Reliving August 1991

The coup that changed everything

The central exhibit at the Boris Yeltsin Museum in Yekaterinburg is organized around “Seven Days that Changed Russia.” The exhibit organizers have selected seven days in the history of the Yeltsin-era Soviet Union and Russia and cleverly recreated the experience of those days for visitors. (The exhibit actually explores not just the given day, but the events surrounding it, some of which unfolded over weeks, or even months.)

There is the day in October 1987 when Yeltsin gave a speech to the Central Committee Plenum criticizing Gorbachev, marking the beginning of the rivalry between these two politicians and raising Yeltsin in the public’s esteem as a “champion of the truth.” There is also the day economic reforms were launched; the day of the 1993 putsch; the day of the 1996 elections, when Yeltsin faced off against the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov in a hotly contested race for president of Russia; the day when President Yeltsin underwent open heart surgery; and the day in 1999 when he shocked the nation by announcing he was stepping down with the words, «Я ухожу» (I am leaving).

And of course a sizable portion of the exhibition is devoted to August 19, 1991, the day members of Gorbachev’s own government attempted to declare a state of emergency and bring a halt to his reforms – a day that ultimately led to the end of the Soviet Union. It was also the day that Gorbachev’s political career came to an end and Yeltsin, defender of the House of the Government, Russia’s White House or Белый дом, was catapulted to the pinnacle of popularity.

The Yeltsin Museum was designed by film director Pavel Lungin, so everything is theatrical, cinematographic, and interactive – in a word, highly engaging.

Visitors enter a room devoted to the events of August 1991 and find themselves in an apartment typical of an educated family of that era. For young visitors, almost everything looks antique – the bookshelves, the couch, the desk. The shelves hold the Library of World Literature, a many-volume set that anyone who loved literature went to great lengths to acquire in the late-Soviet era, a time when literature was something that almost everyone loved – or at least pretended to love.

The room contains an old television set showing a performance of Swan Lake, the Soviet authorities’ broadcast of choice whenever they needed time to decide how to “spin” some unusual event unfolding in the country. The day Brezhnev died, for example, Swan Lake was shown on all TV channels. It also appeared on TV screens that August Monday, the day of the attempted coup.

As part of the exhibit, the ballet is occasionally interrupted by recordings of news reports about the creation of the Government State of Emergency Committee (the ГКЧП – “geh-kah-cheh-peh” – or Государственный комитет по чрезвычайному положению). Back in 1991, these reports shocked the country: some were thrilled, others were mortified, but no one was indifferent. Also as part of the exhibit, an old-fashioned (wired, dial) telephone rings, echoing the telephones that rang in virtually every apartment in Moscow that day, with people calling friends and family to ask, “What’s going on?” and then “What are you going to do?”

Around the time that the telephone begins to ring, visitors to the exhibit realize that they are not in just any apartment. On the book shelves next to the Library of World Literature stand three photographs, childhood images of Dmitry Komar, Ilya Krichevsky, and Vladimir Usov. They were the three young men who died in a tunnel next to Moscow’s Smolensk Square while manning a barricade set up in a desperate attempt to stop oncoming tanks heading for the White House. Three days later, after the coup had been crushed (or rather, after it disintegrated for lack of support), the entire country took part in the funeral of these three young men, glued to televisions like the one in the exhibit, as a priest and a rabbi read prayers and Yeltsin addressed the fallen before his fellow Soviet citizens: “Forgive me, your president, for failing to protect you.”

Of course, the exhibit can only hint at the mood of the country at large. For now, we are merely inside the sort of apartment in which any of the three young men might have grown up, their childhood photos on the shelf, the television on, and a telephone ringing.

Those young men were also presumably asked “What will you do?” In their case, they opened the door and left for the barricades.

And so it is in the exhibit. As soon as visitors open the door and leave the room, they encounter a breathtaking scene: they are stunned to find themselves in a huge, dark space where an actual barricade has been set up resembling the one near the White House.

Over the barricade towers a huge screen showing a 15-minute video loop made up of pictures taken over the course of those three amazing days. There was Yeltsin addressing the crowd from atop a tank; defenders of the White House encircling the huge complex; and the State of Emergency Committee’s press conference, at which Soviet Vice President Gennady Yanayev famously could not control the trembling of his hands as he tried to explain to the public what was going on and responded to questions posed by hostile journalists.

Many of the younger visitors crowding to watch this loop have barely heard of these events, while the older ones have largely forgotten them. Many watch as best they can through their tears.

In the exhibit’s next section, visitors are offered an opportunity not just to relive the events of August 1991, but to learn about them. As a teacher, my heart skipped a beat when I saw the display devoted to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before us were fifteen tablets that could be used to watch, listen, and read about how this collapse unfolded from the perspective of each Soviet republic. It was also possible to synchronize the tablets so visitors could learn about and contemplate as a group the experience of a particular republic.

On a wall opposite the tablets hangs a flag, the very flag of Russia that was raised over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, the day the USSR became a thing of the past.

For me personally, the sight of the flag had a huge emotional impact. It brought back my youth, those three days in August, and the final months of the country in which I had grown up. It is hard to convey what it meant to be in the presence of THAT FLAG.

This was not the first time I had brought my high school students to the Yeltsin Museum, financing the trip from Moscow to Yekaterinburg with a crowdfunding campaign on Facebook. And I hope to bring more, so that they can get a sense of what it was like to step out of a Soviet-era apartment and head for the barricades, so they can stand by the replica of the barricades watching history flash by, and so they can see the historic flag.

Rarely do we have an opportunity to relive history so viscerally.