By Alexander Golovenko
I WELL remember that sunny morning of Aug. 19, 1991. The voice on the radio and television announced the sensational news: Due to ill health, Mikhail Gorbachev could not perform his duties as president of the Soviet Union. Vice president Gennady Yanayev stepped in to perform those duties. In order to normalize the situation in the country - rocked by interethnic conflicts, separatist tendencies, growth in illegal armed bands and crime - the leadership of the Soviet Union created the Government Committee on the State of Emergency, or GKChP. Its members included Yanayev, the head of the Cabinet of Ministers Valentin Pavlov, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, Minister of Internal Affairs Boris Pugo, Minister of Defense Dmitry Yazov, and other parties close to the Kremlin.
Documents on the GKChP mention of the strict requirement to observe the laws and constitution of the Soviet Union. And the tanks on the streets of Moscow frightened no one.
The heads of some Soviet republics supported the extreme measures of the Soviet leadership. But the Russian leadership, which had long conducted a war against the "hateful center," entered into a bitter confrontation with the GKChP.
Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin, who clambered on top of one of a tank at the White House, called upon the people of Russia to repulse the "putschists." He declared top government leaders "traitors of the Motherland" who had organized a coup d'etat.
Gorbachev resigned his post as general secretary, and Yeltsin, in an illegal decree, banned the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. This was made possible by the fact that Russian Communist Party secretaries Valentin Kuptsov and Gennady Zyuganov did not support the GKChP but sided with the president. Public Prosecutor Valentin Stepankov, in a completely illegal move, ordered the arrests of the highest leaders of the Soviet Union. And on Dec. 8, 1991, the heads of the three Slavic republics - Yeltsin for Russia, Kravchuk for Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich for Belarus - pronounced the death penalty on the Soviet Union in the Belovezhsky accords. American president George Bush announced that the United States had won the Cold War.
What caused the leaders of the Soviet Union to hastily create this GKChP?
Yanayev put forth his position: "On Aug. 20, a Union agreement was set to be signed, the draft of which Gorbachev had worked on in Novo-Ogaryovo with a small group of leaders from the Union republics, without the knowledge of the Supreme Soviet. Instead of a powerful centralized government, the idea was to create a sort of 'cloud in trousers,' an insipid, amorphous creation, in which the leaders of the 'sovereign' republics would no longer be subject to the laws of the Soviet Union. If one considers that the Union agreement would have been signed not by all 15 republic leaders, but by only six or seven, it was clear: After Aug. 20, 1991, the Soviet Union would cease to exist. We could not let that happen."
"I saw the August drama," said Lukyanov, "as a conflict between a weakened socialism and the forces of nascent Russian capitalism. There were no moral or legal boundaries set up against the home-grown, cheeky bourgeois. Taking advantage of the indecisiveness of the GKChP, they seized the initiative and toppled the highest leadership of the Soviet Union, destroyed the country's constitutional structure, thus performing a coup, of which they then accused me and my comrades."
Why, with all the military might of the Soviet Union at their disposal, did the GKChP lose? Why did they so timidly allow themselves to be arrested? The answer is obvious: As products of the post-war Soviet system, they were incapable of cruelty and violence; they tried to preserve the Union using the "mildest methods." So when the first blood was shed, when they felt they had been betrayed by Gorbachev, they stepped aside, disbanded their committee themselves. Yazov, who had participated in the Great Patriotic War, could never have given an order to shoot the Russian parliament.
But Yeltsin did not stand on ceremony. Yeltsin ordered the arrests, and Stepankov, in contravention of all laws, detained the leaders of the Soviet Union. If the governor of, say, California stripped President Bill Clinton of his post and sent the vice president, secretary of defense, heads of the CIA and the FBI to prison, then announced the division of the United States into a number of "sovereign" states, I imagine that this "loony" would be packed off to the nut house. But in Russia, this was called "the victory of democracy."
After the downfall of the Soviet Union, Russia and other republics rushed headlong into "wild capitalism." And the score after five years? Six hundred thousand dead in interethnic conflicts, destruction of the economies of the "independent" states, pauperization of millions of former Soviet citizens, unprecedented growth in crime and corruption of highly placed officials, the mixing of the highest echelons of power with mafia structures.
Ukrainians and Belarussians understood this situation perfectly well and drove Kravchuk and Shushkevich out of office. And if the third die-hard, Yeltsin, retained his throne through the recent presidential elections, then we should extend our "thanks" to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which put its money on Zyuganov.
Here is a personality so gray, faceless, timorous, smelling of Gorbachevian idiocy and blather, that the Russian voters thought it best to leave the ailing Yeltsin in place for a second term. They forgave him the Soviet Union's breakup, the shooting of parliament and the war in Chechnya.
Thus you have the inscrutability, the mystery - the tragedy - of the Russian soul
Alexander Golovenko became a member of the Communist Party in 1974 and has been a special correspondent for Pravda since 1986. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.