August Coup: An Inside Job?

We Russians love a good conspiracy theory, so here’s one: the failed August coup against Gorbachev by KGB and Communist party hardliners was actually organized by his rival Boris Yeltsin.

Think about it: 1. The plotters arrested Gorbachev all the way in the Crimea, but did nothing to prevent Yeltsin, second on their hit list of biggest USSR-traitors, from freely walking down Moscow’s sealed-off streets from his house to the parliament building, despite having KGB intel as to his whereabouts. 2. Yeltsin stood up on the tank to give his iconic, defiant speech, and was still not arrested, or killed (while it’s true that the army refused to shoot, the KGB had its own special troops it could have used). 3. Most importantly, cui bono. The biggest loser turned out to be Gorbachev, who lost his job and his country. The biggest winner was Boris Yeltsin, who gained both. But the coup plotters themselves were somewhere in the middle. Apart from one who committed suicide, they were all amnestied shortly after the smoke cleared…by none other than Yeltsin himself.

OK, before FPA Russia Blog gets blacklisted at snopes,  there’s certainly no evidence for such a story, but it’s one that continues to circulate all over Russia. It’s at least partly fueled by the fact that surviving participants of the events, such as KGB chairman Kryuchkovm, refused to talk or release their secret documents. But mostly, I think, by a continued sense of outrage at how a group of the USSR’s most powerful and dangerous men could have allowed Yeltsin to destroy the Soviet Union so easily (something that 60% of Russians ‘deeply regretted’ as recently as 2009). Even veteran journalist Bridget Kendall wrote about how unconvincing the whole thing was:

There was an air of theater about it all: the display of military force; the ominous TV announcements; the moment when Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank to defy the coup leaders and declare their action illegal; and the drama of ordinary people clutching briefcases and shopping bags, rushing to the White House to make a visible show of defiance.

It somehow felt as though the coup, badly thought out and only half-heatedly executed, was doomed from the start.

The only way, it seems, that the powerful Emergency Committee could have fouled up so badly, is if it was done on purpose, an inside job all along. To Western ears, all this sounds a lot like 9-11 ‘truthism’, but in the Russian context of virtual politics and all-pervasive black pr, it would not be that far fetched.  Most likely, however, coup conspiracy theories reflect the kind of denialism exhibited by the plotters themselves. Writes Kendall:

I turned on the television. Scheduled programs had been replaced by the ballet Swan Lake, interspersed with news flashes, read out by a man in spectacles, awkwardly reading off a piece of paper without autocue.

It was so typically Soviet, such a cliche, I could hardly believe it. In the old days of Brezhnev, sombre music and terse news statements were always the sign that a Kremlin leader had died and a new regime was about to start. It was as though the coup plotters believed that if they went through the motions of behaving like the old Soviet Union, somehow magically the clock would turn back to a former epoch.

The nostalgic regret at the collapse of the Soviet Union cannot be separated from anger at what followed, most of it directed at the same person held to be responsible for both events – Boris Yeltsin.

In the words of the mother of Dmitry Komar, who was one of three civilians killed at the barricades:

“Had my son known the outcome, he would’ve never gone there. He would’ve not liked what happened to the country afterward. Their goal wasn’t reached. And at that time, although I’ve lived enough and had experience, I really started to believe that we could now have a better life, like people in the developed countries in the West, and that our people could prosper and be happy – I really believed that, but it all went a different way.”

The Army officers who refused to fire on civilians felt a similar betrayal, reports Fred Weir.

“As a Soviet person, I was against the USSR collapsing and the republics going their own way,” says Viktor Baranets, at that time a spokesman for the Soviet Defense Ministry. “The Army hated Yeltsin, and didn’t end up supporting the Emergency Committee only because we feared civil war. We remained silent [through the coup]. But many officers of my generation still feel betrayed and deceived,” by all political leaders, he says.

The utter banality, improvisation and near comic ineptness with which the Soviet Union collapsed will continue to mystify and upset those who saw the country that had defeated Nazi Germany and equaled the US fall crumple over quite so pathetically and ignominiously.

But ironically,  the closest parallel would be none other than the Russian Revolution itself, when, contrary to Eisenstein’s celluloid heroics, the seat of the world’s largest contiguous empire yielded to the softest push, and surrendered without a shot.