When I went to pay my phone bill I found a bitter row going on in the queue between a man in his forties and an old guy with short back and sides and rows of medals. The young man was saying, “and what did you defend the country for?” The old man and his wife kept saying, “at least there was order and good discipline. The trouble with young people today is that they are degenerate.” “And who brought them up that way?” the postwoman suddenly shouted. “Their parents!” According to the medal man, the worst sign of economic collapse is that young men are now selling flowers at the metro. I had to bite my lip several times. Another case of old men’s dreams.
I lost Mum, Dad and Elspeth in the metro in the morning, so came back home to await their anguished call. In the afternoon we went to see the Icon Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, which was beautiful, and then sailed down the Moscow River. At night we went out for dinner, picking our way past eleven large tanks outside the USSR Foreign Ministry Press Centre, all their armoury trained on Progress Publishers, for some reason. During the day I noticed all the bridges into the centre are guarded at both ends by tanks, and soldiers were digging something in the roads.
Have had a creeping sense of unease all evening. I learned from wall posters on the way home that there is now a curfew from 11.00pm to 5.00am. I only learned it at 11.30pm. The shortage of information is very disconcerting. Irina rang when I got home; she’d been trying to tell me about the curfew all evening. She’d been to the meeting at the RSFSR Supreme Soviet at midday and said the atmosphere gave a false sense of security. The rumours this evening are that the Moscow Mayor, Gavriil Popov, is under arrest. I saw a fly poster of Sergey Stankevich’s speech today. He said the Crimea is sealed off and a number of Gorbachev’s assistants are under arrest with him. No one knows what has happened to his wife and daughter. Alongside this there were reports of strikes in Sverdlovsk and Vorkuta, but they seemed like whistling in the dark by comparison.
Oleg rang me at 12.00 and said, “Thank God – you’re home.” Every time I eat this past week, I get an unpleasant sinking feeling in my stomach. I wonder if it’s the start of an ulcer. Heard late at night that the Ukraine has finally come out against the junta.
Wednesday 21 August
Was woken at 5.00am by loud radios through the wall and the ceiling. The neighbours seem to have found some channel of news I don’t know about.
The morning BBC said an attempt to take the RSFSR Supreme Soviet fell short last night. One armoured car was petrol bombed, one demonstrator was shot and three were crushed by tanks. There were mass meetings in Leningrad and the army and police are loyal to Sobchak. Tanks were on their way to Leningrad but did not enter. Japan has declared an economic boycott of the USSR. Apparently Pavlov has backed out of the Committee, pleading illness. There are rumours Yazov may have left it too.
Tolya rang about the building works, just back from the barricades where he has spent the last two nights. I felt immensely grateful to him for going there and also admired him. He said Yazov has definitely resigned as Defence Minister and that the feeling is that the KGB are running the coup. Demonstrators apparently seized several cars in the underpass where Kalinin Prospekt intersects with the ring road.
I called several other people. Yelena, seven months pregnant, was also just back from the barricades. She said people are organised now, there are bonfires, and a huge number had just arrived for the morning shift. It is a dismal cold morning with heavy rain.
Tatyana rang. Her son, Sasha, has spent the last two nights at the barricades too. He reckons there were between 30,000 and 60,000 people there. They are being organised by a general who was in Afghanistan, and are divided in blocks and chains, with strict instructions not to resist tanks. Though they are unarmed, their morale is high and the crowd is disciplined. The Ukrainian miners are apparently out on strike. Sasha had called her at midnight to say all was well. Ten minutes later she heard they were about to storm the Parliament and the radio went dead. So she had a worrying night.
I realise I’m in a real state of nerves, constantly running to the toilet, can’t settle to anything, and my stomach’s very sore. Decided to send the first part of this diary to London with Mum and Dad.
Oleg came round, massively depressed. He feels most of Moscow is apathetic about the coup and many are in favour. Like me he hasn’t been to the barricades and got information firsthand, and it seems to be more disconcerting that way.
The British Embassy is asking people to register in readiness for a quick getaway. I’m reluctant to, because I don’t want to be made to go “forcibly”. Instead I decided to go and register the extension to my visa. On the way into town I noticed the tanks had gone from the bridges. The buses were all up the creek, so I took a taxi for the last stretch. The guy tried to fleece me for dollars, until I convinced him I live in Moscow. Suddenly they announced that the Extraordinary Committee had been arrested! I couldn’t believe it. The Visa and Registration Department was shut, so I called on Nikolay and his mother. Nikolay answered the door and said, “They’ve been arrested!”
He and his mother had bought me flowers as a belated birthday present and had laid out a tea. We then had a very difficult hour, while they argued about the political scene and I was turned to as arbiter. His mother was visibly distressed that the coup had failed. She’s a good woman, but thinks the people protecting the Supreme Soviet are all extremists, that they fired first last night, and that the unconstitutionality of the coup is merely a legal trifle. The fact that the Vice President is leading it makes it all kosher. Everything she was saying echoed things I’ve read in Soviet newspapers for years. When I left she handed me a letter explaining her views. It was immensely sincere and courteous, and ended saying my parents were witnessing “a historic defeat of a bourgeois revolution”. She’d written it yesterday. I was struck that she’d taken the trouble to write to me, and perhaps that is the most important thing in our relationship with each other, because I do not know how to write back.
I felt immensely relieved by the news and I think I was not the only one. People on the tram and the metro were talking about the coup for the first time. Posters had appeared, asking, “Who were the Gang of Eight?” and showing their faces like a “Wanted” poster. When I got home, TV was broadcasting a live session from the Russian Parliament, with Yeltsin reporting back on the stages of the coup. Free television was like rain after a drought and it was a real pleasure watching it.
I had dinner at the Cosmos with Mum, Dad and Elspeth. The TV was on loud and Yeltsin’s voice was booming in the hall. The staff all flocked to watch the nine o’clock news, and I noticed as we left that the service staff downstairs were all glued to the TV news too. The curfew has been lifted and Kravchenko, the head of TV and radio, has gone. There may still be civil war, I think, but this battle has been won on the best possible terms, it seems to me. It seems like a “coming of age” somehow. Presumably the republics will now be able to reap some capital from the centre.
I took Mum, Dad and Elspeth to their Leningrad train. They’d spent the day in the rain at Zagorsk in a bus with only ten tourists. An American had asked if tourism had dropped off noticeably since the Gulf War (?). The Intourist guide had said to Elspeth behind her hand, “I don’t know, but it’s dropped off considerably since 19 August!”
When I got home Lyuda rang from Leningrad and said, “Congratulations!”
Thursday 22 August
Lovely weather, symbolically enough. Izvestiya published its uncensored account of the last few days and said that for the first time in possibly seventy-three years Russians had begun to realise “We’re not slaves!” I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. The newsreader on Russian TV broke off to say that for the first time in his life he saw happy faces on the metro. I think that was a bit overdone, but there certainly is a lot of animation and buoyancy. The Visa Registration Department was very busy, but remarkably pleasant and helpful when I went to hand in my visa papers. When I called the USSR Foreign Ministry Humanitarian Affairs Department, Nikolay Smirnov answered and said, “Hello Marjorie, it’s Nikolay”, with unaccustomed palliness.