RL 326/91 August 31, 1991 THREE DAYS IN AUGUST: ON-THE-SPOT IMPRESSIONS Iain Elliot What follows is descriptive rather than analytic. But for at least one eyewitness to the events in Moscow from August 19 to 21, it seemed that three factors were crucial: first, the politicians--on the one hand, El'tsin and his colleagues, charismatic and decisive, and, on the other, the Yanaev junta, grey and incompetent; second, the post-1968 generation, politically aware and determined to defend democracy; and, third, the journalists, who refused to be silenced by the junta and enabled the RSFSR leaders to communicate effectively with their supporters. In the steady rain of Monday afternoon on August 19 I watched the indignant crowds on Kalinin bridge and Smolensk embankment building barricades and thrusting leaflets into the hands of young, confused tank crewmen. Workers dragged concrete blocks into place with their trucks. Young lads carried up stretches of railings. Middle-aged academics, brief case in one hand, scaffolding pole in the other, delayed their return home to add their contribution to the defense of the White House and their elected representatives. The first barriers of trolleybuses with slashed tires grew stronger by the minute. Building sites were ransacked, and a vast supply of long steel rods for ferroconcrete construction gave barricades the appearance of some ancient phalanx of spears. A veteran of the Afghan war said that such rods were the most effective defense available against the tanks. At five o'clock a familiar sound caught my attention: the news from Radio Liberty emerged loud and clear from the center of a large cluster of umbrellas at the end of the bridge. At 1715 troop transport vehicles, which were trying to force their way through to the makeshift barrier on the bridge, abandoned the attempt, and in a dangerous operation, turned round amid the crowds before disappearing in the direction of the Ukraine Hotel. Some frustrated soldier inside one of the transporters fired a few rounds into the air to frighten the crowds into clearing a path. Later a column of several dozen light tanks came charging recklessly round a corner at the Smolensk metro station. The tank officers were desperately waving passers-by out of the way, but were clearly determined not to relax speed for fear of finding themselves pinned down like so many others by leaflet-waving youngsters. Nonetheless someone had managed to scrawl with a piece of chalk on tank number 073 "Freedom, not tanks!" Outside the Marx Prospect metro station people were clustered round Boris El'tsin's "Appeal to the Citizens of Russia," posted on a wall opposite the Bolshoi Theater. In front of the nearby Moscow Hotel a large crowd was cheering the speeches of young deputies. A general strike was spreading, there was widespread support for El'tsin, Russians were no longer prepared to give way to totalitarianism. The young deputy Dmitrii Chegodaev, a "Democratic Russia" leader, was particularly effective with his megaphone, summoning the crowds to an all-night vigil outside the White House. I was to speak to him again under happier circumstances an epoch later, on Thursday night. Still with his megaphone, he was persuading laughing but determined Muscovites to stand clear so that two powerful Krupp cranes could remove "Iron Feliks" (Dzerzhinsky) from his high pedestal before the KGB headquarters. For several hours in the late afternoon agile young people scrambled all over the towering statue, placing steel cables round its neck, and linking them to an ancient yellow bus. They were convinced by Sergei Stankevich and other spokesmen for El'tsin and Gavriil Popov that this day of victory should not be marred by further casualties, and they waited patiently until almost midnight, when the hated symbol of KGB repression was eventually laid low in a safe, well-organized operation. That tense Monday evening, however, I heard from one of the deputies at the White House that Radio Russia and "Ekho Moskvy" had been suppressed. I had visited Sergei Korzun, chief editor of the popular "Moscow Echo" radio station in its cramped quarters just that morning, shortly after KGB officers had told him to close down. He said then that he had no intention of obeying them, since he did not recognize their authority, and it therefore seemed probable that he had been arrested. This turned out not to be so, and "Ekho Moskvy" was soon back on the air, although its broadcasts were interrupted more than once in the grim hours that followed. I spoke that week with several journalists, print and radio; their experiences varied greatly, as did their fascinating accounts of how they had somehow succeeded in defying the incompetent junta's attempts to suppress their activites. But they shared with the young men who stood unarmed before the tanks a courageous determination to do everything in their power to ensure the collapse of the coup. Suddenly a dozen tanks roared past the Metropol Hotel and Sverdlov statue, heading for Manege Square, scattering those who like me were strolling away from the speakers towards the line of tough OMON paramilitary police blocking off Red Square. Three sped past and on through Manege Square, but the fourth ground to a halt so abruptly I thought for a moment that it had hit one of the passers-by. It was a relief to realize that nothing more dramatic than engine failure had occurred. Within seconds the snorting tanks with flak-jacketed soldiers on top clutching their Kalashnikovs were surrounded by people from the meeting determined to educate the soldiers about how they were being misled. Leaflets fluttered from the windows of the deputies' offices in the Moscow Hotel, but possibly even more effective were the plump, motherly Russian women who gave the undernourished soldiers everything they had in their baskets, from bunches of grapes to a very large jar of stewed fruit, which an officer demanded be promptly returned. "And they make our children take part in this!" shouted one irate woman. Confused and unhappy, the soldiers and tank crews listened to a range of hecklers, from lecturers on the nature of democracy to the only drunk I was to see among hundreds of thousands of demonstrators against the junta. Ripping open his shirt and thrusting his naked chest against the muzzle of a Kalashnikov in the hands of a nervous teenager, he shouted: "You won't shoot us, will you? After all, we're Russian, and you're Russian." At last the rain stopped and the setting sun made the red bricks of the Lenin Museum glow. Tank crewmen helped some pretty girls climb up beside them to decorate their tank with flowers. An angry officer chased the girls off, but agreed to withdraw the remaining tanks the way they had come, if only the crowd would step back enough to allow them to maneuver round. And so the tanks left, ignominiously towing backwards the one broken down, the triumphant cheers of the crowd resounding across Manege Square while the OMON looked on impassively. Monday set the scene for the defeat of the bungling junta. The politically aware among the population realized their strength, and I saw little evidence of doubt among those on the barricades whether democracy would prevail. Of course all too many Muscovites kept their heads down, waiting to see which way the wind was blowing before voicing any opinion about events. And there were several in buses and the subway who even argued in favor of the junta, hoping for a return to the Brezhnev stagnation when at least there was something to buy in the shops. On Tuesday, August 20, meetings were taking place all over Moscow as the staffs of newspapers, factories, and other institutions decided where they stood. Some simply went about their business as usual. Others were divided, and opted to sit on the fence until it became clearer on which side it would be in their own best interests to jump. For people in the media this was not really an option; those who did not immediately go public with a statement opposing the coup were denounced by their more courageous colleagues as compromisers. But some newspapers that immediately decided to defy the junta's ban found that they lacked the means to publish a normal issue--and not, in most cases that I heard about, because there were tanks barring the way to the printing presses. More often it was simply that the responsible official for the formerly Party-controlled newspapers refused to provide the keys; and since access to xerox machines is still severely restricted, it was not always a simple matter to run off several thousand leaflets or brief "emergency" issues of a newspaper. Even obtaining supplies of xerox paper required considerable initiative. Under the leadership of Irma Mameladze, Alla Latynina, and Yurii Shekochikhin (who is also an elected deputy), Literaturnaya gazeta journalists held a meeting at their editorial offices in Kostyansky pereulok to protest the actions of the junta and arrange for joint action by the democratic media. The weekly is printed courtesy of the Pravda presses, and since they lacked the facilities to produce an immediate "emergency" issue themselves, they decided to pile into their bus and join the demonstration of solidarity at the Russian parliament. They were not impressed by the attitude of their editor Fedor Burlatsky, who stayed in the Crimean sunshine and provided no leadership for their protest. It was not until Wednesday, August 21, that he phoned his protest at the closure of his newspaper, in time for the front page of that week's delayed issue. Vitalii Tret'yakov, editor of Nezavisamaya gazeta, produced a special issue of his newspaper by fax despite the ban, and quickly organized underground distribution of it and the following issues. When I called at his offices on the first floor of the "Voskhod" factory off Myasnitskaya Street (temporarily called Kirov Street under Communist rule) he paid tribute to all those who had helped provide paper and xerox facilities. He expressed particular gratitude to the Library of Foreign Literature; as an article in the Saturday issue pointed out, while some printing houses made the impossible demand of an official letter of permission from Minister Poltoranin before taking the risk of printing the liberal newspaper, the director of the Library, Vyacheslav Ivanov, simply said: "Come." It was late when they arrived. "But no tasks are hopeless where Deputy Director Ekaterina Genieva is concerned. If not already aware of her energy and determination, one would have been astonished to see how necessary but difficult-to-find people appeared; how doors, the keys to which it was impossible to find, were opened; and so on." The newspaper published a list of Library staff who had shown particular dedication.1 Among the most active in producing and distributing leaflets were young members of the Memorial Society, who took paper from every office they could find and produced thousands of leaflets on their overworked xerox machines. "Suppressed" newspapers and press agencies provided them information by fax, which they sent to the West via Prague and Bratislava, since they were unable to fax direct. One lad had an uneasy moment when two policemen approached as he was distributing leaflets to tank crews. But all they asked was: "Have you got any more for us?" On Tuesday, Aleksandr Daniel had a bad moment when a truck pulled up outside and a KGB officer rang the bell. They talked, and then he said: "It's all right, we won't shoot you." Outside the White House on Tuesday there was a steady flow of speakers to inspire the thousands of supporters who gathered to prevent the storming of the Russian parliament. El'tsin, Eduard Shevardnadze, and Elena Bonner were enthusiastically received; the poet Evgenii Evtushenko less warmly, although he did succeed in capturing the atmosphere in his poem "19 August" which he proclaimed to the crowds: This August day will be remembered in song and saga. Today we are a people, no longer idiots deceived. And today Sakharov, shyly wiping his cracked spectacles, is coming to the aid of our parliament. Beside the tanks the conscience awakens. El'tsin climbs on a tank. And beside him Not the ghosts of former Kremlin leaders, But the skilled men of Russia, not yet vanished, And tired women, victims of long queuing. No! Russia will not again fall on her knees for interminable years. With us are Pushkin, Tolstoi. With us stands the whole awakened people. And the Russian Parliament, like a wounded marble swan of freedom, defended by the people, swims into immortality.2 Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin introduced a KGB lieutenant colonel who appealed to his boss "Volodya Kryuchkov" to abandon the junta, because it was "about to collapse" anyway. He said that most of his brother officers had declared for El'tsin. (The same message was received by a BBC correspondent who phoned the KGB public relations office in the Lubyanka: "We're all for El'tsin here!" he was told.) At first it was announced that El'tsin could not speak to his supporters outside the White House, "because he had a great many matters to attend to," but when he did in fact appear on the long balcony, it was clear that there were other concerns also. He was surrounded by police shields, and at one point an armed policeman jumped up on the wall in front of his president, pointing at what might have been a sniper high in a nearby building. There were several false alarms about the impending storming of the White House, and instructions were given on what to do in a tear gas attack. As usual, Russians rose to the occasion with a stream of anecdotes: "Why are these people cheering when we know that a column of fifty tanks is coming to crush us? They've probably heard that it's not fifty, but only forty-nine!" Matched only by the enthusiastic reception given to El'tsin were the cheers that greeted the appearance of the popular comedian Gennadii Khazanov, who mimicked Gorbachev and caused shouts of laughter with his sharp comments about would-be dictators with shaking hands. There were other, less repeatable jokes about "Yanasha" on the walls of transportable toilets provided for the defenders of the Russian parliament. The first reports from the Chaikovsky Street underpass in the night of August 20-21 were inaccurate, with as many as ten said to be killed and dozens wounded. Katya Genieva, deputy director of the State Library for Foreign Literature, who, despite the curfew and the tanks in the streets, was working through the night to arrange for the printing of thousands of copies of an "emergency" issue of Nezavisimaya gazeta, found time to worry about my wife and me. She thought that we should catch the first plane home: "It's going to be nasty in Russia now; they'll arrest all of us. I'll help in any way I can." My wife Elisabeth, in Moscow for the BBC Russian Service, thought it much too interesting to leave. Two trucks stopping immediately opposite in the dark small hours to allow armed soldiers to jump out made me wonder whether it was not getting too interesting to stay. A dozen heavy tanks in camouflage paint, which made them seem even more outrageous in the center of a city, roared along the embankment towards the White House. By the time I reached Chaikovsky Street, however, it was quiet. Grim but determined "afghantsy" talked about their experiences as they stood in the persistent drizzle beside a burned-out trolleybus. Girls were placing flowers to cover bloodstains. There were several makeshift shrines of broken planks. Just a few yards from the reconstructed barricade I noticed a wall covered with leaflets. One was headed "Radio Liberty Informs" and a typed page gave a dozen items with world reactions to the coup. Yaroslav Leontiev, the duty editor for Radio Russia that night, had compiled a fairly comprehensive chronology of the tragic events from the flood of phone calls received. He told me that only information confirmed by independent sources was included. Although an attempt was made by the junta to remove Radio Russia from the air, its frequencies were defiantly stuck up on walls around the city and, being on medium waves, appeared to have most listeners on the radios I heard around the barricades. Radio Liberty also contributed significantly to defeating the junta's attempt to impose censorship, as Gorbachev, El'tsin, Elena Bonner and others have since confirmed. Everyone I talked to, on the barricades, at the White House or in newspaper offices and institutes, had warm words for Radio Liberty, and for the work of our free-lance correspondents in particular. Sergei Markov, a young politics professor at Moscow University, told me how he had recorded from a broadcast El'tsin's first decree opposing the junta. Markov cycled through the rain to the local soviet at Dubna and had the satisfaction of watching the executive committee put El'tsin's instructions immediately into effect after they had listened to the recording. Markov, who is leader of the Russian Social Democrat Party, spent the long night of August 20-21 in the White House with Radio Liberty providing a steady stream of information from Russia and abroad. On Saturday, at the memorial meeting on Manege Square for the three victims of the coup, I could see over the shoulder of the man in front his copy of Vechernyaya Moskva: "According to Radio Liberty..." El'tsin himself heard evidence enough of the value of Radio Liberty broadcasting in the fraught days of the putsch, when RL free-lancers were broadcasting direct from the tenth floor of the White House.3 On August 27, he issued a decree providing Radio Liberty with a Moscow bureau and full accreditation for its correspondents in the RSFSR. Three indispensable human factors for building a solid foundation for democracy in Russia were very much in evidence in those exhilarating August days. There were elected representatives of the people who provided the right leadership at the right time. There was a politically conscious section of the population--probably not the majority, but sufficiently numerous to prevail--that was prepared to stand up for democratic principles despite very real dangers. And there were enough journalists with the initiative and courage to ensure that the democratic politicians and their supporters could communicate with each other quickly and effectively to organize the defeat of the reactionary forces. Among the politicians, El'tsin of course played a decisive role: he appeared to be the right person in the right place at the right time. When there was a very real fear of snipers, he was prepared to take the risk of speaking to the crowds from the top of a tank--a risk that was justified when even the "Vremya" television news carried the image around the country with at least some indication of the contents of his inspiring: "To the Citizens of Russia." I wondered if El'tsin too was reminded of the statue at the Finland Station in Leningrad, with a triumphant Lenin atop an armored car. El'tsin epitomized the fledgling Russian democracy in a way that no other politician could. Shevardnadze, Khasbulatov, Burbulis, and several leading deputies showed similar courage and dedication to defeating the junta. On August 20, Deputy Valerii Borshchev of the Moscow City Soviet on Tverskaya Street described to me how it, like the White House, had become a center of resistance, defying the tanks gathered outside. Shevardnadze had spoken to the crowds there too. I met several of the leaders of new Russian parties--some numerically more significant than others, and with a wide range of policies, but all convinced of the benefits of a multiparty system. At a press conference on Thursday morning, August 22, Nikolai Travkin of the Democratic Party of Russia, Viktor Aksyuchits of the Russian Christian Democrats, Sergei Markov of the Social Democrats, and Vladimir Filin of the Republican Party of Russia debated issues such as privatization, social services, policies on national minorities in the RSFSR, and on Russians in the other republics. Their views of course varied greatly, but they agreed on the need to put their policies into practice only through the electoral process and parliamentary debate, and all had proved by their actions in the preceding days that they were united in their determination to defend democratic government. The Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) with their green flag embossed with a white swan were present at most street demonstrations, although they told me they had only a few hundred members. They stand for the same policies that won strong support among middle-class voters for the Constituent Assembly of 1918. Many a true word is spoken in jest, and it was widely claimed in the streets of Moscow that since the democratic forces had failed to prepare themselves to deal with the hard-line putsch that everyone expected, gratitude for its failure was owed more to the bungling of the junta than to the competence of the democratic leadership. Deputy Tel'man Gdlyan joked that Dmitrii Yazov should be shown leniency because by threatening students with military service he had increased their determination to oppose a military takeover. Others pointed out that when Boriss Pugo branded as "traitors" the OMON who pledged their loyalty to El'tsin, he merely strengthened their resolve to fight to the end in defense of the White House. Certainly their failure to win the obedience of army, KGB, and MVD units at least sufficiently to remove quickly the RSFSR leadership, their failure to cut telephone communications, jam radio broadcasts, and suppress the free press, their complete inability to inspire either trust or terror--rather than contempt--in the broad masses who watched their feeble television performances all meant that they deserved to lose every bit as much as the RSFSR leadership earned their victory. Without doubt, the strong line taken by President Bush, Prime Minister John Major, Chancellor Kohl, and other Western leaders heartened the democrats and further demoralized the junta. All of this became known to those who manned the barricades only through the democratic media. In addition to the ones mentioned above, I saw many "emergency" issues of the democratic newspapers pasted on walls and even on tanks; they certainly reached the troops and had the desired effect. Aleksandr Kabakov, political commentator of Moscow News and author of "The Defector" screenplay predicting the disintegration of the USSR and armed clashes in the Moscow streets, was tired and unshaven but triumphant after the defeat of the putsch. He told me that the film of "The Defector" had received an unplanned premiere immediately after Sobchak's defiant speech on Leningrad television. He also passed on four issues of the "emergency" issue of Moscow News (A3-size xerox) that had been distributed at the height of the crisis, including an appeal by the indomitable and ubiquitous Elena Bonner for half a million Muscovites to demonstrate their support for the Russian parliament "to show that we are worthy of the title of citizens of the capital and of the state, rather than just a crowd, interested only in sausage" (issue number 3). Most of the newspapers that appeared with the permission of the junta were opposed by some of their staff. In addition to the "putschist" Moskovskaya Pravda, there was an "illegal" Moskovskaya pravda appearing as an A4-size leaflet, appealing to readers to ignore the normal-size "legal" issue. Moskovsky komsomolets managed to produce five "emergency" issues in the form of A3-size photocopies. Rossiya, the White House-based newspaper of the presidium of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, produced a series of A3-size leaflet issues with appeals to pass them on and reproduce them as much as possible. This activity was complemented by the radio stations ineffectively banned by the junta: Radio Russia, "Ekho Moskvy," and the Radio 3-Anna, which gave its air waves to Radio Russia correspondents Lyubimov and Politkovsky, broadcasting from inside the White House. Its frequencies could be seen pasted on the walls of Moscow streets. The Western radio stations broadcasting in Russian and other languages of the former USSR spread this information further. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, isolated in the Crimea, was able to follow events in Moscow and elsewhere thanks, as he acknowledged, to the BBC, Radio Liberty, and the Voice of America. It was gratifying to see so many tributes in the liberal Russian press to the work of the international broadcasters. A random survey of the newspapers I managed to buy, beg, or scrummage for in the course of that week found information attributed to Radio Liberty in Vechernyaya Moskva (August 22), Literaturnaya gazeta (August 21), Moskovskie novosti (August 24)--where Aleksandr Kabakov wrote of how he had listened to Andrei Babitsky and Mikhail Sokolov reporting for Radio Liberty from the White House. Rossiiskaya gazeta (August 23) wrote that on the morning of August 21 the barricades damaged by the APC attacks of that night were being restored, when "to relieve the pickets who had lived through these heavy hours, Muscovites began to arrive on the first metro trains, having spent the night at their receivers, listening on Radio Liberty to information about the attack that had begun." But for me as an observer of these events, the lasting impression is of the youth of the vast majority of those who defended democracy on the barricades and distributed leaflets, and of their conviction that they had no alternative. As El'tsin said in his victory speech at the rally on August 22: It has again been shown how great are the powers of the people. The political course of Russia, the honor and virtue of its highest bodies of authority, its leadership, were defended by unarmed, peaceful citizens. It is symbolic that among those who became the defense of the constitution, the law, and human worth, there were a great many young people. This means that the future course of this reform is ensured. Too many Western specialists dismissed the dissidents of the Brezhnev era as too small in number to have any significant impact on political reform. But the self-sacrifice of those few courageous individuals who in the 1960s and 1970s placed their civic duty and the defense of human rights above their own well-being was not wasted. Through samizdat and Western radio broadcasts their example reached the post-1968 generation, and it was not lost. On Saturday evening, Elisabeth and I visited Misha and Flara Litvinov, parents of Pavel Litvinov, one of the few who demonstrated for some minutes on Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia before being arrested. Among those squeezed into their hospitable kitchen to watch the amazing scenes on Russian television were Kronid Lyubarsky and his wife, and Larissa Bogoraz, who had played their part in the events of that week, in a worthy culmination of their distinguished lifetime in defense of human rights. One could not avoid the conviction that it was they and their small circle that planted the seeds that flowered this August in Moscow. I remembered Lev Timofeev, Gleb Yakunin, Mstislav Rostropovich at the White House, but it was the words of Elena Bonner among the representatives of that tiny band of dissidents that came to mind. When she spoke on August 20 she called on Muscovites no longer to act like bydlo (cattle) but, avoiding bloodshed, to stand for a free, democratic Russia against the junta: "They cannot stand over us; we are above them, we are better than they, more honest, and we are many!" 1 Nezavisimaya gazeta, August 24, 1991. Copies of special issues--A4 fax and A3 xerox--are in the possession of this author. 2 First published in Literaturnaya gazeta, August 21, 1991. 3 Mikhail Sokolov's firsthand account was published in Sobesednik, No. 35, 1991.