By Renfrey Clarke
Green Left correspondent RENFREY CLARKE was behind the barricades around the Russian parliament during the failed coup attempt. He presents an exclusive account of the dramatic events.
The noise as I emerged from the metro was overpowering: a dozen large engines bellowing in unison, the notes rising abruptly and then falling as the drivers accelerated or throttled back. Then the smell: thick blue fumes mixing with the warm drizzle. A column of tanks was slamming its way down the hill from the Children's World department store to the Manezh, the broad square flanking the north wall of the Kremlin. It was Tuesday, August 20, day two of the coup.
On top of each of the tanks a machine-gun swivelled, the armoured-glass eye beneath it scanning the crowd. At the entrance to the Manezh, the column halted. Here were more military vehicles, and lines of soldiers with helmets and assault rifles.
The coup's leading opponent, Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin, had called a mass meeting for the Manezh, which in 1990 was the site of repeated large demonstrations against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. But today, the Manezh was sealed off. The centre of Moscow belonged to new opponents of Gorbachev: his sometime government colleagues, along with the army and security forces.
I had learned of the coup the previous morning as I sat in the office of a communications firm. The young man next to me, toying vaguely with his computer, sang softly between keystrokes the infantile song with which Misha the bear, the beaming mascot of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, had been farewelled at the close of the games: "Goodbye Misha ... back to your enchanted forest ..."
Almost two years before, opponents of Mikhail — Misha — Gorbachev had used the song to humiliate the Soviet president as he stood on top of the Lenin Mausoleum on the anniversary of the October Revolution.
The young man looked up. "You don't have a radio with you?" "No. Why?" "There's something very wrong with our government." The remark was so obvious I did not pursue it.
Then the person I had been waiting for arrived. He dealt quickly with the business that had brought me there. Then he asked nervously: "What do you think about what's happened?" I had no idea that anything had happened.
He continued, in English, as if to emphasise the gravity of the news. "Gorbachev is no longer president. There's a committee — Yanayev, Pavlov, Yazov ..."
"It's very bad. I'm worried." He was an environmentalist with a history of criticising the government on sensitive questions. "I think the repression will return."
Tanks
I took the metro to the publishing firm where I work. The office was deserted, but within a few minutes the art director phoned. "What's going on? What have you seen?"
I said I had seen tank tracks on the ring road.
"And Andrei? Is he even alive?" This was a publishing colleague who doubled as a fiercely right-wing radio commentator. But again, I had heard nothing.
There seemed no point staying at work. I decided to make for the city centre.
A committee had taken power; it included Yanayev, Pavlov, Yazov. I recalled these men from their television appearances. Gorbachev, I had often reflected, had pursued a Menzies-like strategy of surrounding himself with nonentities, "short poppies", people unlikely to upstage him or pose a challenge.
Yanayev, the vice-president, was a talentless bureaucrat, a former boss of the trade union apparatus who had never defended a worker in his life. Prime Minister Pavlov was a former finance minister with a reputation for at least being able to count. He might, however, have won a prize as the least charismatic politician ever to fill a leading post — a fat man with a pedantic mentality and droning, monotonous speaking style. Yazov, the defence minister, was a bluff, dense general.
In the centre of Moscow, traffic into the Manezh was blocked by commandeered trolley-buses, and Red Square had been sealed off to the public; across the entrances were further buses full of soldiers.
At one end of the square, a meeting was in progress. Under umbrellas, a group of parliamentarians were addressing a crowd of perhaps 500 people. Someone had painted on the pavement: "Ban the Communist Party! Bolshevik putschists on trial!" To one side of the main gathering, a group of demonstrators had cornered a supporter of the Committee. Several score people were clustered about the gesticulating figures; bits of sentences emerged from the hubbub: "Restore order ... son-of-a-bitch Communist ... starve if something isn't done ...".
But here before the citadel of the putschists, the sense of threat was less than extreme. The soldiers looked bored. In a street leading onto the opposite end of the square, a row of armoured personnel carriers was parked, but so far not a shot had been fired. The factories had not come to a halt; the streets had not filled with people.
Most incongruously of all, an opposition meeting was under way a stone's throw from the Kremlin. Did the people who had staged this coup lack the will to exert real repression? Or would it turn out that they had no need to start shooting, or even to break up opposition meetings? Would the political deculturation of 60 years of Stalinist rule, together with the daily ordeal of queuing for basic foodstuffs, keep the population in a state of surly apathy?
Boris Yeltsin's Russian Federation government would oppose the coup, but what levers did Yeltsin really possess? He had a popular following, but not a party; his Democratic Russia bloc was a shapeless mass held together by the magnetism of its leader, lacking defined structures or a cadre of experienced activists. Among a population still traumatised by repression, could the adherents of Yeltsin's movement build an effective opposition to a governing Committee whose supporters included the army and the KGB?
Farce
By the end of that day, however, I had ceased to be impressed by the Committee's chances of surviving. By that time I had watched six of the Committee members perform in a televised press conference which teetered on the brink of farce.
The tone of the press conference was set when the presenter forgot the name of Starodubtsev, the sleek-headed, ambitious leader of the Peasants Union, who had been invited onto the Committee to shore up rural support. Then a US journalist asked the obvious question: if Gorbachev was sick to the extent of being quite unable to work for a period of months, what was he sick with? Yanayev answered that the Soviet president, who had been ousted while in the middle of a holiday on the Black Sea, was "tired". A collective guffaw — the first of several during the session — swept through the crowd of journalists. Throughout the proceedings, Yanayev's hands shook visibly.
On the second morning of the coup, I again made for the centre of town. This time the military presence was much greater; the Committee had decided that there would be no more demonstrations, even small ones, in the Manezh.
But the show of strength meant little. The political geography of Moscow had changed: the symbolic, and perhaps the actual, centre of power had shifted several kilometres upriver to the
Krasnopresnenskoe Embankment, to a large building clad in pale grey marble and known all-but-officially as the "White House". This is the home of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation — the Russian parliament, stronghold of the Yeltsin forces.
Barricades
I arrived there early in the afternoon. In nearby streets, barricades had been thrown up, constructed for the most part of heavy concrete blocks and steel reinforcing rods. Before the "White House" were at least 50,000 people, enthusiastically cheering speakers who included former foreign minister Edvard Shevardnadze and a US
businessman with investments in the USSR.
The general strike which Yeltsin had called had been observed only sporadically, and Moscow workers had not mobilised against the coup in a serious way. Nevertheless, Yeltsin had been able to draw in other forces: young people and, to a striking degree, students — traditionally a layer more committed to their careers than to political activism.
A mound of people rising above the crowd turned out to be a tank. Overnight, an armoured unit had declared that it would not "act against the people". In a thick cordon round the walls of the "White House" was a volunteer guard: youths in improvised military clothing and among them real soldiers, absconders from various units around the capital.
Strategic points on the terrace about the building were heavily barricaded, and clustered between the barricades were makeshift shelters of steel rods and plastic sheeting. With charcoal from the campfires, opponents of the coup had covered the marble walls with slogans and savage caricatures. Conscious of the likelihood that people would be wounded, health workers had set up casualty posts.
In an incident late that night three people were killed. I heard several versions of what happened, but all of them involved a lethal combination: heavy tracked vehicles and crowds of people. Someone also fired a volley of shots. Next day I was handed a copy of the London Daily Mail reporting a bloody massacre by troops who were said to have shot at least 10 people. The mood about the "White House" became one of desperate anxiety.
Wall papers
On the third morning, with no sign that either side would break in the near future, I decided to show up for work. The usually tedious trip on the metro had now become a matter of riveting interest.
With most newspapers and radio stations shut down, the walls of the metro stations had become the new mass media. Plastered over them
were Yeltsin decrees offering protection and legal support to soldiers and security force personnel who defied the Committee's orders. The banned newspapers had been printed clandestinely in single-page editions and slapped up alongside.
As working days went, that Wednesday was not productive. I spent much of it with a group of publishing executives, including a senior Communist Party member, discussing the coup and turning up the sound on a television set whenever a news break seemed imminent. No-one cared to defend the Committee, which Muscovites by this time had taken to calling the "junta".
As the hours passed, it became clear that the coup leaders were on the defensive. Periodically, someone would burst into the room with a new rumour. The Baltic Fleet of the Soviet Navy was said to have declared for Yeltsin. The junta was said to be heading for the airport, perhaps to fly into exile. A KGB general phoned with a categorical statement that all eight leaders of the coup had been arrested.
Around five I made once again for the Russian parliament building. During the day the tension had lessened; I wandered and took photos. A guard member with a Molotov cocktail in his hand posed for me beside a truck on which someone had hung a placard declaring: "No Pasaran!" — "They shall not pass!" — the heroic slogan of the Spanish and Nicaraguan wars.
Despite the vehement anti-Communism of the parliament's defenders, the ethos of popular revolutionary struggle, implanted in stylised, distorted form in the consciousness of huge numbers of Soviet citizens, had emerged and, in a paradoxical way, even begun to thrive. People spoke unselfconsciously about "the revolution". Guard members addressed one another as tovarishchi ("comrades") — never gospoda ("gentlemen") — the word used by the liberal politicians to whom they gave their loyalty.
'Chile'
Several times, people I spoke to remarked on the danger of a Soviet Pinochet, of a bloody Chile-style military dictatorship. I was taken aback: did they realise how the liberals they were supporting regarded the Chilean experience?
Repeatedly over the previous few months, the journal Independent Newspaper — which, despite its name, is the leading mouthpiece of the new liberal-bureaucratic Soviet oligarchs — had published lengthy articles contending that, despite the unpleasant aspects of Pinochet's rule, his economic and social strategies represented fully viable models that deserved to be studied and even imitated. But first, went the unspoken corollary,
labor activists had to be systematically annihilated.
Would the young people I was talking with — conscious of themselves as defenders of popular rights, exulting in their shared difficulties and dangers — stay within the Yeltsin camp once the thrust of the liberals' policies had become clear? Simply to pose the question, it seemed to me, was to answer it in the negative.
I spent that Wednesday night inside the "White House". I had been asked by a Scottish Labour MP to interpret for him as he tried to talk his way in and present Yeltsin with a letter of solidarity from British opposition leader Neil Kinnock. We were not fated to meet the Russian president, but we did manage to observe life within the parliament building at a stage when the struggle against the coup was still continuing.
The spectacle was an improbable one: troops with assault rifles, teenagers in running shoes and camouflage shirts, a priest to give them spiritual guidance, innumerable foreign journalists and even a squad of fancy-dress Cossacks.
I listened as a tank senior sergeant, with a moving lack of pretension, told interviewers of the democratic convictions that had caused him and others to leave their units. The first night in the building, a young Soviet journalist told me, had been one of hunger and confusion, before organising bodies were set up and food brought in. An aide of Russian Vice-President Alexander Rutskoy described how pro-coup commanders had stationed snipers on top of nearby buildings, ready to pick off people in the offices of the Russian parliament. When firing had broken out on the Tuesday night, the man had written a hurried letter to his wife and placed it conspicuously on his desk.
I also listened as a group of US TV journalists interviewed the Cossacks — descendants of the shock troops used by the tsars to butcher demonstrating workers — on their fidelity to Yeltsin and their love for Russia.
But by midnight on Wednesday the coup was over; Gorbachev was on a plane back to Moscow. The morning found me once more on the terrace outside the building. At one of the casualty posts I sought out some health workers and medical students I had got to know earlier.
Their mood was of almost hysterical elation. They had not expected to win; they had expected to be killed, or jailed, or at the very least to be sacked from their jobs or excluded from their courses. As they packed up their aid post, they shared with me the favourite drink of Soviet health workers: pure ethyl alcohol mixed with glucose. They posed for last photos. Then, with mock-serious discipline, they formed up and marched off, singing the Russian workers' hymn, the "Varshavyanka", with the words only
slightly changed.
They had fought this battle together with Yeltsin. The next battle they would probably have to fight without him. And before long, there would be a battle they would have to fight against him. I did not believe they would be found wanting.