The Russian calendar is often rich with anniversaries, but rarely more so than now. The twin centennials of the revolutions of 1917 are, of course, front and center – unavoidable and yet oddly absent from the public eye. In March 2018, Vladimir Putin is expected to seek reelection on the fourth anniversary of the annexation of Crimea. A year and a half later, assuming no surprises, and he will mark the 20th anniversary of his ascent to power.
But all of these anniversaries were preceded in 2016 by the passing of a quarter century since the events of August 1991. Russia analysts will continue to debate why the Soviet Union collapsed, and whether or not it could have been avoided; Russian citizens will continue to debate whether or not it should have been avoided. But on one thing at least there appears to be consensus: after the State Committee for Emergency Situations (GKChP) launched its abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, there was no turning back.
And yet few historical events seem to have such a grip on Russia’s present. Putin’s insistence on the calamitous nature of the breakup of the USSR has been a touchstone in Russian politics since he first uttered the phrase in 2005. Long before that, accusations of treason dogged Boris Yeltsin and anyone associated with him, for ostensibly using the putsch as an excuse to dismember the union. And whenever protests emerge in Moscow – whether in December 2011 or in March 2017 – they are inevitably compared to the crowds that faced down the GKChP. Those crowds, needless to say, were larger than anything Russia has seen since.
It is with that grip in mind that this issue of Russian Politics and Law brings together six texts looking back – and, inevitably, ahead – to August 1991. The first three – by Aleksei Makarkin, Andrei Ryabov and Sergey Markedonov – form the core of a symposium published by the venerable Russian ‘thick journal,’ Neprikosnovennyi zapas. The last three – by Maxim Trudolyubov, Aleksey Levinson and Tatyana Malkina – are shorter, more impressionistic thoughts from the online journal InLiberty.ru. Taken together, they form only a partial picture. Missing is the opinion of those who see the failure of the putsch as an unequivocal disaster, as well as of those for whom the event itself is somehow unimportant. Reflected here instead is the analysis of those who, in different ways, hope for a Russian future that both learns the lessons of 1991 and escapes its cognitive clutches.
History as viewed from the present, of course, is not a fixed quantity, and the August 1991 putsch – the most dramatic event signaling the end of the Soviet Union and the birth of the new Russian Federation – is perhaps the perfect example of the impermanence of interpretation. As Makarkin points out, the meaning that Russians attach to their memories of August 1991 varies depending on the political mood in the country at any given time, fluctuating between ‘alarmist’ sentiment (seeing the breakup of the USSR as monumentally tragic) and a more practiced cynicism (seeing the putsch as little more than one in a very long series of internecine elite power-grabs). Crimea, however, has put a new spin on things, shifting the needle back into the ‘alarmist’ camp but replacing the fatalism of lost empire with the euphoria of territory regained.
Given the challenges that have faced the Russian state since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the scale, scope and pace of social, economic and political upheaval that have followed, the surprising thing is perhaps not why the August 1991 putsch occurred, but why there have not been more of the same. In this regard, Ryabov asks, inter alia, why Russia has been so much more prone to palace coups than military overthrows, and finds the answer has less to do with civilian control over the military, than with the desires of the elite to keep affairs of state “obscure to mere mortals…, reliably hidden away from outside eyes.”
It is perhaps ironic, then, that when putschists come to understand that they are failing, they most often turn to the public for support – only to find that the public is, of course, far from sympathetic. Looking back at 1991, Ryabov writes, “the party officials who led the putsch had become accustomed over their long careers to speak on behalf of the people and did not have the slightest idea how to use political methods to mobilize the people to support them.” But, as Makarkin notes, even the initial outpouring of support for Yeltsin didn’t translate into anything durable, and as support for Yeltsin rapidly faded, so too did support for the ‘fateful’ outcome of August 1991.
Thus, both Ryabov and Makarkin see the roots of Russia’s contemporary authoritarianism in August 1991 – in the attempt then and in ensuing months to decide the country’s political fate behind closed doors, and in the detachment and disinterest with which Russia’s citizens learned to accept such elite behavior. The analysis of Markedonov is, if anything, more ominous. Extending the discussion into the Caucasus – both Russia’s North Caucasus and the states of the South Caucasus – where contemporaneous and contemporary interpretations of the August 1991 putsch alike shaped and continue to shape the course of often bloody conflict.
There are, of course, other opinions. Trudolyubov finds virtue in iconoclasm, writing:
The brief uprising that turned into the putsch of 1991 was also a revolt against canonistic formulas and monuments. The monuments suddenly reanimated, and reanimated monuments cannot be ignored—they practically jump out at you. The figure of Felix Dzerzhinsky at Lubyanka transformed from a majestic symbol of order that was physically difficult to approach due to the unrelenting traffic, into a monument to the creator of the Soviet repressive machine. In August 1991, people not only got near it, they toppled it from its pedestal.
The echoes of the post-Euromaidan ‘reanimation’ of Lenin statues in Ukraine is striking. But the problem of the 1991 putsch, in Trudolyubov’s view, is not in its destructive energy, but in its insufficiently destructive energy: it left too much intact. “The new government and the new people started to build a market economy from blocks specially designed to prove the inadequacy of the market economy,” he writes.
Where does that leave Russia now? In Levinson’s view, the Russia of 2016 embodies the rejection of 1991, built on an attachment to the status quo at all costs: “Personages within the status quo party changed with frequency, but the main idea of holding on to the economic and political present, which is better than the past and the future, remained,” he writes.
Malkina is less certain. “August 1991 was not an event that determined the course of history but a protracted fluctuation,” she writes writes. And yet, even in dismissing the significance of the event, she recognizes its formative role as the fulcrum of lost opportunity. But perhaps that, too, is impermanent. Next year, the youngest voters deciding Putin’s fate will have no memory of the putsch or its aftermath, even if they have been governed for a quarter century by its legacy. Likewise, students studying Russian politics around the world already struggle to remember the iconic images of Yeltsin atop a tank, addressing the gathered crowds. Memories will fade. Will history persist?