Russia's Cruellest Month

„So far this year, August has been mercifully disaster-free. Instead, Russians are left to ponder the biggest August event of them all, the very event that launched the Curse twenty years ago: the attempted coup d’etat by hardliner Communists on August 19, 1991. On that day, a gang led by the head of the K.G.B., the Soviet defense minister, and the Russian Vice-President Gennady Yanaev formed an Emergency Committee and trapped Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party and leader of the Soviet Union, at his residence in the Crimea. (August is also the time when Russians, perhaps not coincidentally, go on vacation.) Fearing that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse (it was) and that Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian President, was pushing the process along (he was), the K.G.B. cut off all communication to the dacha, ordered two hundred and fifty thousand pairs of handcuffs to deal with the mounting protests in Moscow, and sent tanks and special forces into the city. The attempted coup failed peacefully, and that was the first nail in the coffin of the U.S.S.R. Four months later, on Christmas Day, the Soviet flag was lowered at the Kremlin and the Russian tricolor went up in its place.

It was a momentous day, a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism, of peaceful protest over tanks and guns, of American values over the latent evil of the Soviet system. Yeltsin was the hero, the knight who mounted a tank and called on his people to resist the reactionary forces of Communism. In the coup’s aftermath, Yeltsin scored a nearly sixty-per-cent approval rating, a number registered by the new science of polling Russians’ opinions. And the victory, people felt, belonged to them: fifty-seven per cent of respondents said that »the people’s resistance« was the primary reason for the failure of the coup.”