The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Children's World department store, which stood kitty-corner to each other. The toppling, mandated by the Moscow City Council, which wanted to beat the jubilant crowds to it for safety reasons, symbolized the simultaneous dismantling of the two pillars of totalitarianism: ideology and terror. As it was lifted by a crane, the giant monument was revealed to be hollow.

Neither Masha nor Lyosha nor Zhanna nor Seryozha remembered the toppling of Dzerzhinsky—which was televised—as the defining moment of the coup. They remembered the tanks in the streets, the ballet on television, Yeltsin on the tank, and Gorbachev on the plane. Lyosha also thought he remembered footage of Gorbachev under house arrest, but that was probably an acquired memory rather than a true one. In general, they remembered the coup not as the end—or the beginning—of an era, with a strong symbolic finale, but as one in a chain of confusing and exciting and sometimes frightening events that engaged the adults in their lives. Another such event for Lyosha was the murder, later in 1991, of Igor Talkov, a young bearded singer who performed heartrending pop songs of a new patriotism—Russian rather than Soviet. Lyosha's mother had a boyfriend now—she would marry him before the year was out—and he followed newly emerging popular culture. Like everyone else in Russia, Sergei loved Talkov. He was watching the Song of the Year contest on television when the announcer said, "Talkov has been shot." Sergei and Lyosha, sitting next to each other on the couch, saw the singer's body being carried on a stretcher; he was wearing only his underwear. Sergei cried, and so did Lyosha. It was the most frightening thing he had ever seen.

The August coup looked like only one in a chain of important events from at least one other vantage point: that of Yeltsin. He spent all that year waging his war for Russia. He was fighting on at least two fronts simultaneously, against the Party conservatives, who opposed all reform, and against Gorbachev, who wished to rein in Russia's and Yeltsin's own political ambitions. Yeltsin won several battles that year: in March he defeated Gorbachev in the battle for the streets of Moscow; in June, when Russia declared sovereignty, he won a battle against both of his opponents—a battle for the hearts of Russians. When Yeltsin triumphed over the coup in August, he

eliminated one of the fronts in his war. With hard-liners no longer a force, it was just him against Gorbachev. On this front, victory was virtually assured.

In the intelligentsia's mythology, 1991 was the year of Russia's bloodless revolution. But it was not bloodless: its victims included the three men who died in Moscow in August and the nineteen people killed in Vilnius and Riga in January, and the hundreds who had died in Azerbaijan since 1988 and during the brutal breakup of a demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989.¹⁵ Nor was it a revolution. For the remainder of 1991 Yeltsin focused not on destroying the institutions of the Soviet state but on taking them over. He claimed, for his newly independent Russia, the army, the central bank, and the Soviet seat in the United Nations. Wisdom in the West was that this was a good thing: most of the Soviet nuclear arsenal would be in one place, and Russia would not renege on its predecessor's foreign debt, as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917.

To a very hopeful, very anti-Soviet eye, Yeltsin might have appeared to be tackling the pillars of the totalitarian system, its machines of ideology and terror. He banned the activities of the Communist Party and he tasked his (nominally, Gorbachev's) new head of the KGB with dismantling the organization. But on closer inspection, the Party ban concerned economic activity—Yeltsin feared, with good reason, that the Party apparatus would siphon off what remained of its wealth. The dismantling of the KGB was actually its partitioning into fifteen constituent parts among the republics of the USSR, which ensured that Russia inherited a functioning Soviet- style secret police.¹⁶

By the end of 1991, Yeltsin had a country to run. But even with the former institutions of the Soviet state under his control, he faced a dire deficit of instruments of governance, and of people to use them. He appointed leaders of the constituent members of the Russian Federation—in some cases, leaders who had already emerged locally, whether they called themselves "governor," "mayor," or "president." Only a few of them were, like Boris Nemtsov, loyal to Yeltsin personally and committed to his political agenda, with its focus on the immediate introduction of the market. Nemtsov set about privatizing stores and other property in Nizhny Novgorod. An endless stream of foreigners—potential investors, Western advisers, journalists, and dignitaries—flowed into the city to talk to him. Yeltsin did not have other regional leaders to show them.