Last week, Snob.ru asked its community of readers and "global Russians" whether they remember August 21, 1991, the date when the GKChP and bit the dust - and with it, any chance that the USSR could be preserved. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, it stood for "State Committee on the State of Emergency," the group of people behind the attempted putsch which - much too late - aimed to derail Gorbachev's reform (or liberation, or running into the ground, if you prefer) of the Soviet Union.
[image source]Boris Yeltsin at the barricades with his bodyguard Aleksandr Korzhakov,
whose apparent role in ruling the country (at least according to his tell-all
memoir) made him infamous during the '90s as a symbol of poor governance
The comments are pretty emotional and talk about the various stages of people's feelings about Russia's post-Soviet experiment:
Naive but wonderful feelings of unity - "A couple of times during the night [of 20-21 Aug.] I had a completely incredible feeling, as trite as it sounds, but a feeling of unity with my people [с моим народом], with all of the people [со всеми людьми] who had gathered there for whatever reason. It was a physical feeling of brotherhood, which I have never felt since. By 1993 it became clear that in 1991 we had been total idiots. What remained was an unpleasant aftertaste and those feelings, and it's not clear what to do with them. They have been lost for nothing. And it's a pity."
Later disappointment - "Everyone had incredible - and naive, as it later turned out - hopes...... Who could have known then that the nomenklatura (in epaulets and otherwise) would - having repainted itself - steadily come crawling back, once again grabbing up everything for itself, although now in the role of 'state capitalists'."
Dashed hopes - "Those were days when the hope appeared that there would be real democracy in [our] country. However, that hope rather quickly died a quiet death....I remember that since then I have never seen so many normal, human faces in one place. The first sign that nothing would really change was when they allowed the Communist Party to continue. First they banned it, and then they authorized it on the sly - that little fact left a feeling of extreme disgust. And didn't leave any hope for a better future."
And one of Snob's readers had an interesting story which I've translated:
It was one of the most powerful impressions of my life!... At the time, I was working as a line customs inspector at Sheremetyevo-2. In those days, all of the flights with people leaving to live in Israel departed early in the morning (around 5am), so that arriving foreigners would not be discomfited by this picture of thousands of people emigrating. Naturally, all of the people leaving would show up at the airport the night before, and all night the departure halls were noisy, people would hold farewell parties for their departing friends and relatives; some laughed, some cried...The GKChP plotters and their not-so-bad fates (not counting Boris Pugo, who shot himself), 15 years later, as reported by AiF in 2006:
On the night of August 21, the departure halls were DEAD QUIET! And thousands of absolutely white faces, raised up to the monitors which had been set up in the airport, on which a single question was frozen - WILL THEY LET US OUT OR NOT? It was a frightening picture, burned into my memory...
[image source]More: Reports on the GKChP anniversary from 2004 and 2006.
Paul Goble's impressions of Russians' historical memory of August '91.
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