Reporting on The Putsch to Save Soviet Power: Moscow, August 19, 1991
To mark the anniversary of the attempted coup in Moscow on August 19, 1991, I am sharing an extract from Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin that covers those days that decided the fate of the dying Soviet Union.
DECLARING THAT GORBACHEV had resigned for health reasons, a group of hardline Communists opposed to his reforms said that they were now running the country. The attempted coup lasted only three days, but during that time there were tanks on the streets of the Soviet capital taking orders from the self-styled ‘State Emergency Committee’. Soviet television broadcast a performance of Swan Lake – intended, presumably, to reassure. To any half-curious observer in the USSR or abroad, it was actually a sign that something was not right. It was the first of several media management mistakes which the plotters were to make.
‘The drama of the 19th was amazing,’ remembers Mary Dejevsky, then of The Times, who, unlike many members of the press corps, was not on holiday. Having been alerted to the story by a 5am phone call from a broadcast station in Australia, and, anticipating roadblocks, having checked her documents were in order, she was astonished to discover that the armoured personnel carriers transporting troops to secure the capital, ‘were mingling with the ordinary traffic. You got trolleybuses, buses, pedestrians, and this great column of military gear.’ Remarkably, the coup leaders did nothing to prevent correspondents who were outside the capital, or outside the country, from returning. Nor was there any attempt to control their activities in Moscow. Foreign correspondents were able to gather and send material. With newspapers going to press in the evening or early hours of the morning the Moscow time difference was kind – at least in the sense that being three hours ahead of London and eight hours ahead of the East Coast of the United States meant that correspondents could not only include the news of the coup, but also the opposition to it, in their reports published on August 20th. ‘Yeltsin challenges Kremlin coup’ was the headline above Dejevsky’s despatch in The Times[i]. ‘Gorbachev Absent, Yeltsin defiant’ was part of a stacked headline on the front page of the New York Times[ii]. The abiding news image of these days which decided Russia’s future direction was the Russian president standing on a tank outside the government building known as the ‘White House’ in central Moscow. It became a rallying point for those opposed to the coup; a magnet for the news media. Dejevsky arrived at just the right time. ‘Yeltsin was coming down the stairs with a couple of his advisors and a posse of Russian MPs,’ she remembers. ‘He walked down to the bottom of the steps and then – we’ve all seen the pictures – he got on the tank and gave his mini speech.’ Still free to move around, Dejevsky was able to return late at night. ‘There was a feeling of everybody being on edge and not knowing what was happening. They got priests in the White House and they were basically swearing in troops loyal to Yeltsin, young volunteers.’
If that was the location of the images which defined opposition to the coup, there was one which has come to do the same for the hapless conspirators. The plotters staged a bizarre news conference at the Foreign Ministry Press Centre. The trembling hands of Gennady Yanayev – who had proclaimed himself president in Gorbachev’s stead – as he spoke became such a symbol of their incompetence (and, in this particular case, probably drunkenness) that it outlasted Yanayev himself. It was mentioned in his obituaries after his death in 2010[iii]. Dejevsky remembers, ‘the trembling hands’, but also ‘the very aggressive questioning from the Russian correspondents.’ As Taubman had noted during the news conference after Chernobyl, previously docile journalists from communist media were no longer compliant.
The coup collapsed. Gorbachev returned to Moscow. Back in London by then after a two-month assignment in Moscow, I had been woken by my colleagues on the news desk at Visnews early on the morning of the 19th to come in to help to translate Soviet TV broadcasts. By the end of the week, I was back in Moscow. The White House was still surrounded by defenders of Russia’s new democracy. They were exhausted, and nervous. A TV script I sent on Sunday 25th August told of barricades and Molotov cocktails being prepared to face an expected new tank assault. The rumour was false. Rushing to a nearby public phone to call the bureau, I was chased by one of Yeltsin’s supporters. Fearing I was about to send information to their enemies, he threatened me with a stick as I lifted the receiver – but relaxed when he heard me speaking English.
Extracted from Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin (the 2023 paperback edition is now available from the publisher’s website for the special price of £11.89)
[i] The Times, 20 August 1991, 1
[ii] New York Times, August 20 1991, A1
[iii] See, for example, Jonathan Steele’s obituary of Yanayev for The Guardian, posted on September 26 2010. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/26/gennady-yanayev-obituary-communist-gorbachev Accessed 3 May 2019.