself inside his parliament building and dared the regime's tanks to attack him.
They rolled across Moscow just as they had done in other cities, including Beijing, where Communist reformers seemed to have the upper hand for a short time. The world was expecting a coup in 1991. In the pro-democracy West, we were used to having our hopes dashed.
Tanks commanders stopped just short of the White House.
Boris Yeltsin addresses a massive Moscow crowd during the coup attempt in August 1991. Credit: Peter Turnley / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images
Yeltsin was not yet a drunk when he became a politician. He had a good magnetism. On the first day of the coup, he climbed on top of a Soviet tank and called the coup illegitimate and demanded a general strike. Yeltsin did an end-run around state media by broadcasting from ham radios inside the White House and dropping news leaflets from its windows to the crowd below.
It wasn't until later that day that he got out in front of the camera. He wasn't a leader but he was a lifelong bureaucrat. My sister thought he was a rumpled FBI agent from Twin Peaks. He wouldn't show up without the others. It became clear that he was a figurehead after.
Losing the charisma contest doesn't mean the coup will fail. Nikita Khrushchev was deposed by a bunch of Communist bureaucrats. The tanks were on the committee's side. Protesters tried to lie in the street in front of the tanks, but lost the game at the last moment.
You can get a sense of the mood on that day by watching this report from August 19th. The military leaders were described in the report as fascists. They knew which political wing they thought was behind the coup.
People march towards the White House on Aug. 19, 1991. The sign reads "No to Facism! Yes to Yeltsin! All on Strike!" Credit: ALEXANDER NEMENOV / AFP via Getty Images
Hardline victory and a return to the Cold War were the most likely outcomes. The coup was still beingPukiWikid by the people of Leningrad. There wasn't anything Yeltsin could do when he talked to world leaders in Moscow. Yeltsin told the American journalist to not write his obituary. They filled his office with sand bags. Three people were killed by tanks that night. The deaths in Beijing were compared to the recent ones.
Muscovites form a barricade of buses against the Soviet tanks. Credit: david turnley / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images
I wrote in my diary that I prayed this wouldn't be another Tiananmen Square. I'm an unbeliever! The prayers were answered by the Russians. The Russian parliament was surrounded by thousands of people. They became more determined to resist the reactionaries after the deaths of the demonstrators.
Demonstrators roll a large metal pipe through the streets of Moscow to help form a barricade outside the Russian White House. Credit: Alain Nogues/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
A pro-democracy demonstrator argues with a Soviet soldier late Aug. 20, 1991 as a tank block access to the center of Moscow. Credit: ANDRE DURAND / AFP via Getty Images
The tank crews began to display the Russian flag instead of the Soviet one to show sympathy with the demonstrators. The emergency committee was wavering as the military argued over its support for the coup. This could be the beginning of a new civil war. The future appeared to be in doubt.
A little girl stands placidly atop a Soviet tank in the barricades at Red Square during the coup. Credit: David Turnley / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images
The Defense Ministry said it was pulling out of Moscow. Dimitry Yazov was unavailable with a bug. That was the end of the coup committee's existence. The others fled the capital before being arrested.
On Aug. 21, 1991, armoured units leave their positions in Moscow following the collapse of the military coup. Credit: WILLY SLINGERLAND / AFP via Getty Images
Crowds gather in Red Square to celebrate the failure of the attempted coup. Credit: Peter Turnley / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images
Demonstrators in front of the White House cheer a speech by Boris Yeltsin. Credit: Pascal Le Segretain / Sygma via Getty Images
Gorbachev went back to Moscow that night. The city had changed over time. Now, it was Yeltsin territory. Gorbachev's slow pace made it impossible for reform to go forward.
Mikhail Gorbachev and his family at Moscow airport, returning from house arrest in Crimea. Credit: TASS via Getty Images
Yeltsin humiliated Gorbachev live on television. Gorbachev hoped that the status quo would be restored. Yeltsin lectured him publically. Yeltsin forced Gorbachev to read an account of the coup in order to reveal that only one man in Gorbachev's entire cabinet had defended him. His voice was cracking as he read it. The Yeltsin men were appointed to replace them.
Gorbachev gets a lecture from Yeltsin. Credit: peter turnley / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images
Yeltsin did something no one had ever seen before in our lifetimes. The decree suspending all activities in Russia was signed by him. Gorbachev was only interested in how there were still some good Communists. Yeltsin's pen took most of the power away from him.
The other parties were now legal as well. The communists weren't. The Republics that were ready to break away arrested the Communists. The founder of Russia's secret police, a symbol of KGB power, was the first statue to fall. The official break-up of the Soviet Union was set in motion without fear of the KGB.
Gorbachev had a chance to keep the U.S.S.R. together in a multicultural federal democracy. That dream was no longer alive. The coup had done what the Cold War rhetoric couldn't. The U.S.S.R. ended because the parliament was angry at the right-wing insurrectionists.
People from various parts of the Soviet Union hold flags in Red Square on Oct. 5, 1991, protesting desecrations of Lenin's memory since the failed coup. Statues of the Soviet founder were removed; the Mayor of Moscow closed Lenin's tomb. Credit: VITALY ARMAND / AFP via Getty Images
A few of us from my school district went on an exchange trip to the U.S.S.R. two months before it ended. There was a land of contrasts in the countryside. Many people were getting religion but not yet celebrating Christmas. Yeltsin people eagerly devoured independent news even though Communist symbols persisted. We got old Red Army medals from the neighbors. There were no plans to remove the statues in Moscow. They wouldn't celebrate Revolution Day for the first time.
The youngest boy in my host family gave me a toy tank as a gift. A statue of a tank in the center of Kostroma commemorates a local unit that was wiped out three times in the Great Patriotic War. There were reminders that the war had killed 20 million Russians. Even a coup seems small when you're living with a lot of history.
It had still been significant. When the coup took place, my hosts felt like they couldn't talk openly again. They were as hopeful as Russians were. The girl insisted that God saved them from the coup. There was not yet a new economic reality. The country had everything on the table. They wouldn't rule out the appointment of a new tsar. A monarch solely based on the constitution.
The coup organizers in the early 2000s, gathered under a banner that says "Patriot!" Credit: Ivan Sekretarev / AP / Shutterstock
I thought of them many times in the decades since, as we saw a new kind of rise that wasn't bound by a constitution. At the end of Yeltsin's presidency, Putin became the Prime Minister. In the wake of terrorist-style apartment bombings in Moscow, Putin won the 2000 presidential election. One of the coupplots was invited to the inauguration by his former boss.
Russia was plunged into an increasingly authoritarian nightmare as a result of the coup. Don't go easy on insurrection is what Americans can learn from it all. The Russian parliament wanted to promote unity and turn the page after pardoning the top conspirators.
After a decade after the coup, the conspirators gathered in public to say they had been correct. The defense minister who became ill after the coup was given a medal by Putin. There was a death in 2020.
Russian soldiers on the 15th anniversary of the failure of the coup, near the White House, on 20 August 2006. Credit: VIKTOR DRACHEV / AFP via Getty Images
Some Russians regret that it didn't succeed because of the anniversary. Vladimir Putin's sympathies are not difficult to guess. The 1991 break up of the Soviet Union was the biggest catastrophe of the 20th century, according to Putin. The coup that Russians call an act of fascists was started by Putin's KGB.
No to fascism, no to communism: Russian opposition supporters hold a puppet's head wearing a balaclava, trademark of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, during a commemorative event for the victims of the 1991 coup in Moscow on Aug. 19, 2012. Putin made no comment on the anniversary. Credit: andrey Smirnov / AFP via Getty Images
The story was first published in January of 2021.
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