. Akio KAWATO
When people think of Russia today, they usually think of dictatorship, imperial ambitions, and the long shadow of Vladimir Putin. Yet there was a time when things looked very different.
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After Mikhail Gorbachev launched his reforms in 1985, Soviet and Russian society began moving toward openness and democracy. That process reached its peak in August 1991, when mass gatherings of Moscow citizens helped defeat a hardline coup attempt.
The moment was brief and largely emotional.
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By December of that same year, the Soviet Union had collapsed. In January, prices were liberalized, and within two years Russia was hit by an astonishing 6,000 percent inflation rate. The dream quickly turned sour.
Still, those days revealed something important: Russians, too, yearn for freedom and democracy. They are people with whom we can deeply sympathize.
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In 1991, I was serving at the Japanese Embassy in Moscow, responsible for public affairs and cultural relations.
Early in the morning of August 19, I was awakened by a phone call from the head of our political section.
“A coup has taken place. Get to the embassy immediately.”
Come to think of it, the vehicle that had rattled past my apartment only moments earlier had been tanks.
When I got into my car and drove out, the asphalt was scarred with fresh tank tracks.
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What followed was a whirlwind. My Russian friends immediately sided against the hardline coup plotters. They began distributing leaflets in the streets. By nightfall, young people had gathered around the gleaming white building of the Russian Republic’s Supreme Soviet—the legislature of the Russian Socialist Republic, then still formally part of the Soviet Union—where Boris Yeltsin and his supporters had barricaded themselves.
The weather was surprisingly cold for August. The young people sat around campfires, as if they were on a camping trip, singing folk songs to guitars as they tried to keep warm.
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On August 21, the coup collapsed. Late that night, Gorbachev and his family returned to Moscow from the Crimean resort where they had effectively been held under house arrest. But by then public loyalty had already shifted decisively to Yeltsin, who had been elected President of the Russian Socialist Republic the year before in a direct popular vote.
The Soviet Union itself would formally cease to exist four months later.
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I still remember the fresh sky after the rain on August 22. Muscovites carried themselves with a new confidence. They felt they had changed their country with their own hands—even though, in reality, most had done little more than watch events unfold.
Even the young Russian janitor, who normally swept the grounds of our foreign apartment complex with the expression of a man wondering why he had been cursed with such work, suddenly stood straighter, his face brighter than usual.
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“Freedom!” The word echoed constantly on television during those romantic days. That was the starting point of the next thirty years of Russian history.
The first ten years were the chaotic Yeltsin era, when almost anything seemed possible (at first only). The next twenty were the conservative age of Putin.
Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party and his democratization campaign produced a political landscape crowded with parties but incapable of making decisions. His market reforms generated 6,000 percent inflation in only two years. Privatization of state enterprises created powerful oligarchs and staggering inequalities.
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The public quickly turned against the Yeltsin government. The arguments that emerged during those years—about democracy, markets, national identity, and later anti-Americanism—have been repeated ever since and still form the foundation of contemporary Russian political culture.
In many ways, the Putin era has simply frozen and hardened the contradictory legacy of the Yeltsin reforms.
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Now, partly because of the Ukrainean war the Russian authorities have tightened control so thoroughly that not even weeds are allowed to grow. After thirty years of circling back, Russia has arrived at something not so different from the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan: a society that rejects Western-style democracy and has, in many respects, reverted to a Soviet-style political mindset.
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Most Russian industrial production remains dominated by state-controlled enterprises. In some respects that is understandable; compared with major Western corporations, Russian companies are often far smaller in both revenue and profits. Competing in cutting-edge technological development is extraordinarily difficult under those circumstances. State support becomes almost unavoidable.
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Moreover, after more than seventy years of communist and bureaucratic economic management, Russia still suffers from a severe shortage of people capable of running enterprises as modern businesses.
There are promising fields—nanomaterials, software applications, and a handful of others—but unless Russia opens itself to global competition the way China once did, a “Soviet Union 2.0” will struggle to reach the twenty-second century.
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But let me return to that coup thirty years ago.
I once wrote a sweeping novel about the Soviet Union and Russia of that era titled Land of Legend…Land of Dream (You can find the English translation at https://www.amazon.co.jp/Land-Legend-Dream-English-ebook/dp/B003CFB53G).
Set against the backdrop of revolutionary change, it follows the fate of a colorful (fictitious) Russian journalist, Ilya Makoshin, and his family.
The book was published in Russian, and my publisher promoted it as a modern-day Doctor Zhivago. That comparison even prompted a phone call—more protest than compliment—from a grandson of its author, Boris Pasternak.
Still, I remain fond of the novel.
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To convey the atmosphere of those extraordinary days, I would like to reproduce a passage here.
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(The protagonist, Ilya, has just launched his own newspaper and is helping shape the spirit of the age. On the day of the coup he is painting his dacha outside Moscow when news of the coup reaches him. He rushes into the city, heading for the Russian parliament building—the famous White House where Yeltsin’s supporters have gathered.)
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—–As Ilya emerged from the metro station at Smolenskaya, he saw a barricade of trolleybuses blocking the Garden Ring.
There were no soldiers in sight. Instead, crowds of spectators milled about, shouting slogans with the enthusiasm of people who seemed half-drunk on the historic events unfolding before their eyes.
Among them walked an Asian monk in bright yellow robes, beating a hand drum and loudly preaching peace.
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In front of the parliament building stood tanks and armored vehicles belonging to the coup plotters, but the building was guarded by improvised barricades made from metal pipes and fencing, and fleets of taxis whose drivers had arrived to support the defenders.
Yet the atmosphere felt less like a revolution than an outdoor rock concert.
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Young people warmed themselves around bonfires, listening to cassette players and guitars. Middle-aged women wandered through the crowd distributing mountains of homemade pirozhki.
Soldiers chatted with civilians. Officers accepted copies of Yeltsin’s appeals and stood reading them thoughtfully.
One drunken, unemployed-looking man threw open his shirt and shouted at a tank crew: “Go ahead—shoot! You can’t do it, can you? You’re Russian, and so am I!”
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On a makeshift stage, the comedian Gennady Khazanov drew roaring laughter by mocking Gorbachev and imitating the trembling hands (because of fear and alcoholism) of coup leader Vice President Gennady Yanayev.
Nearby, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko—widely viewed as a political weather vane—nervously read a poem praising the resistance while receiving a somewhat cool reception from the younger crowd.
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As democratic politicians shouted through megaphones, Ilya suddenly heard the familiar gravelly voice of Alliluyev, a fictional nouveau riche. Ilya smiled despite himself. That man has come all the way here just to show off.
“I’m Alliluyev! I don’t do things halfway! Come on, take it!” he shouted, throwing hundred-ruble notes into the crowd.
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Later, inside the parliament building, Ilya learns from his friend Safronchuk, a government official, that Gorbachev may have known about the coup plans in advance.
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“What on earth does that mean?”
“I’d like to know myself.”
“Good God. Well, what’s done is done. But things are moving in a direction nobody expected. The Communist Party and the Soviet Union are finished. The people who tried to save them have destroyed them with their own hands.”
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Leaving Safronchuk’s office, Ilya walks down a dim corridor. A tall young woman appears in the distance, her long blond hair flowing beneath a hat and trench coat. Aurora.
She had once worked for the KGB, spying on Ilya. Then she had fallen in love with him and even borne his child. After that, she vanished.
Now she stands before him, tears shining in her eyes.
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“Ilya, my Ilyushenka. My sun. My hero. I wanted to see you so badly. One last time. Forgive me, Ilyushenka. Forgive me—for our child.”
“Our child? You mean my child?”
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Before he can say more, Aurora throws herself into his arms and kisses him through her tears.
Around them, armed guards and government officials hurry past carrying documents.
A voice blares through the building:
“Enemy forces are approaching. Enemy forces are approaching. All women are requested to evacuate. Gas masks will be distributed to male personnel. Report to your floor supervisors immediately.”
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Neither of them hears a word.
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On August 21, it became clear that the coup had failed.
By evening the rain had stopped. The setting sun cast a fresh glow on the rain-washed red brick buildings.
At a nearby intersection, a young woman in yellow shorts and a T-shirt skated past on roller skates, smiling as she handed out leaflets announcing the coup’s defeat. Even the melancholy accordion music of a beggar on the sidewalk somehow sounded cheerful.
People walked through the city with bright expressions. There was pride in their faces—the pride of believing they had opened a new era with their own hands.
For a brief moment, the Russian people seemed to be enjoying a honeymoon with the goddess of freedom and reform under Yeltsin.
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It was a strange feeling.
As if a hole had suddenly opened in one’s heart—and yet at the same time everything felt bright, fresh, and full of possibility.
A new age had begun.
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At dawn the following day, the motorcycle gang known as the Hell Wolves—led by Aurora—rode along Komsomolsky Avenue toward Lenin Hills.
There they turned and formed a line.
Far below them, the eastern sky over Moscow slowly turned red.
The sun of a new era rose over the horizon.
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The Hell Wolves sounded their horns together in farewell to their leader.
“Take care of yourselves! Goodbye, everyone!” Aurora shouted.
Then she twisted the throttle. Her red BMW burst from the deep forests of Lenin Hills and soared into the air.
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Below lay Moscow, asleep with all its desires, despairs, and hopes.
Beyond it stretched the vast Russian plain, blue and seemingly endless.
Aurora fell toward the Moscow River, her blond hair shining in the sunlight, her crimson motorcycle beside her.
The dog chained to the Little Bear had been set free, and the end of the world—as the old legend foretold—was about to begin.
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And indeed, something very much like the end of the world arrived in 1992 and 1993: a Russia colored by money, violence, and shattered dreams.
