Three Days in Moscow

8/20/2016
Three days in Moscow Medium
erre Brianon
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enior writer, Politico Europe, Paris.

2 days ago 9 min read
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Three days in Moscow

On August 19, 1991, around 7 a.m, I was pulled from the deep sleep I was
enjoying in Provence by a call from my brother, who sounded quite frantic
on the phone, and was urging me to turn on the radio! Turn on the radio!
He had a point. As all French radio stations were making clear in their nonstop, special reports, the citizens of the then-USSR had woken up three
hours earlier to repeated broadcasts of a Statement of the Soviet
leadership declaring a state of emergency and announcing that a State
Committee of the State of Emergency had taken over the presidential duties
of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, due to the latters illness. Gorbachev
was until then known to be in good health and away on his yearly holiday in
Crimea, where Soviet leaders traditionally vacationed. The broadcasts were
strictly limited to state-owned radio and TV channels since the couple of
edging independent broadcasters had been shut down.
In the West we had a name for this: a coup dEtat.
Moscow, August
| Picture Pierre Brianon
Thus began the three most surreal days of the late history of the Soviet
Union the so-called superpower that would be gone within four months.
Western correspondents in Moscow the group of harried reporters to
https://medium.com/@pierrebri/three-days-in-moscow-60250509f5ee#.hy8egfv7c
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which I then belonged, whod covered for years the ups and downs of
Gorbachevs well-meaning attempts at reforming the bankrupt communist
system had often talked and written about the communist hard-liners
increasing opposition to perestroika, the restructuring of the system that
the new, youthful Soviet leader had tried to engineer since hed taken over
in 1985. Occasionally some leader of the nascent democratic movement
raised the spectre of a possible action by reactionary sections of the army,
the KGB or both. And historians or pundits familiar with communist history
were always quick to recall the crushing by soviet tanks of democratic
movements in Hungary in 1956 or then-Czechoslovakia, in 1968.
Moscow, August
Still, something in that coup sounded wrong. And if history had to be called
upon to understand what was going on, then it looked denitely to me more
like farce than tragedy.
Id left Moscow, for good I thought, less than three weeks before, at the end
of a four-year stint for the French newspaper Libration. The last event Id
covered was a summit meeting at the end of July, 1991 between Gorbachev
and U.S. president George H.W. Bush. I was headed next to Washington,
D.C., where I was due to arrive in the fall in time to cover the U.S.
presidential primaries. I remember my sense of relief on the plane home the
day after the summit. Id worked the last days in Moscow in an empty at.
Furniture was gone, things had been duly packed, and friends farewelled.
The Moscow posting had been intense, endearing, time- and energyconsuming, even too emotional at times. Anyone who has lived and worked
for some time in Moscow, even in recent years, understands the depth and
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intensity of the Russian blues and the periodic need to take a deep breath
away from it all.
Moscow, August
To take full advantage of what I thought was a well-deserved rest, Id

scrapped my meagre savings to rent a big house in Provence for the whole of
August. The house was rich with all the hackneyed trappings that people
who can aord them usually demand in that posh area of France favoured
by the cultured and moneyed Parisian types notably in this case, a big topof-the hill pool.
I was ve minutes into the broadcast about tanks rolling into Moscow, now
awake for good, when Serge July, Librationss founder and editor, called.
Pierre, I know you deserved that holiday in that big house in Provence and
everything, he started
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Moscow, August
I wasnt done with Moscow after all. And truth be told, I was dying to go
back. My replacement as Moscow correspondent had just arrived a couple of
days before, didnt speak Russian, and hadnt yet found his bearings. Julys
message was clear: get back there as soon as you can
I couldnt y to Moscow until the next day, so I immediately ew to Paris to

work in Librations newsroom. The rst surprise was that all phone calls to
Moscow were getting through. The days of the old-style, technically decient
and heavily censored Soviet telecommunication system had been receding
fast of late, and it had become possible to use phones (note to the under-30
crowd: landlines only) almost as conveniently as we did in the West.
Yet the rst thing youd have expected from professional coup masters would
have been that theyd cut communications with the outside world. It looked
like the authors of the coup had somehow forgotten the basics.
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Moscow, August
That Monday afternoon, in between calls to Moscow, I penned for Libration

a news analysis that even years later, on occasion, gives me a small petty
reason for shameless bragging. It will last three days or three weeks, I
wrote, but that coup is bound to fail. Never mind that it was led by the
regimes nominal number two vice president Gennady Yanayev along
with minister of Defense Dmitry Yazov, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov and
Interior minister Boris Pugo. Those men, whatever resources they could
summon, would prove impotent against the chaotic but powerful forces that
Gorbachevs policies had unleashed in the country. That was the core of my
reasoning.
French president Franois Mitterrand meanwhile went on national TV that

evening and seemed to give his blessing to the leaders of the junta that had
deposed Gorbachev, led by his own former vice president Gennady Yanayev.
Mitterrand spoke about the new leaders of the USSR, hinted that they
should be given the benet of the doubt. He even took to reading on the air
a letter that Yanayev had sent him assuring him that the junta had nothing
but good intentions. Mitterrands colossal misstep he remained alone in his
case among western leaders was later seen as one of the rst signs that he
had begun to lose touch, consumed by the cancer he had kept secret for
more than ten years which he would only make public at the end of 1992,
when it became impossible to hide.
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Moscow, August
Ha, laughed the security o
cer. You re
And he waved
here to cover the coup

me in.
I ew to Moscow the next morning. The very rst impression did nothing to
prove me wrong. The security ocer who opened my passport ashed a big
smile when he saw my foreign correspondent visa: Ha, he laughed. Youre
here to cover the coup and promptly waved me in. When Id left Paris I
was still unsure whether they were allowing foreign journalists in the
country. Here again, the junta seemed to have skipped the Coup 101 class.
The story of the coup is by now well-known. To my enduring pride it indeed

lasted exactly three days. On the eve of Wednesday, Gorbachev was free and
proceeded to undo whatever the team of nine of his closest collaborators
had tried to do. Then Boris Yeltsin, the Gorbachev nemesis whose climbing
of a tank to call for resistance had made a popular hero, proceeded to undo
whatever Gorbachev had tried to do in his six years as USSR leader.
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Moscow, August
Those were three days of operetta more than tragedy, even with the
constant presence or military trucks and tanks in the streets of Moscow,
even with makeshift barricades thrown across bridges. The whole range of
human character was rmly deployed across the city. There were those who
made sure no one doubted their serious commitment to defend democracy
in peril, mostly at work in and around the famous White House on
Krasnopresnenskaya embankment then the seat of the Parliament of the
Republic of Russia, presided over by Yeltsin since the year before. Others
were indierent and tried to mind their ordinary business nding food or
toiletries, taking care of families, going to work or not. Outside the small
part of Moscow gripped by democracy fever mainly the short distance
separating the White House from Red Square people kept living as usual.
Among my own Russian friends and acquaintances, you were hard pressed
to nd truly worried minds. Some were puzzled and some cynical, some
curious about what would follow, and some excited about the popular
uprising and the promises it seemed to bear.
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Moscow, August
The word wasnt yet the clich it has become, but this was, for all practical
purposes, a virtual coup. That became obvious on the afternoon of the very
rst day, when six members of the junta took to giving a news conference
open to foreign media. Eyes down, hands trembling, staring at each other
whenever a question embarrassed them, it all amounted to bad puppetry
notably the moment when Yanayev talked about the need for Gorbachev to
recover after the exhausting job he had done in his six years at the top. I
hope my friend president Gorbachev will be back and well work together,
Yanayev said to general disbelief.
Meanwhile the rotten core of the inecient and idiotic Soviet system was
nally exposed for all to see. If even the armys chief of sta and the KGB
chief werent able to engineer a coup together, where was the once dreaded
superpower? Years of glasnost the transparency pushed if not forced on
Soviet media by Gorbachev and his allies had opened the eyes of the last
few citizens who still harboured illusions about communism. Now the
regimes long-standing pillars of the system had tumbled down, for all to
see.
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Moscow, August
When all was over, it soon became obvious that Gorbachev only physically
came back from his Crimea holiday. Politically he was dead, and the USSR
with him. Yeltsin summoned him to the Russian parliament that had been
the resistances headquarter, forced him to sign documents outlawing the
communist party. Within months the Russian president had decided with his
Ukrainian and Kazazh counterpart that the USSR was no more. He informed
George H. W. Bush of the fact before he bothered to call Gorbachev, who
resigned in dignity on December 26.
What I remember from those days is the optimism that swept the streets of
Moscow once the troops had gone back to their barracks, the atmosphere of
happy chaos visible in the capitals streets as no one knew what form the
new political regime would take, the endless talks about the best ways to
build a strong or at least decent economy on the rubbles of the communist
debacle. And the new faces of youthful political leaders determined to invent
a country governed by the rule of law.
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Moscow, August
And the moment that I remember most vividly is the night they took
Dzerzhinsky down or rather the statue of the rst soviet secret police chief
and Stalin acolytes, a monumental monstrosity that had towered over
Lubyanka Square for more than 30 years. A crane had to be brought and
security of the crowd was always at risk throughout the long night, but they
ended up moving it away on a truck to a park nearby, soon to be called the
graveyard of memorials.
Moscow, August
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Little could we suspect that two years later, Yeltsin would order the same
tanks he had climbed upon to re on Parliament because his former allies
opposed him, that eight years later he would anoint as prime minister and
political heir an unremarkable former KGB ocer named Vladimir Putin, or
that future oligarchs were already at work pillaging the countrys immense
resources. Nor could we predict that Russian lawmakers would one day
petition to restore Dzerzhinskys statue back on its pedestal.
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Three Days in Moscow

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8/20/2016

Three days in Moscow Medium

enior writer, Politico Europe, Paris.

Three days in Moscow

In the West we had a name for this: a coup dEtat.

| Picture Pierre Brianon

Three days in Moscow Medium

| Picture Pierre Brianon

Three days in Moscow Medium

| Picture Pierre Brianon

To take full advantage of what I thought was a well-deserved rest, Id

Three days in Moscow Medium

| Picture Pierre Brianon

I couldnt y to Moscow until the next day, so I immediately ew to Paris to

Three days in Moscow Medium

| Picture Pierre Brianon

That Monday afternoon, in between calls to Moscow, I penned for Libration

French president Franois Mitterrand meanwhile went on national TV that

Three days in Moscow Medium

| Picture Pierre Brianon

Ha, laughed the security o

here to cover the coup

The story of the coup is by now well-known. To my enduring pride it indeed

Three days in Moscow Medium

| Picture Pierre Brianon

Three days in Moscow Medium

| Picture Pierre Brianon

Three days in Moscow Medium

| Picture Pierre Brianon

Three days in Moscow Medium

| Picture Pierre Brianon

| Picture Pierre Brianon

Three days in Moscow Medium

Three days in Moscow Medium

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