1991
By Radmila Yarovaya
August in Moscow is a tedious affair - the stifling heat of July is but a distant memory. People are sluggishly coming back from their month-long vacations, the streets are filling with the monotonous hum of the doomed commuters, and the soundtrack of a falling empire - Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake - is beginning to fill all the channels. Or at least it did in 1991, at the time of the infamous August putsch that finally showed the cracks in the Soviet system and, though unsuccessful, was the first step towards the dissolution of the behemoth of international relations and dread of the capitalist west - the Soviet Union.
Belonging to the first generation to have been born in the “free” and “democratic” Russia, I never fully understood the significance of the 1991 coup and the collapse that it brought on. I could never fully wrap my head around the idea of tanks on the streets of cosmopolitan Moscow or the shelling of Parliament that followed in 1993; it all seemed like a page from a bad fairytale, so I let the topic go. I was a citizen of a progressive and liberated state after all, and why should I care about the fall of the barbarous and backward USSR. But as I got older, and the inevitability of the repetition of history started to cement itself, I started to question exactly how we got here, and what it was like to live on the cusp of history. Thus I proceeded to incessantly interview the closest eyewitnesses of the events in question: my parents. So while our esteemed delegates try to hash out the problems facing Russia in 1991 in the crisis committees, I thought that I would offer you a brief, and by no means all-encompassing, snapshot of Russia in 1991 from people who were actually there when it happened.
What my mom remembers is the fact that no one could make it to my grandfather’s birthday; she also briefly recalls the tanks, to which she had a concerningly passive reaction. The day was August 20th and as always my general grandfather was having a feast; after all, you don’t turn 50 every day, nor do you get to celebrate only a day before the GKChP broadcast its declaration - followed by the infamous loop of Swan Lake - and armed forces entered the capital. Any and all information regarding what was going on was entirely cut off. The only way that people found out where to assemble was through a rogue broadcast played outside Parliament which launched people into action. Interestingly, the activity did not concern my mother in the slightest. In fact, she only gave the armoured personnel carriers standing on tramways a passing glance as she hurried past to her next date. My mom, who is a foremost critic of communist ideology and was the driving force behind our move from Russia to Canada, surprisingly took the uprising in stride and saw the secession of the various republics as a matter of course.
This nonchalant attitude was a stark contrast to the experience of my father, who being at the end of his two-year mandatory service, returned to a completely different country. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, he remembers the Soviet Union with a heavy tinge of nostalgia, as a country that he swore allegiance to which was irrevocably broken apart.
Despite the fact that we now see the emergence of the authoritative Russian Federation as a natural occurrence and inheritor of the authoritative USSR, it was not always so. There was hope and an overwhelming feeling that after years of stagnation, hypocrisy, and appalling inequality masked by communist propaganda, which no one really believed past the 60s, there could be change and that Russia would finally emerge as an accepted member of the international community, setting people free. Of course, all of this was dashed on the famine, internal strife, and rocketing crime rates that characterized the 90s in Russia. It is easy to disregard my parent's generation as artefacts of days gone by; they were, after all, born in a country that no longer graces any modern map. But despite the cynicism and disillusionment that has now permeated my parents and their entire generation, pushing some to immigration or hardcore nationalism, | want to remember the generation of dreamers, rebels, and romantics that were forever left behind on the tank-filled streets of Moscow and know that they were very much like us.