The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

in solikamsk, where Lyosha's mother had been watching politics on television for two years, everyone was now watching the ballet on television. The grown-ups seemed subdued. In the days before Swan Lake, Galina's coworkers had been coming by the apartment to discuss lesson plans: the school year was starting in less than two weeks and history, it seemed, had changed again, so teaching it had to change too. The same thing had happened the summer before, and the summer before that. Now they were silent. At some point the ballet stopped and a gray picture with six old men wearing suits of different shades of gray appeared. One of them introduced the rest, and each of the men half stood at the sound of his name. Lyosha remembered the name of one of the men in the middle: Yanaev. He said that Gorbachev could no longer work as president and he, Yanaev, was taking over. Lyosha also remembered the word "Foros"— it was the name of the place where Yanaev said Gorbachev was lying ill.³⁸

Then there was a man on a tank, a big man surrounded by many smaller men. He held a piece of paper in his hand, and he said that something was illegal.³⁹ Lyosha asked his mother who it was. "That's our president," Galina said.

Then there was an airplane on the TV, against a dark sky, the sound of its engines winding down, and Gorbachev descending the stairs wearing a light casual jacket and smiling. His granddaughter followed, draped in a blanket, and Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, her arm around the girl. Gorbachev shook hands with several men, and then his face came fully into focus and a voice said, "Mikhail Sergeevich, for three days the country has been living in terrible tension, in awful worry for its president, for its future, for the fate of democracy. . . ."⁴⁰ Lyosha started crying. He loved Gorbachev so much, and he really had been so worried and so tense ever since he heard that Gorbachev was sick.

Soon it began to seem to Lyosha that all of it had happened in one day—the ballet, the three presidents on TV one after another, then Gorbachev's granddaughter with the blanket, and the tears. In fact, it had taken three days. On August 18, four men dispatched by the leaders of the coup flew to Gorbachev's dacha in Foros, in the Crimea, and effectively took Gorbachev hostage. The following morning, television broadcasts began with the state-of-emergency announcement and transitioned to Swan Lake. Yeltsin and his closest supporters took up their post inside the White House and his more distant supporters began to gather around the building while troops entered the city. Around noon Yeltsin climbed atop a tank parked outside the White House and declared the state of emergency illegal— but this would not be shown on television that day or the next. Instead, the gray men held their televised press conference. The people outside the White House, who now numbered in the thousands, built barricades that never could have stopped a tank, and handed out gas masks, falling far short of being able to equip everyone. The following day passed in nervous anticipation outside the White House and negotiations inside: the general who would have to lead the attack on the White House was unwilling to obey that order if it came but was not going to switch sides either. In the early-morning hours of August 21, three young men died trying to stop armored personnel carriers headed in the direction of the White House but still nearly a mile from it. By mid-afternoon six men, including the minister of defense and KGB director Kryuchkov, flew to the Crimea. A couple of hours later three men from among the coup's opponents followed them. Around two o'clock the following morning Gorbachev's plane landed in Moscow. Kryuchkov, who flew on the same plane, was immediately taken into custody: the Russian prosecutor general had already ordered the arrest of all the coup organizers. At noon on August 22 a Russian flag—white, blue, and red stripes—was raised over the White House for the first time. That afternoon Gorbachev held a press conference in which he said, "I have come back to a different country." He said that there had been an attempt to return the country to a totalitarian state and it had failed. At some point, Gorbachev had started using the word "totalitarian" to describe the regime that now seemed, finally, to have toppled. With that out of the way, he said, he would now press ahead with a new union treaty. He had already appointed ministers to replace the rebels in the Soviet government.⁴¹