ANALYSIS: Anniversary of failed coup contains many ironies (09/02/01)

ANALYSIS

Anniversary of failed coup contains many ironies

by Kathleen Knox
RFE/RL Newsline

On August 20, 1991, Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats was sitting in the offices of the Moskovskie Novosti (Moscow News), faxing reports on the events unfolding in Moscow to other newspapers around the world.

The day before, the group of hard-line conspirators - including Vice-President Gennadii Yanayev and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov - had formed a state emergency committee in a bid to seize power and also had attempted to shut down all independent newspapers. "The three of us reporters were sitting in the newspaper office and writing leaflets and sending information to newspapers around the globe," Ms. Albats said. "We were stunned that we were allowed to do this. It was still the Soviet Union and international faxes worked. People from the United States were able to reach us. No soldiers or KGB guys came into the Moskovskie Novosti office, even though we were calling the offices of all coup leaders. During this night it became clear that something went wrong for those who tried to conduct the coup."

By the next evening the coup had failed, faced down by an opposition centered around Boris Yeltsin, then the president of Russia. The fate of the Soviet Union had been sealed. Within months, Communist Party rule ended, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the last Soviet leader.

For Ms. Albats, those three days in August were the best of her life. "That was a great time, when we had a lot of hopes, and I believe we had all the reasons to expect the country to turn into a normal, civilized, lawful, democratic country," she said.

What followed instead was disillusionment for many. Economic reforms swept away personal savings, and powerful business tycoons - known as the "oligarchs" - bought up large chunks of industry and exerted influence over government policy.

According to Ms. Albats, many in Russia believe today that the current administration of President Vladimir Putin is a kind of vindication of the failed coup.

"Many of those who came to power now, [Putin's] colleagues from the KGB, see the current situation as their victory," Ms. Albats said. "They openly say in conversation that they got back into power, that they have gained back what they lost 10 years ago."

This is certainly the spin that the surviving - and amnestied - plotters are giving on the event 10 years later. At a news conference last month, co-conspirator and former Soviet Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov said that President Putin's administration is carrying on the work the plotters had tried to start 10 years ago - that is, to restore control over the country. Mr. Putin hosted one of the plotters - his former boss at the KGB, Mr. Kryuchkov - at the Kremlin for his inauguration in May last year.

Archie Brown, a professor of politics at Oxford University and the author of several books on Russian politics, agreed that the goal of the 1991 plotters still finds some sympathizers within Russia's current leadership.

"I'm sure there are a number of people there now who sympathized with the putschists of 1991," Prof. Brown said. "Mr. Putin has invited Mr. Kryuchkov to the Kremlin. Mr. Putin's position is that these people's hearts were in the right place, and he sympathized with their aim of trying to maintain the union, but that they went about it the wrong way."

If President Putin - the chosen successor to Mr. Yeltsin, who faced down the coup conspirators - really is the true heir to the plotters, it would be just one of many ironies of the failed putsch.

Prof. Brown said it is also ironic that the conspirators accused Soviet President Gorbachev of indecisiveness, when it was clear from their first disastrous public appearance that they lacked direction and did not know exactly what to do.

Another irony is that, in the end, the failed putsch achieved the opposite of what its organizers had aimed to do: it accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union that it had hoped to maintain.

Andrei Ryabov, a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the current Russian administration and a large section of the Russian establishment today have a split attitude about the coup.

"Of course, they understand that without the events of August 1991 the victory of the new political order in Russia, the creation of a market economy, would be pushed back for a long time, at the very least. So they recognize the positive influence of these events," Mr. Ryabov said. "But on the other hand, for many of them it represents the collapse of the state, and right now this idea is being put forward by a large section of the political elite. From this point of view, this weakening of the state as an institution can't really command sympathy with these people, so the attitude is a dual one."

Mr. Ryabov said he expected President Putin to highlight both the good and bad consequences of the failed putsch if he makes an appearance marking the anniversary.

"On the one hand, he will undoubtedly recognize the great significance of these events for the development of Russia along the path of democracy and a market economy," Mr. Ryabov predicted. "But on the other hand, he'll probably say a certain anarchy arose then as a result of the wrong choice of economic reforms, and that this has had a negative impact on the economy in the last 10 years, on social relations and on the weakening of the state, and that he, as the new president, is now working to rid the country of these negative effects."

The ambivalent nature of the Russian administration's attitude toward the failed coup is matched by the feelings of many ordinary Russians. If no one is in a celebratory mood during the anniversary, it won't be much of a surprise, Prof. Brown said. After all, the Soviet Union disintegrated a few months after the coup - something that many Russians still regret.

Kathleen Knox is a correspondent for RFE/RL.

| Home Page |