The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Kommunist pages now contained words that had been unthinkable as applied to a socialist economy: inflation, unemployment, poverty, social inequality, budget deficit. We published the first realistic estimates of military spending. . . . Periodically a call would come in from the Central Committee's headquarters.

"What are you doing? Since when is this issue subject to public discussion?"

Such calls were generally easy to handle. I would ask in response, "Don't you know?" The caller, a bureaucrat who could not be sure of what the latest party line was, would shrink back and leave me

alone.¹³

The Party's signaling system had ceased functioning, and this in turn rendered the ideology no longer hermetic—in effect, no longer totalitarian.

Four months after the women's forum, the two American lesbian activists and their Soviet partners held a gay and lesbian film festival and a series of workshops, first in Leningrad and then in Moscow. Mindful of the feminists' experience, they made backup arrangements in case they lost their venues. But the festival proceeded without incident, in a centrally located "house of culture" in Leningrad and a similarly central movie theater in Moscow. Both venues belonged to the state, but by now they could be rented for a few hundred dollars. The organizers were able to bring into the country reels with gay-themed films, though neither censorship nor criminal penalties for homosexual conduct had been abolished. At the end of the festival, they even rented a restaurant in central Moscow and held the country's first nonclandestine gay party. By this time, Moscow had a few "cooperative" restaurants—a perestroika-era euphemism for newly legalized private businesses—but this was not one of them: the gay party was held at the Central House of the Workers of the Arts, which for six decades had served the elite who serviced the ideology.

In the four months between the feminist forum and the gay festival the government had not shifted its stance on homosexuality or on private life more generally, but between rapid political change and new economic exigencies—every venue needed hard currency— the system of signaling and response, the very social contract of Soviet society, lay in ruins. At one point during the Moscow leg of the festival, the police meekly tried to seal off the movie theater from the street by stringing construction-site flags around it. The gays cut these down with scissors, and the shows went on. In another three weeks, many of the people who had attended the gay festival were in front of the Moscow White House, preparing to push back the tanks. The American activists had given the Moscow gay group a photocopier, and it was now put to work printing Yeltsin's address to the people.

The tanks were there but never moved in on the protesters. Gaidar later described what happened as follows:

As of August 19, 1991, there was nothing in Russian or Soviet history to give one hope that the resistance would not be brutally suppressed. The coup leaders were clearly prepared to do just that. All that was needed was someone willing to accept immediate responsibility for large-scale bloodshed and mass repressions, someone who would organize and demand action from the troops, someone who would identify the most reliable, trustworthy, and decisive of generals and place him on the leading tank, assigning to him personally the task of crushing the resistance. In other words, there had to be a person who would overcome the military's natural inertia and reluctance to accept blame. As it turned out, there was no such person among the coup plotters. Hence the back-and-forth, the inconsistency of action, the will to shift responsibility onto

others, and the military's wheel-spinning.¹⁴

The coup organizers, in other words, tried to will the signaling system back into existence simply by issuing several decrees—and by placing the country's president under house arrest, which has to rank near the top in the hierarchy of signals—but the social contract could not be resuscitated. The army did not respond to the hard-liners' signals, but it did not pick up on signals from Yeltsin's White House either, and did not side with the resistance: it simply did not act.

for the post-soviet intelligentsia and Western journalists and politicians, the most important moment in August 1991 came after the coup failed, when a giant statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, was removed from its pedestal in the middle of Lubyanka Square, a short walk from the Kremlin, a block from the Central Committee, and right in front of KGB headquarters and the