Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

By 2:00 a.m., we are getting cold and tired and bored, and we agree that some of us should go home so that we can return, refreshed, tomorrow. “We can’t all just live here for the next six months,” Larisa remarks. As we walk toward the barricade where we parked four hours ago, we are accosted by a striking woman with blonde hair and a pale gray coat. She explains that she is helping to inflate a helium balloon to fly over the Parliament and that she wants to attach to its cord the banners of resistance. “You have the biggest Russian flag I have ever seen,” she says. “If you will give me your flag, then all the people of Russia will be able to see it and take hope from it.”

Andrei smiles. “Of course you can have it.” He hands it over. “Long live Russia.”

What was wholly ironic between Andrei and Kostya, then semi-ironic as the banner of the vanguard—“And how will we find one another tomorrow?” Larisa asks. “We will have to meet like tourists from Japan, under a green umbrella”—has become at this moment of crisis wholly unironic.

Tuesday, August 20: In the afternoon, Viktoria, the photographer, calls me to say that she went to Germany last night, using up her one-exit visa, to deliver film from Monday. “I wanted to make sure the photos got there. And now I have returned to defend my country. Who knows whether I will ever be able to get out again?”

Kostya stops by my hotel to watch CNN for half an hour. “It’s my flag,” he says when the Parliament building flashes on the screen, the balloon and flag hovering over it. When we get there, a little later, we are in time to hear Yeltsin speak of rallying under the Russian flag, and Kostya and Andrei exchange glances. “It’s our flag,” they remark.

That evening, I have dinner with Kostya, Larisa, Serioja, and Kostya’s mother, a survivor of hard labor in the gulag. We drink lots of toasts: to Kostya’s mother, to Kostya and Larisa, to me, to freedom, to Gorbachev, to Yeltsin. Kostya doesn’t want his mother to know that he is going to the Parliament. We have a whispered consultation and devise a ruse.

I am feeling increasingly uneasy. A curfew has been declared. Driving back to the hotel, I see that the streets are almost empty. In the lobby are men from the military police.

At about 1:00 a.m., Tanya Didenko, a musicologist, calls me. Her apartment, opposite the Parliament, has become a sort of base of operations for many members of the intelligentsia, and throughout the night I check in with friends who have gone there to get warm, have tea, or use the phone. “Who would have thought it?” Tanya says. “My home has become the public lavatory of the vanguard.” She is organizing the women’s line, to stand behind the men in the human barricade, and she is also negotiating contact with the outside world. “Please keep me informed as you get information from your CNN,” she says. CNN keeps saying that its information is not yet available to the crowds outside the Russian Parliament, but as I repeat everything to Tanya, she sends runners down to tell the mob. I hear that there has been one death; she hears that there have been seven. Much of the time, it is hard to tell who has the more accurate information.

There are a few hitches. The phones are going haywire; they work and then stop, cut us off and reconnect us. There is constant clicking. Once, Tanya gets through and asks me to tell her exactly what CNN is saying. I reply that CNN seems to have shifted its reporting away from the Moscow coup and is now going on about a hurricane that is hitting New England. I explain that Hurricane Bob is wreaking devastation on the East Coast. Half an hour later, word is running around the Parliament that Hurricane Bob is coming in from Siberia, destroying everything in its path, and will soon hit Moscow.

At two thirty, Kostya calls to say that he and Larisa and Serioja have been looking for gasoline and have been unable to get any. The metro has stopped running, and there are no taxis. So they have all gone home. I make a halfhearted effort to get down to the Parliament, but I am stopped by the military police. So I pace outside the hotel for a while—symbolically breaking the curfew—and then I go to bed.

At four, I later learn, Josif Bahkstein, the critic, wakes from a bad dream, gets into his car, and drives to the Parliament, joining the throng outside the building. “I met many very attractive young girls,” he says afterward, “one of whom I will see again in some days.”