Wedding in the shadow of tanks
Boris Yeltsin condemned the August Coup before a crowd of demonstrators gathered outside the Russian Parliament.
Every country has a different political structure. Another version of this saying states: “Every country has the political structure it deserves.”
The Russians took good care to put on their strongest team for the coup d’etat against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. They were Yanaev, Gorbachev’s Deputy, Marshal Yazov, Minister of Defence, Kryuchkov, Head of the KGB, Pugo, Minister of the Interior, Pavlov, Prime Minister, Baklanov, Deputy Chairman of the Defense Council under the President of the USSR, Starodubtsev, Chairman of the Peasant Union and Tizyakov, President of the Association of the State Enterprises and Objects of Industry, Transport, and Communications. The men behind the coup called themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency, or GKChP (Russian abbreviation for Gosudarstvenny komitet po chrezvychaynomu polozheniyu).
One can’t even imagine a stronger team. All the ministers who mattered and the full security apparatus. Despite all this, they failed. Why? To understand that I shall rely on my friend: let me call her Lara. Her wedding with Sasha was booked for the 22nd of August in Moscow, but they woke up on the 19th to see the streets of Moscow flooded with military. A fair proportion of those invited to the wedding came from outside Moscow. They had to be contacted and told that the wedding would go ahead as planned at Griboedov Wedding Palace, but the reception at the Hotel Rossia had to be cancelled.
Many people were happy the putsch was taking place, they were supportive of the curfew and willing to obey all orders so that the old way of things could be restored as soon as possible. The first question of those contacted was: “Has Gorbachev resigned?” The second question was: “Is there any shooting going on in Moscow?” The general mood among older people outside Moscow was: at last, somebody is going to stop this madness of glasnost and perestroika and we shall be able to return to the building of Socialism, as our grandfathers did.
At this stage I have to make a small diversion to Hungarian politics. Victor Orban was the Prime Minister for 16 years. He was kept in power by the vote in the provinces. The capital city always voted for the opposition. Orban knew how to please the provincials: no Muslim immigrants, no Jewish financiers and emphasize whenever there is a chance that Hungary has been a Christian country for a thousand years.
Back to Russia in 1991. There were even differences of opinion within Sasha’s family. The parents worked on Soviet nuclear weapons, which gave them a privileged position. They could shop in those stores reserved for the Soviet elite called Berioskas (“little birch” in Russian). Sasha was against all privilege and he was fully supported by Lara. It seems that those in the provinces may tend to be very conservative. Come to think of it, though, the French in Lyons during the Revolution were by no means conservative. There the revolutionaries massacred the good local citizens in their tens of thousands.
Now, returning to the question why the Soviet coup failed, we return to the list of the wedding guests. A large group of the wedding party were university friends of Lara and Sasha; they were all immediately very eager to go to join the protests against the coup. One friend stormed Lara’s student accommodation, exclaiming: “Let’s go to the barricades — now!” Lara replied: “No: there is a non-zero probability of being killed, injured, or worse, arrested.” She was keen to proceed with the wedding. After 22nd August, she added, she was willing to consider joining the protesters.
All her university friends went that night to join the protests on Moscow streets. They returned energised and enthusiastic every morning, for the next three days, telling stories about the marvellous Yeltsin on top of a tank, galvanising the crowds. Lara’s friends were also reporting that troops were not very keen to attack or oppress them. There was one casualty among the protesters, but only because one of the tanks was put in reverse gear, accidentally hitting someone.
The wedding was due to take place on August 22. On the 19th, as soon as the sombre announcement was made on every TV and radio station by the putsch leaders that a curfew and a state of emergency were in place, Lara and Sasha went to the restaurant where the wedding reception was booked. This restaurant was part of a large hotel complex, Hotel Rossia, hosting all Duma (Parliament) members. The first thing Lara and Sasha saw when they approached the restaurant were tanks. Lots of tanks facing the windows of the restaurant. They walked in and found petrified members of staff inside and both parties quickly agreed that the wedding reception would not go ahead, as the evening hours are curfew hours and also it is no fun to celebrate at gunpoint in the shadow of the tanks.
By the evening of August 21, the coup was over. Pugo (the Minister of the Interior) committed suicide, other members of the coup were arrested, Gorbachev was freed and appeared on national TV wearing a homemade sweater, looking sweet and vulnerable.
Tanks were dispersing but as there were such massive numbers of them in Moscow, it took another week or so for all of them to be gone from Moscow streets. There may have been some 180 tanks, 60 personnel armoured vehicles and 400 other military vehicles, with the highest concentration in the city centre around the Kremlin, Manezh Square and the Parliament building known as the White House.
Lara and Sasha did get married in Griboedov Palace. They moved their wedding reception to Sasha’s one-bedroom flat, which was transformed into a large table occupying the dining room composed of all tables in the flat plus chairs from the neighbours with a wooden board across the chairs, turning them into a long sitting bank. Sasha’s professor mum and professor dad cooked good food which was delicious. The main joke (or for Russians, the main toast) of the wedding reception was that these two young people, Lara and Sasha, are really silly – to commit to losing their freedom on the Day of Freedom. That was the official state holiday quickly introduced by Gorbachev on 22 August. The rest is history. The day of freedom was quickly forgotten, Gorbachev’s grip on power slipped, the Soviet Union was dissolved. Lara and Sasha have been living abroad since October 1991 and never returned to Russia.
Did Lara regret not joining the protesters? She said generally, yes, but she would do the same again if she were to be married. Weddings and tanks don’t mix.
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