Driving into Moscow from Sheremetevo Airport, on the Tuesday afternoon after Sunday's coup, the traffic backed up and the sky, already dull, gradually became dark, as if we had penetrated a cloud. About the same time, we noticed small groups of people standing alongside the Leningrad highway, unable to take their eyes from the street. I thought I noticed a woman crying.
Suddenly, our car caught up with the cause of the staring and the darkness -- a mile-long column of tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling toward the center of the city, their tracks clogged with dirt that flaked off into a great shroud of dust over the road behind them. We drove past the column, looking at the expressionless faces of the young soldiers on their terrible mission against their own people. Later, many of the troops became heroes of the resistance, but none of us knew their future that afternoon. All that was obvious was massive force and silent bystanders, the portents of some new calamity for this sad country, the rumbling evil of tanks in a city.
I had been on vacation with my family in the quiet and beauty of New Hampshire when the 1 a.m. call came from the NBC News desk in New York: Gorbachev had been deposed by a coup. (So much for the theory that August is a good time for reporters to take home leave because nothing ever happens then.) I drove to Boston through the first torrents of Hurricane Bob, joined a panel on the Today program, and took the first plane "home."
I said that day that the people and the army had changed enough in recent years so the coup might fail, but I had no idea it would happen so quickly and completely. In retrospect, "The Plotters," as Gorbachev called them, had already failed by the time I and a dozen or so other reporters first saw the dust and the tanks.
ONE OF THE GANG of Eight's early mistakes was to appear on television. Most of them had a group news conference Monday afternoon, August 19, at which they seemed confused and disunited. By the millions, Russians watching that inept performance concluded that Yanaev and Co. were weak, and within a few hours thousands of people hurried to join those already defending the headquarters of the Russian Federation, the White House, in which Boris Yeltsin was leading the resistance.
As Gorbachev has pointed out, his reforms had created a new class of people uncowed by conventional authority. Moreover, many of those who drove their own cars to the White House -- and then used those cars to build defenses -- were from the private sector: young entrepreneurs and brokers who had everything to lose if the coup succeeded. Raiding construction sites for pipes, rods, and stones to build their barricades, they wanted democratic freedoms, to be sure; but they also wanted no interference with their newfound ability to make 15,000 rubles a month, legally.
The single greatest mistake of The Plotters was to fail to see this deep change in the character of the people -- especially the young people. The Soviet generation under 35 had seemed cynical and apolitical, rarely appearing at pro-democracy demonstrations. But when the time came to defend their freedoms -- including, perhaps, the freedom to be disengaged -- they stood up.
So did key units of the KGB and the army, refusing even under threat of court martial to attack their brothers and sisters. The tanks and troops could have smashed the barricades and taken the White House in a few minutes -- with thousands of casualties, but with tactical success.
But there was far more in the balance than military force. The people were different, and so was the army, and the once commanding instruments of authority -- the Communist Party and the KGB -- proved ineffective and irrelevant.
Indeed, within the next few days, as the people tore down hated statues and the coup leaders were arrested or found dead, the entire central government collapsed, and political power, like an enormous tide, flowed out to the republics.
Some of Yeltsin's associates were armed and some of the people fought tanks with sticks of lumber and gasoline-filled beer cans. But the resistance was almost violence-free -- astounding for a country with such a history of bloodshed and hatred. Yeltsin and his defenders were clearly willing to die, if necessary, and their personal courage had a profound effect. It forced soldiers to perform their own great acts of courage, refusing direct orders rather than kill other citizens. By Tuesday evening tanks had begun going over to the resistance and were parked beside the barricades with flowers in their gun barrels, the Russian flag flying, and smiling crews.
Even beyond the effects of courage, the failed coup was relatively nonviolent because of fear. Russian friends have told me they think of violence within their country the way a recovering alcoholic thinks of a drink: one sip can lead to dependence again; one fight can bring on civil war.
Perhaps never has an attempted coup failed so totally. Everything the Gang of Eight tried to preserve was demolished, almost overnight -- central government authority, a strong union, the Communist Party, and their own positions, reputations, and, in some cases, lives.
Sergei Stankevich, the brilliant pro-democracy vice mayor of Moscow, whose specialty as a scholar is the American Congress, thinks the coup and the successful resistance to it accelerated the reform movement in Russia by at least five years.
Andrei Kortunov, another brilliant young reformer, at the USA/Canada Institute, spoke of the total disintegration of central power. "Its backbone has been broken," Kortunov told me on the 21st. "The KGB, the CPSU [Communist Party] -- the heart does not beat anymore. The creature died and nobody can bring it back to life."
COMMUNISM FAILED, IN strictly secular terms, because of its naive view of human nature. Its ideologists believed that we flawed human beings could be made perfect by social engineering, and that those accomplishing this miracle would not themselves be corrupted by their power.
Communism also failed because its leaders, even before the 1917 revolution, thought any means were justified in pursuit of their ends. Geoffrey Hosking of London University says the Bolsheviks believed that in pursuit of the perfect society "you are allowed, not only allowed, but encouraged, to override every other moral principle." With British understatement, Hosking calls this idea "repugnant."
Finally, Communism simply did not work. The more complex society became, the more difficult it was to make every important decision at a central government ministry. And most of us imperfect but (usually) practical mortals need more than promises to justify our sacrifice.
People of faith, of course, will add their own deeper insights to the secular explanations. Communism failed not only because it did not appreciate human weakness or the importance of decent means but because from its inception it forgot God and humanity's absolute dependence on God. From that first sin all the other fallacies and tragedies followed -- the demeaning of the individual, the corruption of power, the terror and the purges and the Gulag; the more than 20 million human beings killed by Stalin and his agents.
Every Russian family I have met lost a relative to Stalin's tyranny, and they remember those atrocities. An artist friend told me, "We do not want to hurt anyone, but, someday, we will just go to the Kremlin and take down its walls with our hands, brick by brick."
Now, after the events of August, that will not be necessary. Communism has been destroyed from within by its own rebellion against God.
Where does it all go now, this country without a name, with its interrupted history and legacy of hate, this uneasy association of independent republics, and this new generation of reformers and business people?
There is no shortage of apocalyptic scenarios. Everyone speaks of looming economic catastrophe and the need to avert it, probably with emergency food aid this winter from the West. Vitaly Korotich, the editor of Ogonyok magazine, says he is afraid that by December or January "hungry, angry, jobless people will go into the street."
Meanwhile, with central government authority all but destroyed, who will keep the peace between ancient enemies -- between competing republics and rival ethnic groups? A research organization has calculated there are 74 separate border disputes between and among the republics, of which the struggle between Azerbaijan and Armenia is only one.
Nor does independence necessarily equal democracy or respect for human rights. There is no guarantee that the newly sovereign republics will be led by reformers or that, even in Russia, economic distress will not require or become an excuse for "the strong hand."
It is common in Moscow to be on the verge of hopelessness, and then to have something happen that brings light back into the darkness. Soon after the coup attempt I drove past the remaining barricades beside the Russian White House and saw a wedding party visiting the piles of cobblestone and the twisted pipes and rods. In the past, such groups went to look over the city from the Lenin Hills or to visit the statues of poets and other heroes. They still do.
But now this bride and groom and their friends were also pilgrims at a barricade, the new symbol of their troubled land. It is rusted and bent, ugly by objective standards. But when you look at it with the memory of what happened those days in August -- when you see in it the courage and commitment of its builders -- you can be filled with hope, again, that these long-suffering people may be able to create, at last, with help and grace, the abundant life they and all God's people deserve.
Bob Abernethy was a NBC News correspondent in Moscow when this article appeared.
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