Tanks on Moscow's Manezhnaya Square on the day the August Coup started in 1991. Andrei Soloviev / TASS
Moscow Times: ‘It Was All for Nothing’: Russia Marks August Coup With Regret, Indifference
Thirty years on, The Moscow Times spoke to surviving participants in the events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of a new Russia.
In the center of Moscow, hidden behind two lanes of heaving traffic on the New Arbat commercial thoroughfare, stands a small concrete monument bearing the names of three young men killed by tanks on the night of Aug. 21 1991, as a coup by communist hardliners to preserve the unravelling Soviet Union flamed out.
It is the Russian capital’s only memorial to the August Coup that sounded the death knell for the Soviet Union and the birth of the Russian Federation, but today is barely celebrated, even by the country’s beleaguered democrats.
“The coup was an idiotic affair, completely absurd,” said Grigory Yavlinsky, then an advisor to the Soviet government on economic reform and later a liberal politician, who joined the crowds who had rallied against the putschists on hearing of the coup.
“When it all collapsed, people were shouting ‘victory’ and’ ‘freedom.’ But it didn’t feel like that to me.”
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Update #1: Hardline coup set the stage for Soviet collapse 30 years ago (AP)
Update #2: Fall of the Soviet Union: Three days that shook Russia and the world (The Independent)
WNU Editor: I could not believe at the time that these Communist die-hards thought they would be successful. To say that I was relieved at the time that when the crisis ended is an understatement.
