One year after that brief and shining moment of unity, Russia has a lot of the same problems. The government cannot govern. Yeltsin can’t make people obey his decrees any better than Mikhail Gorbachev could. Yeltsin’s own vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, blasted the drift in national lie last month: “I can cite thousands, even hundreds of thousands of examples where there is absolutely no execution of policy,” he complained. That sounds rather like the complaints of the coup leaders themselves. The grim men who orchestrated the clumsy August putsch were trying to bolster the sagging Soviet state; as they explained on the first full day of the coup, they aimed at “restoring law and order, stabilizing the situation, overcoming the gravest crisis and preventing chaos, anarchy and a fratricidal civil war.” All those things still need to be done. And to this day, the coup leaders have not yet been tried-a fact that, more than any other, attests to the fecklessness of the Russian government.
That doesn’t mean that nothing has changed. The outlawing of the Communist Party and the disappearance of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were no mean feats. What’s more, they were irreversible feats. This summer a group of hard-line deputies has gone to Russia’s Constitutional Court to challenge the legality of Yeltsin’s decree banning the party, but they’re not likely to win. Even if they did, the Communist Party is too thoroughly discredited to govern Russia again. Similarly, even if Russia were to turn militaristic and aggressive, the republic doesn’t have the wherewithal to conquer its 14 neighbors and re-establish a union. Maybe it’s too early to draw new maps in indelible ink, but at least we can throw out the old ones.
It’s important to remember, too, all the terrible things that didn’t happen in the wake of the coup. Though several small wars are percolating around the edges of the former Russian Empire, no major civil disturbance has racked Russia itself. There was no famine last winter. So far Boris Yeltsin has not proved to be an autocrat, as many feared. And when he argues with the Russian Parliament, it’s usually because he’s more committed to progress than they are. Finally, there’s been no witch hunt against former Communist Party members. Many Russians believe that the old bureaucrats have feathered new nests and relinquished little power; they think a little witch hunt might have been a good thing. But it would have been terribly divisive in this very fragile society.
Still, the threat of another coup lingers over the collective Russian psyche. Russians remember how Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze virtually predicted the coup in a December 1990 speech, and they were unnerved to hear the current foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, issue a similar alarm last month. “The party of neo-Bolshevism, the party of war, is rearing its head in our country,” he told the daily Izvestia. “The threat of an antidemocratic coup does exist.” Last week Gorbachev told reporters that he didn’t think the coup would be repeated, because “you would have to be an idiot and a half-wit to try it.” But his aide Aleksandr Yakovlev believes that “the public is paralyzed with fear of another putsch.” The threat, as ever, supposedly comes from disgruntled army brass, ex-KGB hard-liners and factory directors from the military-industrial complex.
There is ample reason for the gloomy national mood: crime, inflation and unemployment are all on the rise. But there are positive signs, too. The private economy, albeit corrupt and chaotic, is exploding. Yeltsin announced last week a plan to distribute vouchers worth 10,000 rubles each-about two months’ salary–that would enable each Russian citizen to purchase shares in the country’s state enterprises. Young entrepreneurs were the bulwark of defense on the barricades last August, and they have only grown more numerous since then. Dotting the streets of Moscow are new little kiosks, known as “tents,” in which virtually everything is for sale. That includes even tampons and disposable diapers, two of the ultimate hallmarks of consumer convenience, which were completely unavailable in the old Soviet Union. If push comes to coup, the lure of the throwaway society may prove a powerful democratic weapon.
As the anniversary compels Russians to assess their lives, don’t let the dolorous comparisons with last year fool you. “We don’t have any prospects for improvement,” Titenkov said outside Moscow’s White House. But that’s a typical piece of Russian pessimism. Russians almost always think things are getting worse. The 19th-century philosopher Aleksandr Herzen once called “sorrow, skepticism, irony . . . the three strings of the Russian lyre.” Whether the defeat of the coup actually brought the former Soviets a better life may be debatable. But last year’s showdown was a remarkable accomplishment-not least, because it offered a sudden burst of unity and hope, however fleeting those have proved to be.
