Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

According to the Constitution of the Russian Federation (Chapter 1, Article 3): ‘The bearer of sovereignty and the sole source of power in the Russian Federation shall be its multinational people.’ What happened in August 1991 was an act of people’s sovereignty, when tens of thousands of people stood up to the tanks of the coup plotters, took the weakened power into their own hands and handed it to the nascent Russian state. The principal actors here were not those playing at being plotters in the GKChP, who were simply frightened men, nor was it Gorbachev or even Yeltsin. The most important participants were the people, who constituted the real power and legitimized its passing from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. It was the classic scenario of a national-liberation and bourgeois-democratic revolution.

The events of August 1991 and the collapse of the USSR became the basis for a new Russian statehood, and it is exactly from there that the current Russian elite have their beginnings, having received power and property in the post-Soviet collapse. If those August events hadn’t taken place, Putin would now be a retired KGB colonel, living in his three-roomed flat with his dacha and ‘Volga’ car, and today’s oligarchs would have lived out their time in state scientific research institutes, or would have spent long periods in prison for economic crimes. It’s no coincidence that today they all stubbornly criticize the collapse of the USSR and the 1990s, the decade of changes, yet they all got everything thanks to that period, and they are all children of August 1991, products of the semi-collapse of empire.

That August I was in Moscow and spent three days and two nights on the barricades around the White House, the seat of the Russian Supreme Soviet (Parliament), which had become the centre of resistance to the coup. There are two feelings that remain with me from those incredible days. The first is the feeling of the implausibility of all that was going on; it was as if I was taking part in a huge dramatization. I remember feeling this from the first moments of the coup, when I heard the strains of Swan Lake playing on every TV channel (this classic performance by the Bolshoi Ballet was always broadcast at moments of crisis, instead of normal programming), and when I saw the tanks on Manezh Square near the Kremlin to where I hurried from home. The tanks stood around uncertainly, awaiting further orders, and here and there soldiers started to crawl out of the hatches, looking to bum a cigarette off passers-by. Already at that stage I began to feel that this wasn’t for real. On the one hand, there was alarm, tanks, the Manezh, the silent Kremlin towers: in a word, a Soviet Tiananmen. On the other, the tankmen were curious to know what was going on, there was a holiday crowd, children climbing on the tanks: a typical family day out, a real carnival atmosphere.

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] Vasily Rozanov, The Apocalypse of Our Time (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1977; trans. Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff, pp. 228–9).

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] Sovok is a derogatory name for all things Soviet, and is also the Russian word for a dustpan. 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.