The most dangerous moment for a bad regime is when it begins to reform.
On the morning of 19 August 1991, tanks appeared on the streets of Moscow and other cities. This attempted coup d’état was led by Vice-President Gennady Yanayev (a supporter of Ligachov’s Stalinist faction), the Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and the minister of defence Yazov. The coup leaders announced on the radio that it was staged “due to Mikhail Gorbachev’s inability to perform his duties for health reasons”, and a state of emergency was being introduced to overcome “the profound crisis, political, ethnic and civil strife, chaos and anarchy that threatens the lives and security of the Soviet Union’s citizens”. In fact, Gorbachev had been placed under house arrest in the Crimea after refusing to relinquish the presidency.
The attempted coup represented a desperate gamble by a section of the bureaucracy to stop Gorbachev from signing the Union Treaty. Negotiations over the Treaty had dragged on into 1991. It was due to be signed by Gorbachev in August. The plotters were terrified of further power passing to the Republics, especially the Russian Republic under Yeltsin. The Soviet Union had been buzzing with rumours of a coup for months. George Bush even telephoned to say he had heard rumours of an imminent military takeover. As early as December 1990, the Soyuz group of parliamentary deputies had pressed for military action against the breakaway Republics, to be followed by the declaration of a state of emergency across the country.
The old guard were attempting to prevent the breakup of the Soviet Union and re-establish the power of the military caste. However, the coup proved to be an abortive attempt from beginning to end. Boris Yeltsin, who was in the presidential building of the Russian Republic (the so-called White House) took advantage of the situation to rally all ‘democratic’ forces against the coup. Within a few days, it had collapsed.
This coup, however, was not defeated on the streets as was later claimed by certain people on the left. As a matter of fact, the mass of workers were indifferent. According to The Guardian’s Moscow reporter (22/8/91): “Most people were too apathetic, cynical or just plain frightened of the consequences to obey Mr Yeltsin’s strike call.” The five years of perestroika ended up in a mess of empty shops, queues, shortages, spiralling inflation, chaos, and the threat of hunger. This resulted in a collapse of support for Gorbachev and a growing rejection of the whole pack of ‘reformist’ politicians.
The bureaucracy was split: one section wanted to maintain the status quo, or even go back to repression, as under Brezhnev; the other wing wanted to go down the capitalist road. However, the mass of workers saw no fundamental difference between the hard-liners and the pro-capitalist counter-revolutionaries around Yeltsin. His call for a general strike against the August coup was publicly backed by Margaret Thatcher who appealed to the Russian workers to support it. As it turned out, it was a total flop.
Reuters’ correspondent issued the following estimation:
Yeltsin’s appeal for strikes was meeting with a patchy response. In the Soviet Union’s biggest coalfield, the Kuzbass, whose miners had previously shown themselves willing to use their industrial clout as a political weapon against the Kremlin, only about half the workers downed tools. In Vorkuta coalfield of Siberia, only five of the mines were to respond positively to Yeltsin. (The Guardian, 22/8/91.)
The oil workers, a decisive section to whom Yeltsin specifically appealed to, decided not to strike. The same was true of the gas workers. There was little or no response in Moscow. A few limited strikes in Leningrad. Five enterprises in Yeltsin’s home town of Sverdlovsk went on strike. But there was nothing in the Baltics, the Caucasus or Central Asia. When the then president of the Ukrainian parliament, Leonid Kravchuk, took an ambiguous stand in relation to the coup, the Reuters’ correspondent noted “Mr Kravchuk was reflecting opinion on the streets of Kiev, where Ukrainian journalists reported that many people expressed support for the coup.” (The Guardian, 20/8/91.)
A similar story was recounted by Morgan Stanley bank, which carried the following eyewitness report in its Review (17/9/91):
Moscow is a power vacuum. It isn’t that the centre doesn’t hold. It just isn’t there. That’s one side of it. The other is that there is no popular revolution. A rotten power clique encountered very little democratic resistance, and yet the coup, its edifice and the apparatus of power collapsed.
And further on:
Indeed, popular resistance to the coup was minimal for most of the first few days… I was struck in Moscow by the lack of popular revolt.
In other words, the majority of workers did not raise a finger to resist the coup. And this is for the very good reason that they did not trust Yeltsin any more than Yanayev or, for that matter, Gorbachev.
A Russian observer writing for the same journal spoke of a conversation on a Moscow bus on 19 August:
One middle-aged man said loudly that he was glad of the restoration of order. No one either supported or objected. Gloom and fear, and maybe equanimity and resignation hung over the people.
Such examples could be multiplied at will and graphically show the mood at the time of the coup.
This view was reinforced by the report from the same source which wrote:
It seems that most of the public would have silently accepted the rule of the junta if the coup had been successful… Demagogic as it was, its promise of a quick economic amelioration could have given the junta a good chance. The feelings of frustration, desperation and cynicism over the state of the economy are so widespread that any rulers who look capable of achieving any progress [i.e. towards capitalism] could not expect to find popular support. I am not at all sure that the broad masses of the population understood and accept the idea that there is no alternative to marketisation and shock therapy.
The mood of the people was summed up by the BBC correspondent Martin Sixsmith:
The role of the Soviet people was also under scrutiny that afternoon: those who came to the parliament or demonstrated on the streets had made their own decisive choice in favour of democracy. But there were, in truth, not that many of them: fifty thousand people from a city of ten million is not an overwhelming percentage. Many more may have opposed the coup in their hearts, but they did little or nothing to put that emotion to practical effect. Strikes did occur sporadically, but most enterprises kept going and there were enough transport workers willing to work to keep the buses and the metro in action. At this stage of the coup, Yeltsin was facing not only the Kremlin’s tanks, but also the apathy of large sections of the population.
Even more challenging was the sentiment expressed by a considerable number of ordinary soviets that the coup leaders should be given a chance, that they could hardly do worse than the previous lot in power, and that they might at least bring back law and order. Especially attractive to many people were the plotters’ promises of ending the rise in crime, the spiralling ethnic conflicts which were dogging the country, and the attempts of independence-minded republics to break up the Union. (Martin Sixsmith, Moscow Coup, p. 37.)
Those who had rallied to the Yeltsin camp, according to a Sunday Times (25/8/91) report, “were the people who had experienced first-hand the benefits of perestroika, who looked beyond the promise of cheaper bread and higher wages and were not about to go back easily to being treated as sheep”. This stratum was composed mainly of millions of qualified people, students, engineers, speculators and black marketeers who sensed in the movement towards the market economy the possibility of gaining power, wealth and positions. They made up the intellectual ‘reformers’, distrusted by the great majority of Soviet workers. This stratum’s hostility towards the Stalinist bureaucracy had nothing to do with ‘democracy’, far less a defence of workers’ interests, and everything to do with the thirst for their own political and economic power.