With hindsight, most of these suicides were needless. After about eighteen months in jail, the coup leaders were granted amnesty. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin respected the rule made by Stalin’s heirs after his death not to use violence against members of the ruling elite. Kryuchkov, who orchestrated the coup, lived long enough to regain wealth and status. So did many other conspirators. A decade later, Russia would be ruled by a KGB officer and his former colleagues who would project their sense of defeat and humiliation in August 1991 onto the rest of the country.
Mikhail Gorbachev and his circle of Perestroika lieutenants were both the winners and the biggest casualties of the coup. Gorbachev was physically alive but politically dead and so were most of the Perestroika reformers. As Latsis wrote in his book, ‘we suffered a victory’.36 If any hope of saving the union existed before the coup, it was certainly dead afterwards. ‘After the events of 19–21 August, the death of the empire became not just inevitable, it happened,’ pronounced Yegor Gaidar.37
That day Moskovskie novosti was published – the first time since the coup – with the headline: ‘WE WILL LIVE!’ Soon, however, the sense of victory and joy gave way to anxiety and reflection. The question was not ‘Will we live?’ but ‘How will we live?’ Humiliating Gorbachev may have given Yeltsin satisfaction, but it did not resolve any of the big questions, the main one being ‘What next?’ After the excitement and heroism of those three days, a downturn in the mood was perhaps inevitable. But this was a symptom of something far deeper than just a temporary anticlimax. The defeat of the coup did not become an ideological watershed; for all its revolutionary imagery, including Yeltsin on a tank, it was not celebrated as the birth of a new country, only as the collapse of the old one.
There was an expectation that, once the communist system was gone, Russia would become a ‘normal’ country, part of the civilized world. It was as if the main problem was ideology rather than a ruined economy, a demoralized workforce, a corrupt and greedy bureaucracy and a lack of institutions. Nobody had warned the hundreds of thousands of people who had demonstrated on the streets for sovereignty and democracy in the late 1980s that a collapse of the Soviet empire would be accompanied by continued hardship – otherwise why would people come out for it? Neither Gorbachev nor even Yeltsin as Russia’s first president had any coherent plan or idea of what kind of a country would succeed the Soviet Union.
The Soviet intelligentsia, as a class, was the engine of the 1991 revolution, but it was caught unprepared by it. Used to raising toasts to ‘the success of our hopeless cause’, it did not know what to do when its cause succeeded. The intelligentsia and the state had been joined at the hip. It was a product of the Soviet system and could not exist without it. Having lost its main opponent (as well as its feeding hand), the intelligentsia lost a sense of its meaning and purpose; it felt depressed and disoriented. Many Russian intellectuals left the country. Others lamented their own fate. There was a vacuum of power, but there was also a vacuum of ideas.
A week after the coup, Alexander Kabakov wrote in Moskovskie novosti: ‘Fairy tales end with weddings and revolutions; life only begins with them. Communism is over in our country. “What joy,” one would have thought: I could have only dreamt to live to such a day. But there is no joy. Instead there is growing anxiety. How can one be glad of an ending if there is no beginning to follow or if the beginning is too hazy? For now, it is still a funeral.’ Kabakov called his article ‘A Ghost at the Feast’.38
The motif of the ghost was persistent in the months after the coup. Around the same time, the scholar and philosopher Sergei Averintsev wrote the essay published by the Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary Gazette) – a newspaper of Soviet intelligentsia – entitled ‘God Keep Us from Ghosts’. It resembled a sermon illuminating the risks and opportunities of the coming era. ‘It seems that we are entering an era of politics when any amateurism – however noble, sincere and morally invincible – is inadequate and therefore dangerous,’ he wrote.39 ‘This does not mean that moral problems, moral examples become irrelevant – God forbid – but the period which is starting is more prosaic, where political weight is determined not by emotional and ideological criteria, but by the ability to offer particular solutions to particular problems.’ The new era required Aristotle, not Plato, Averintsev argued. The problem was that Aristotles were few and far between.
Averintsev’s sermon also contained a warning to the generation that was to follow the Soviet intelligentsia and which felt confident that it knew ‘particular solutions to particular problems’. ‘Beware of the difference between feeling right and displaying one’s righteousness and superiority,’ he wrote, citing the example of Pharisees.
According to Averintsev, ‘the younger ones are always more guilty, because the older ones are feeble. It is never easy for the young, but it is nevertheless harder for the old. I would not want the righteous anger against totalitarianism to be exploited by those who are entering the stage as an excuse not to follow God’s commandment “Honour your father and your mother so that you can live long on this land…”’40 Above all, he argued, do not distort reality. Facing the past was one thing, reinventing it was quite another. ‘Christ tells people to return from the imagined world to reality and from the imagined self to one’s actual self. A return to God is possible from any real place – however shameful and disgusting, but not from an imagined one – because we are not there. An imagined self in an imagined world cannot start a journey toward God. Let us try to choose reality and God saves us from any ghosts,’ Averintsev concluded.41 Inevitably, his words of wisdom fell on deaf ears.
FOUR
Fathers and Sons
Look Who Is Here
The coup induced or coincided with a generational shift in Russian public life. Rarely had the transition been so clear-cut. The shestidesiatniki, or the generation of the 1960s, were succeeded by their children. Naturally mistrustful of Gorbachev’s circle of reformers, Yeltsin surrounded himself by people who were twenty or thirty years younger. But the generational shift was even more pronounced and meaningful among those who came to control the media and the narrative of the country.
Unlike Yegor’s generation of reformers who grew up in the ‘fireglow’ cast by the revolution, their children had no reverence for their fathers’ generation. They did not suffer from Hamlet’s urge to redeem their fathers or to carry on their deeds. First, their fathers were still alive; second, they were bankrupt, both intellectually and financially.
The idea of ‘socialism with a human face’ was as dead as the Soviet economy. While Yegor’s generation wished to carry on their fathers’ deeds, their children presented the shestidesiatniki with a hefty bill for their failures: ‘How could they justify the Bolshevik Revolution even when its consequences were so obvious?’ Settling scores with the shestidesiatniki became one of the popular intellectual pursuits of the first post-Soviet years. The young ‘liberals’ were too quick to blame their fathers (and the Soviet intelligentsia as a whole) for getting too close to state power, for playing cat-and-mouse games with the authorities, for their slogans of ‘more socialism’, but above all for their civic pathos.