Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007
From: Sergei Roy <SergeiRoy@yandex.ru>
Subject: August 1991
August 1991 August 2007
By Sergei Roy
Editor, guardian.psj.ru
In August 1991 I spent 72 hours at the barricade that I had helped build on August 19 by Entranceway No. 6 of the White House of Russia. What does one remember most about those long hours? The rain during the night, the endless talks round smoky, stinking fires, the minutes when we jumped up to link arms and form a "living ring" around the building whenever rumors of an impending attack came, the roar of the tanks and APCs, the faces of one's comrades - whenever I later wrote about those days and nights, I called them "beautiful faces," and so they were. They were the faces of people who came there prepared to die for what they believed in - freedom, democracy, Russia. And three of us did die.
In August 1992 we met right where we had spent those days and nights. We made speeches, we gloried in our victory, we drank vodka, we laid flowers at the spot where the three chaps had died. We still felt sure that it had been a victory, and the hardships the country was going through would soon be over, for hadn't our hero, Boris Yeltsin, told us that within a year to eighteen months things would be shipshape, and if they weren't, he would go lie down on some railway tracks in front of a train. The train that never came.
August 1993 came round, and we could no longer gather at the spot where we had been prepared to die for freedom and democracy, for the White House of Russia was then occupied by the enemy, the KhasbulatovRutskoy bunch intent on restoring the Soviets and generally turn the wheel of history back, or so we believed. The communists vs. democrats dividing line was becoming a bit blurred, for weren't the enemies of 1993 thick and fast friends of 1991? They had all been there - Yeltsin, Khasbulatov, Rutskoy - on the White House balcony facing what is now called Freedom Square and making fiery if a bit tongue-tied speeches to us, the huge, jubilant crowd filling that square. Still, in 1993 we believed that we were the better democrats; there were too many out-and-out fascists and power-mad scum on the other side, so we gathered by the City Hall opposite the White House and made more speeches denouncing our enemies.
In 1994, we could not gather at the spot where my barricade had towered for the simple reason that no one could gather there any longer: the White House of Russia was surrounded by very tall, very strong, very beautiful iron railings, and the few people who came there on that day had to be content with milling around nearby. I somehow felt that those railings divided more than just physical space, so I did not go. Not ever again. Our victorious democratic leaders were either behind the Kremlin walls or behind the White House railings, and we, the guys who had manned those barricades, were left to sink or swim as best we could while nifty characters around our leaders were busy privatizing the country.
There was a brief revival of the "damn the communists" spirit in the run-up to the 1996 presidential election, and the general feeling in my circle was, hold your nose and vote for the lesser of the two evils, vote for Yeltsin rather than the unspeakable Zyuganov. In August, we could have gathered to celebrate a democratic victory and tell ourselves that those terrible days and nights in 1991 had not been lived through in vain - only would we believe that sort of spin ourselves? We could not, and we did not. The democrats vs. communists battle was neither here nor there, "democrat" had become a dirty word for too many people though we, the foot soldiers of democracy, were the least to blame for it, but how were we to prove that? We had fought for a transition to market economy - and we now had plenty of that, with all our savings stolen, outright criminals coming to prominence, former candidates and doctors of sciences turned "shuttle traders" while the sciences and industries were collapsing in ruins and up to 40 percent of the population eked out a miserable existence below the poverty line. We had fought for democracy - and we now had a beautiful democracy, for some reason called an oligarchy by ill-wishers, with seven bankers running the country, installing in the presidential palaces a guy who a few months before the election could barely scrape up four percent of support and could rarely be relied on to stay sober until noon, buying deputies, ministers, TV channels, and whatever else they desired.
Now, 16 years after the event, do we feel ashamed for what we did then? No, we don't. We went there to stand up and be counted. We gave history a push in what we believed to be the right direction, and on a very big map it probably was the right direction - so many people I respect honestly believe so. But is there any cause for celebration? I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it. The price of that one push against the chariot of history has proved too costly, and too many of our leaders have proved just what the leaders on the other side were, power-mad scum who are best forgotten.
Some commentators complain that too few people remember those events of August 1991 now. Peter Vail, chief editor of Radio Liberty's Russian service, said so in so many words the other day on Moscow's City FM. If I needed any support for my current attitude, this was it. To me, if Radio Liberty feels sorry that those events are being forgotten, then forgotten they should be.
Whatever else those events were, they were an incipient civil war that luckily failed to flare up. It left a festering wound at first, which is by now just a pale gash. It is no good scratching that gash, no good stirring up memories of past hatreds - the more so that those hatreds were mostly confined to the squabbling clans of the "elite" and had little to do with the thoughts and feelings of vast masses of people.
This was all too evident even in those turbulent days. Anyone who was there will recall how slanging matches between the citizens of Moscow and the invading tank crews often quieted down as the bewildered soldiers complained that they did not know themselves what they were doing in Moscow. When folks learned that the poor guys had not even had their chow, fury turned to pity, and those poor eighteen-year-olds were fed by the same citizens who had been ready to tear them from limb to limb a few minutes back.
Flowers stuck in cannon muzzles. Girls kissing young guys in uniform. Soldiers drifting over to join circles of people around someone singing to the guitar or spouting off-color jokes. Those are the scenes that one remembers these days, too, not just the cold, fear-ridden nights. If someone wishes to celebrate victory of the forces of democracy over those of communism, let them; this is a free country. My memories and feelings are simply different, and so are, I daresay, those of most Russians.
In those days I often recalled what the people of Leipzig yelled in the mammoth rallies of 1989: Wir sind ein Volk! "We are one people!" We, too, were one people then, though the menace of discord was very much present. We are still one people, more so than ever. Celebrating discord is a silly thing to do. Much more intelligent, to celebrate unity in diversity.