From private life in the days of the coup

Volumes have already been written about those three days in August 1991, assessments have been made and conclusions drawn from different positions. Everything is known – in general political, historical terms. Here are notes about three days of private life on August 19-21, 1991, made directly during the events.

Maxim Oshurkov, my wife Masha and I are not heroes, not fighters and not fighters who immediately stand up to their full height on the barricades. Ordinary people. We have elderly parents and a little daughter at home. In addition, Masha’s mother is in the hospital after a recent heart attack. Maxim has a mother, wife, little daughter, mother-in-law.

But then everything worked out by itself.

On the morning of August 19 (at 6 o’clock on the radio and TV they began to broadcast the so-called “Statement of the Soviet leadership” on the removal of the President of the USSR Gorbachev, on the transfer of power to the “State Committee for the State of Emergency” – GKChP; at 09.30 tanks and armored personnel carriers entered Moscow) we started calling friends, acquaintances; and they called us from different parts of Moscow – they told us what was happening and how. The artist Marat Kim said that his uncle, the famous bard Julius Kim, is now in the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, that the Supreme Soviet is alive and well and is starting to fight the putschists, which means that nothing is over!

This was the first, most valuable information about the democratic government that had already been overthrown by the conspirators. But after all, practically no one in the country knew that the Russian legitimate government was acting, preparing a rebuff to the putschists. And you need to know. From early morning, familiar journalists called me from other cities and republics, asking what was happening in Moscow. Radio and TV were turned off, only the “Statement” and “Appeal” of the State Emergency Committee were transmitted, the country fell silent in ignorance, in fear and misunderstanding. And so there were circumstances that the three of us, Maxim, Masha and I, knew a little more than others.

First, we told our Moscow acquaintances to give our phone to their acquaintances so that they would tell us what they see and hear. Secondly … Your deeds are amazing, chance. Shortly before that, a device rare for those times appeared at our house – a small TV, which for some reason caught on an indoor antenna (!) … CNN! Now, in the era of the Internet, it is difficult to imagine what it was like for 1991 in the USSR.

Thus, we received regular information from CNN reporters about what is currently happening on the streets of Moscow, as well as about how the world reacts to what is happening, up to the fluctuations in the Dow Jones index on the stock exchanges. Maxim Oshurkov and Masha, classmates in the history department of Moscow State University and co-authors in translations from English, gave me their transcripts from the air, and I composed them into a hasty, more or less readable general text, combining and interspersing it with other information. They called us from the streets of Moscow, told us what they saw, what they learned, Olga Balalaeva, Tatyana Shmachkova, Marat Kim, Ilya Tsurkis and others, acquaintances and strangers. Their messages, along with CNN data, went to other parts. By that time, we had already agreed with fellow journalists from different cities on a constant, hourly connection and began to transfer, dictate to them ready-made materials of our spontaneously formed chronicle.

In my hometown of Petropavlovsk, North Kazakhstan region, young guys Seryozha Ovcharov, Sasha Kotseruba, Andrey Letyagin prepared special editions of the independent newspaper Provincial Vedomosti.

Valera Orlov, a correspondent for the republican youth newspaper Leninskaya Smena, was with them. That is, our information went to Alma-Ata.

In Vladivostok, it was received and distributed by journalist Galya Arbatskaya.

In Yaroslavl – the editor of the newspaper “Golden Ring”, a former political prisoner Boris Chernykh, the newspaper’s employees.

This is how our original press center arose and worked. Moreover, the information was obtained cross, self-propagating, like an echo, already from other sources. The executive secretary of Ogonyok, Slava Perfilyev, laughed: “Here are wonderful things: I learn from you about what is happening in Moscow through CNN, and about what is in Petropavlovsk, already from Voice of America, but through you…

Here it is necessary to explain. After the very first issue of Provincial Vedomosti with our materials, the local authorities were frightened (portraits of Gorbachev were already filmed in some regional committees and regional executive committees) and the circulation was arrested and confiscated from kiosks. Then the guys went out with bundles of newspapers to the gates of the factories. At the same hour I told the correspondents of Western radio stations who called me about it, and that same evening they went on the air. I don’t know how much this affected the situation there, but the journalists were no longer touched. Some time later, Nelli Alexandrovna Ivanova, secretary for ideology of the North Kazakhstan regional committee of the CPSU, called from Petropavlovsk. We were acquainted with her. And I shouted (normally we almost stopped talking then): “Tell your people not to do anything! Soon these fools from the State Emergency Committee will be driven out and imprisoned, and you will find yourself smeared for life!

Where this confidence came from, I have no idea.

Because this certainty was somehow combined with constant fear.

They lived in fear.

Of course, Maxim and I did not sit at home without getting out, we went to the “hot spots” of Moscow in order to see and hear everything for ourselves. On the rally squares, on the barricades in the “Living Ring” around the White House – the building of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, where the President of the RSFSR Boris Yeltsin and people’s deputies were located – it was not scary. Despite the audible rumble of the GKChP tanks. In the vast sea of ​​like-minded people, engulfed not even by enthusiasm, but by the euphoria of resistance, faith in a just cause, fears were dissolving. And when they returned home, they embraced. After all, we were alone at home.

From the August 1991 entries:

“At first we thought: that our names should not be in newspapers, in programs. Naive … But then we decided: our names must be, and as noticeable as possible. So that if they take, people knew why. I also went to Smena and Ogonyok, told what we were doing, and we agreed: if they take us, they will make a fuss. And then after all, when no one knows anything, to disappear in such confusion is like a pebble falling into the water. <...> After all, the decrees of the State Emergency Committee were issued not only on the closure of some newspapers, but also on bringing to criminal responsibility for the dissemination of information. Most of all, they were afraid of free speech. The entire repressive machine was in their hands, and they were afraid of free speech. <…>

They thought that all they had to do was bring in the tanks and the people would hide in the burrows. They didn’t need anything else. And people took to the streets. <…>

They thought the main danger was the President. They will remove him – and everything will roll like clockwork. But it suddenly turned out that for the success of the case it was necessary to eliminate us, the people. It turned out that they needed to eliminate us, forty and fifty years old, who lived for many years in gloomy silence and did not rebel, because they did not know another life. And now, when we have known the taste of freedom, you can’t take it from us – you have to take it away. It turned out that they needed to eliminate twenty-year-olds who managed to grow up into adults, almost without knowing our fear.

Of course, any generalization is arbitrary. I mean my then words about forty and fifty year olds. Because people of the older generations took to the streets to resist the putschists, of course. Among them is my friend and teacher Vasily Efimovich Subbotin, a seventy-year-old participant in the Great Patriotic War from the first day to the last, the author of the famous book “How Wars End” about the storming of Berlin and the Reichstag. I also remember the family in front of the White House. Old, very old father and mother – with a big trunk. With them is their son, about thirty years old. In appearance and behavior – a typical sissy. There are such, to gray hair. But he, this sissy, was preparing to go to the night watch, to the Living Ring, to the barricades around the White Lot. Just on that night, from the 20th to the 21st, when the assault was expected. The old father and mother, moving the bag towards him, instructed: “The worst thing is dampness, you need to put on rubber boots, son, and warm pants, and canvas on top. And do not hesitate to put on a padded jacket with a sweater, and a hat, son, night is night, and the heat from the fires is unreliable … “

Maxim Oshurkov spent these three days with us. What changed their minds, what his relatives experienced – you can imagine. They knew what he was doing here (besides, it was difficult to get through to us.) When on August 21 at 5 p.m. everything was over, when the silent, silent radio stations and TV channels exploded with messages, comments, victorious reports, when Maxim went out the door, there was a another call from his mother-in-law. And Masha reassured her: “Yes! Already! Just now! Well, yes. Oshurkov overthrew the junta and went home!”

In conclusion – the last of the entries in August 1991, the day after the defeat of the putschists:

“The whole country saw on television people who stood at rallies, in a cordon around the White House. I saw their faces. These were faces from which everything vain, petty had gone, and the highest, proudest thing stood out <...> Probably, everyone noticed that there were mostly young people at the barricades. Eighteen to thirty five. That is, people who, in 1985 (1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the beginning of perestroika and glasnost), were still a few years old. People who were no longer in time could no longer be crushed, crushed by our monstrous system. And the Moscow youths who took to the streets and squares in those days, and the guys from a small brave newspaper in a distant provincial town – they are peers. They are from another, new generation.

It already exists – the first unbroken generation.”

So I finished my recordings then – August 22, 1991.

Sergei Baimukhametov.

On the picture: Moskovskaya Pravda newspaper August 23, 1991, fragment of the front page