25th anniversary (I): The fall of the Soviet Union
Boris Yeltsin took power in the vacuum that appeared when Gorbachev was betrayed by his inner circle in August 1991 (Photo by Yeltsincenter.ru)
25 years ago, the almost 300 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union woke up to this announcement:
A group the country’s highest-ranking politicians and military leaders had tried to seize power, only to lose it after a three-day stand-off with disagreeing and disobedient Soviet citizens.
For most Russians, this was the event that marked the end of the Soviet Union. This anniversary was commemorated last week in Russian culture, media, political life and historical debates.
19.08.1991 in Russian government media
With the current political leadership not participating in any ceremonies, the public was left without a government-supported narrative about the 1991 events.
However, state-controlled TV Rossiya-24 ran a series of interviews with surviving eye-witnesses and participants in the historical events.
The series carefully suggested an established pro-Kremlin message, namely that the audience should expect more confusion than clarity. This was expressed in an interview with Nikolai Ryzhkov, prime minister in 1991, who said he “still isn’t sure Gorbachev was actually not behind the coup himself.”
Rossiya-24 also referred to a poll published by Sputnik, Russia’s official international mouthpiece.
A majority of respondents in 11 different former Soviet countries find that life was better in the Soviet Union than after; in Ukraine, Sputnik claims that 60% of the respondents old enough to remember the Soviet Union “believe that life in the Soviet Union was better than after the collapse of the Soviet Union” – a comment on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine?
19.08.1991 in Russian independent media and culture
Under the headline “A Quiet 25th anniversary”, independent RBC focused on the authorities’ wish to downplay the anniversary.
RBC also underlined that while a pro-democratic demonstration to commemorate victims of the August 1991 events was not allowed, Moscow’s city authorities accepted a manifestation by right wing populist LDPR (led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky) in support of the ideas of the attempted coup d’état.
Independent online media Colta.ru co-organised a 1990s festival in a park in central Moscow:
Among the exhibited items at the ”Island-1991” festival was this trolleybus, which was used as a barrickade in Moscow in August 1991 (Photo by Svoboda.org)
Colta reports that the festival, entitled “Island-1991”, offered art and musical performances, political discussions and interactive exhibitions, also aiming at a younger audience without personal memory of August 1991.
It was clearly the festival’s aim to re-enact the atmosphere of solidarity and freedom of the 1990s between the Soviet and distinguish it from current authoritarian rules. Among the events was a screening of the documentary “The Event” – a mosaic of amateur footage shot during the August 1991 events:
Independent TV Channel Dozh (TV Rain) marked the anniversary on Facebook by publishing the 19 August 1991 nine o’clock news coverage of the coup on Soviet national TV, highlighting the critical and independent journalism demonstrated in this late Soviet news item.
One of Russia’s most prominent critical voices, Oleg Kashin, commented on the mixed feeling of joy that the Soviet regime came to an end, but at the same time the loss of the years of Glasnost and Perestroika, which, according to Kashin, deserve to be looked at in a positive light:
“Today is an occasion where we can commemorate that other Soviet Union, which everyone has now forgotten. The Soviet Union in which Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago was published in millions of copies. The Soviet Union in which the great humanist and Nobel Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov was elected to the Paliament in free elections […]
This was the Soviet Union in which a giant stone from the Solovki Islands [known for their GULAG prison camps] was placed on the Lubyanka Square [in front of the KGB headquarters] as a commemoration of all the victims of Bolshevik terror. The Soviet Union in which warehouses, gyms and and barns with cows […] were returned to their former status as churches […] It was not a very liveable country, but it was an very interesting country, perhaps this country was the most free and the most open in the whole world.”