Russia's Lost Bastille Day

The memorial to the 1905 uprising. We're still waiting on the memorial for 1991.

Last month, on August 19, Russia could have celebrated its version of Bastille Day. There were some television specials and broadcasts of glasnost-era movies, but the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, the failed coup by Communist hardliners, came and went. The memory of those historic events among today's Russians is mixed, and seems to reflect that in politics, sometimes success is only managed disappointment.

The coup began on August 19, and the next day, a Monday, Russians heard the news that their leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was "ill" at his Crimean dacha and that a committee of reactionaries was now in charge. But it was clear from the start that the putsch was a farce. They issued a stream of bizarre, apocalyptic statements, and ostensible "leader" Gennady Yanayev couldn't keep his hands from shaking when he appeared on television. Within hours, a crowd had gathered around Russian President Boris Yeltsin at the Parliament building, the White House, and began throwing up barricades.

American writer Jamey Gambrell, writing in the New York Review of Books just days after the coup failed, summed up the giddy sense of confusion and excitement. "At the first mass demonstration, there was at last a feeling, which was to grow as the days passed, that Russia had taken a stand, perhaps for the first time in its history."

The coup fizzled over the next few days, as the military declined to participate in a bloodbath, and the Soviet Union quickly began to unspool. By the end of the week, the enormous statue of Felix Dzherzhinsky, the hated founder of the secret police, had been ripped from his pedestal outside KGB headquarters, which itself was covered with derisive graffiti. Emotions in those days spread, soon vented against not just the Party and the KGB, but at Gorbachev himself. By Christmas, the Soviet Union was history.

But not everyone remembers the story as an uplifting journey from oppression to freedom. A recent poll by the independent Levada Center found that only eight percent of respondents viewed the events of August 1991 as the start of a democratic revolution. About 43 percent said the coup attempt was nothing more than a struggle for power among bureaucrats. To this day, 36 percent say the collapse of the USSR was a negative thing.

A lot of that comes through the lens of hindsight, through all the shocks and traumas that Russia endured in those years. When the coup took place, Soviet citizens were already adjusting to a radical realignment of their political space. They lost an "empire" in Eastern Europe, and the splintering of the USSR into separate republics left about 25 million ethnic Russians suddenly as minorities in foreign nations. And it was unclear when the unraveling would stop, raising questions about the territorial integrity of Russia itself -- the Caucuses were already in revolt, and there was a danger that Tatarstan, in the heart of Russia, would be next.

No clear order had emerged in domestic politics either. Yeltsin may have been hero at the White House, but a little more than two years later he would bomb the same building after months of squabbling with the Congress of Peoples Deputies. The irony was lost on no one. And the appearance of free markets held little appeal. The "shock therapy" recommended by the international neoliberal elite meant that to most, instead of being robbed blind by Communist nomenklatura, they were now free to be robbed blind by elitny businessmen.

There are many ways to read all these struggles. Russophobes insist Russians, after centuries of oppression, are culturally unable to handle freedom. But Russians weren't alone in finding the Brave New Post-Socialist World more complicated and difficult than they expected. Disappointment and frustration appeared everywhere once they had moved beyond the black-and-white struggle against Communism. "We are witness to a bizarre state of affairs," lamented Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, in April 1992. "Society has freed itself, true, but in some ways it behaves worse that when it was in chains."

There are many moving parts in politics, and success is sometimes a matter of how you organize them into a story. In Russia, the past ten years the story has been about the horrible 1990s, how Russia was rudderless and adrift and only a "strong hand on the tiller" -- like Vladimir Putin's -- could keep the ship on course. The story worked while the economy was treading water -- thanks to Russia's disproportionate reliance on the export of raw materials. But as the global economy stumbles and another round of disappointment takes shape, it is a tragedy not to have the memory of moments of courage and promise to rely on.