All that Is Soviet Melts into Air
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
All that Is Soviet Melts into Air The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons By Mikhail S. Gorbachev HarperCollins. 127pp. $18.00. Mikhail Gorbachev: The Origins of Perestroika By Michel...
...If the people won't obey and the troops won't shoot, power, like the Emperor's new clothes, is nonexistent...
...Chiesa has an answer: "The coup d'?©tat...
...Gorbachev and Ligachev, working together in the initial disciplinarian phase of perestro??ka, brought Yeltsin to Moscow in April 1985 and turned him loose to attack the corruption and privileges of the Communist bureaucracy...
...But as Roxburgh reminds us, Gorbachev's entanglement in these Soviet roots is undeniable: "In all three main policy areas...
...Yeltsin was at his best during the crisis, rallying resistance to the plotters and using his military contacts to shake the will of the Armed Forces...
...Gorbachev comes across as a very sincere man who initiated monumental changes but ultimately could not overcome his own limitations...
...At the time, Tatu admitted painting "a very flattering portrait" of the champion of perestroika, "who helped the Soviet Union to get back on course, who made socialism more human," indeed was "a sort of Dubcek...
...Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak...
...Perhaps the Communist Party could finally fall only at the hand of a charismatic ex-Communist using Communist methods...
...Yanaev, can you tell me what is the state of your own health...
...20.00...
...Like many instant analyses, TheSecond Russian Revolution occasionally goes overboard...
...the half-blind efforts of the Congress to work out parliamentary procedures and mobilize its clout to tackle government scandals...
...Tracing the Soviet President's decline into compromise and impotence once he abandoned Stanislav Shatalin's "500 Days" plan to marketize the economy, Sobchak offers a novel conclusion: Gorbachev, "accustomed to working among the time-servers of the Party pyramid," began to feel threatened by his reformminded lieutenants as they increased their power...
...Actually, The August Coup is only a slightly reworked compilation of the former Soviet President's statements during and just after the event, plus a hitherto unpublished article he was working on at the time the plotters sequestered him in his Crimean dacha...
...Tomorrow a power without consent and without any future will have to decide whether to turn to armed struggle...
...the investigations of the April 1989 Tbilisi massacre (chaired by Sobchak himself...
...235pp...
...Tatu's Mikhail Gorbachev has now been translated and includes an Epilogue that conveys a very different estimate...
...These are quite un-Russian traits, yet they appear to explain his popularity, as well as his negotiating skill and his contribution to the mechanics of the new parliamentary system...
...Sobchak comments on Gorbachev and Yeltsin evenhandedly, but it is clear that for him the real hero of the Soviet era is Andrei Sakharov...
...his blunders in dealing with the Armenians and the Baltic republics...
...The six-part series was broadcast in the U.S...
...Meanwhile, everyone wondered if the Russian President, who had not yet shown himself, would escape arrest by the troops surrounding the building...
...Nonetheless, there are a host of other impressive figures who won repute at the same time that Yeltsin was making a comeback in his 1989 election to the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR...
...Stubborn, overbearing, self-assured, honest, irresistible, a human engine without brakes...
...At Gorbachev's press conference following his return, Chiesa boldly asked the Soviet President why he had initially appointed the conservatives who later turned against him...
...How will President Gorbachev react when he is told that the decree is the only way to stop the Army from acting independently, as well as keep his power, especially if he is reminded that his prestige abroad can ensure that the West will prove understanding and alio w a return to naked power, since he is the only person capable of explaining to Bush, Mitterrand and Major that the putsch is not illegal and that it is certainly a regrettable parenthesis on the way to perestroikaV Another veteran journalist, Giulietto Chiesa, enjoyed a unique degree of highlevel access in Moscow as the longtime correspondent of the Rome Communist daily L'Unit...
...The Soviet Union is finished," the author declared well before Yeltsin proclaimed the fact in December...
...How could the Communist dictatorship, still embodied in the institutions commanded by the coup leaders, have toppled so abruptly and totally merely because those individuals decided to tighten up a bit and present Gorbachev with the demands that Tatu foresaw...
...The whole repressive machine collapsed upon itself, revealing fearful splits in its apparent solidity...
...the political system, the economy, and interethnic relations, Gorbachev's vision seemed to stop some way short of the measure needed to complete the revolution he began...
...The bulk of Boris Yeltsin is devoted to an enlightened narrative of the politics of 1989 and 1990, reinforcing the impressionin The Second Russian Revolution of skulduggery in every quarter...
...Yet even today he remains something of an enigma: Is he a savior or a menace...
...But Chiesa hesitated to predict what would emerge, not foreseeing the apparent resurrection of the Union in Yeltsin's Commonwealth model...
...So it was on the morning of August 21: The KGB had not attacked the White House, the curfew had not been enforced, and the populace ranged the streets at will...
...Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat By John Morrison Dutton...
...Rather, it is a psychological substance, resting on a delicate interplay of perceptions between ruler and ruled: Like beauty, it exists mostly in the eye of the beholder...
...The August coup, like the Chernobyl disaster, was "an explosion that was both inevitable and avoidable," yet Gorbachev ignored the warning signs...
...Sobchak is equally a man of action: In his Afterword on the August coup he becomes his own hero, stiffening Yeltsin in Moscow, then hurrying back to Leningrad to shame the local military into distancing itself from the usurpers...
...Chiesa, his wife Fiammetta Cucurnia of La Repubblica, and Pilar Bonet of Madrid's El Pais were the only foreigners present as Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov rushed in to read Yeltsin's appeal to the people...
...155 pp...
...Cronaca del golpe rosso, not yet slated for publication in this country, consists of Chiesa's unrevised notes and his dispatches to La Stampa during the coup and the three weeks following, plus a Preface and an Afterword...
...Most intellectuals distrust him...
...22.95...
...the next decade was mostly desperate expediency, and Stalinism was cynical gangsterism...
...John Morrison, a former Moscow correspondent for Reuters, has attempted to provide an independent assessment of the man who appears to have stolen Gorbachev's scepter and made himself the leader of whatever will finally replace the Soviet Union...
...Although the Soviet President tried to hang on afterward, he inadvertently sealed his own doom when he forced the Congress of Deputies to "commit suicide" last September...
...191 pp...
...Gorbachev was then preoccupied with mollifying the conservatives who were resisting reform...
...Gorbachev was "the Louis XVI of the second Soviet revolution," he writes...
...The Second Russian Revolution: The Struggle for Power in the Kremlin By Angus Roxburgh BBC Books...
...The book leads off with the dramatic emergency meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Supreme Soviet, held in the Moscow "White House" on Monday, August 19...
...Ironically, the step cut out from under him the political support that might have enabled him to counter Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and the movement to dissolve the Union...
...We live in a country where the ideological framework remains long after ideological content has vanished...
...Considering his peasant background and career progress through the Party, Yeltsin was remarkably similar to his age-mate Gorbachev, even if it took the Russian President a decade longer to reach the top...
...Yeltsin, despite his shortcomings, has come to personify in Western minds the democratic opposition to Gorbachev and to the revival of any form of the old Communist regime...
...Only in the last two years," he confesses, "have I fully realized the value of private life and personal freedom...
...Gorbachev evaded the question...
...303 pp...
...Petersburg's Own Story of the Struggle for Justice and Democracy By Anatoly Sobchak Free Press...
...But Morrison makes no bones about Yeltsin's weaknesses...
...The qualities in Sobchak that come through as most impressive are his reasonableness and his moderation...
...At bottom, Morrison feels, is "the Russian question...
...More recently he has been covering Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for La Stampa of Turin...
...Chiesa is a daring observer, and his volume contains many valuable insights...
...This blow to his pride seems to have governed his relations with Gorbachev ever since...
...Michel Tatu, Le Mond?©'s famed Moscow correspondent, offered an assessment of some of those changes in a short study of Gorbachev published in France in 1988, midway through the former Soviet leader's tenure...
...Here his writing almost echoes Leon Trotsky on himself in 1917, but Sobchak wants no "witchhunt" and bluntly warns, "Opposition to totalitarianism must confront the danger of new totalitarian structures replacing the old...
...AmasterKremlinologjst, Tatu concentrated on Gorbachev's rise through the Party bureaucracy and his efforts to shake it up with glasnost and alterations in the rules, despite an entrenched opposition that limited him to achieving gradual gains...
...Chiesa is perhaps best known to American readers as the coauthor of Time of Change, with the former Marxist dissident Roy Medvedev...
...As the failed coup proved, political power does not rest on vast organizations or derive solely from the mouth of agun, contrary to Mao Zedong...
...his war on two fronts with Yeltsin and the conservatives at the Central Committee plenum of October 1987...
...Like all historic occurrences, the attempted takeover immediately set off an avalanche of journalistic and I-was-there accounts...
...Gorbachev'sversionof the three-day affair made news when HarperCollins paid him a reported $500,000 advance for it...
...Russia's "dual history as both empire and nation-state...
...truly a tragic figure...
...backed by forces that had struck fear into the entire West ??”was defeated in the course of three days, almost without fighting...
...In a fateful episode that Morrison has curiously omitted, Yeltsin was conspicuously passed over for a promotion from alternate to full member of the Politburo in June 1987...
...and Ryzhkov's role in turning Gorbachev away from economic reform into the arms of the future putschists...
...In the aftermath, he adroitly identified himself with the winning issues of democracy and independence for the republics, adding much free market rhetoric and a touch of religion for good measure...
...Clearly the real winner to emerge from the August coup was Boris Yeltsin...
...218 pp...
...20.00...
...14.00...
...and the victorious struggle of the "Interregional Group" of deputies to repeal the special constitutional status of the Communist Party...
...While acknowledging Gorbachev's central role up to 1989, the year his power began to wane, Morrison retells the story of perestroika from Yeltsin's viewpoint, believing this "may in the long run prove more helpful in understanding the turbulent events of the past few years...
...Lenin's "experiment" lasted at best a year...
...He went on: "Your action is anticonstitutional...
...The story of the demise of Soviet Communism turns above all on the mysterious issue of power...
...Mikhail Gorbachev: The Origins of Perestroika By Michel Tatu Translated by A. P. M. Bradley Columbia...
...He recounts the utter confusion in the 1989 elections, including the success of reformers in winning Congress seats through technically undemocratic "public organizations...
...Gorbachev puts great stress on the September session of the Congress of People's Deputies, when he persuaded the representatives to surrender their power to a new government dominated by the individual republics...
...Regarding the USSR's Stalinist past, he writes, "It was the model of socialism that we had in our country which proved a failure, and not the socialist idea itself...
...Once this point was reached, nothing could preserve the Communist Party and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...
...Originally a TV series produced by Brian Lapping Associates in 1990, The Second Russian Revolution incorporated unprecedented interviews with virtually every top leader of the perestroika era: ex-Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, ex-Politburo liberal Aleksandr N. Yakovlev, ex-conservative chieftain Yegor K. Ligachev, ex-neo-Stalinist apparatchik Viktor V. Grishin, eight former Politburo members, including Yeltsin, and many key aides...
...At one point, theCommunist system is described as a 70-year "experiment" to "mold a new kind of human being" in "the largest laboratory test in history...
...The Crimean article and similar postcoup comments gain poignancy in the light of the subsequent collapse of the central government...
...To the emergency session of the Supreme Soviet held upon his return to Moscow Gorbachev affirmed "the idea of socialism...
...Does your program at least include convening the Supreme Soviet...
...For a New Russia: The Mayor of St...
...those who hesitated...
...Sobchak's political philosophy is similar to Yeltsin's, but more reflective and convincing...
...Angus Roxburgh, the London Sunday Times Moscow correspondent for much of the period since 1985, wrote his The Second Russian Revolution as a companion piece to the TV production, drawing on the interviews and placing them in perspective...
...Though written before the coup, the postscript foreshadows it: "Let us hazard a guess...
...who sent the coup to its downfall...
...his authoritarian and abrasive personality," his "impulsiveness and a prickly sensitivity to real or imagined insults...
...Among these, one has stood out in Russian eyes as a natural leader for the future, the former Leningrad law professor, now Mayor of St...
...When he overreached, Ligachev began to conspire against him...
...Yeltsin, having won the leadership of the Russian Republic, could prevail only by advocating sovereignty for all the republics...
...Gorbachev, in contrast, needed to preserve the Union to safeguard his job...
...Actually, the history of the period can be written as a contest between the gradualist Gorbachev and the radical Yeltsin, a duel heightened by personal rivalry and bitterness as well as a widening philosophical gulf...
...Still, as Morrison observes, of all the players in the Kremlin game Yeltsin had the best sense of the logic of history...
...After Gennadi I. Yanaev alleged Gorbachev's illness in the opening statement of the coup leaders' televised press conferenceMonday afternoon, Chiesaasked the first question: "Mr...
...last September on the Discovery Channel, and was followed by a hastily-prepared sequel, A natomy of a Coup...
...born in the innards of the Communist Party, the beacon and guide for decades of an international movement of colossal proportions...
...Some time in 1991 or even later, the situation has become so chaotic that a delegation of highranking officers and top conservative officials meets the President to beg him to restore order...
...By refusing this restraint, "Gorbachev won tactically, but lost strategically...
...They have prepared a decree to declare a state of emergency...
...an idea which embraces values developed in the course of a search for a juster society and a better world...
...the behind-thescenes story of the neo-Stalinist "Andreyeva" letter of March 1988, encouraged by Ligachev (as Chiesa was the first to report...
...Its sponsors lay down their arms and fled in panic when they realized that the country would not follow them...
...He is also the author of a political analysis of the Congress of People's Deputies that will soon appear in English...
...28.50...
...Dashing aroundMoscow, Chiesa was one of the first to sense the hesitancy of the plotters: "The putschists appear uncertain, they don't seem to have a plan, they don't have any prospects without letting a river of blood flow, without repeating a Tiananmen of monstrous proportions...
...lasovi?©tique...
...Where this will lead Russia is, of course, another matter...
...When the Congress debated the Soviet presidency in March 1990, Sobchak defended strong governmental and Party powers for Gorbachev, so long as they lasted only until he was popularly elected under a new constitution...
...MikhailS...
...As a look inside the Soviet democratization process Sobchak's For a New Russia (completed in December 1990, with an Epilogue and an Afterword that takes it through the August coup) has no peer...
...The old ideas, he says, are simply dead weight...
...This arrangement, though, was dictatedbythe politics of their rivalry...
...Unlike any previous incident in the Soviet Union, however, it has also produced public commentaries and confidences by the highest leaders involved...
...how Gorbachev rammed through the democratization of the Constitution in the closing minutes of the Party conference in June 1988, and executed his coup of September 30,1988, when he crippled the Ligachev opposition...
...The Lapping-Roxburgh material is full of remarkable revelations and significant details about major developments between 1985 and 1990: how Gorbachev won the General Secretaryship of the Communist Party by one vote...
...those thousands and thousands of waverers...
...Another work of unusual perspicacity is the fruit of a spectacular yet unsung BBC journalistic triumph...
...Andmore emphatically, "I want to make a special point of praising...
...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor Emeritus of History, University of Vermont Rarely has a brief event arrested the world's attention the way the abortive Communist coup in Moscow did last August...
...He finds it paradoxical that Gorbachev chose the role of imperialist and Yeltsin that of the Russian nationalist...
...Nevertheless, the book is a useful compendium enlivened by several dramatic highlights, above all Gorbachev's description of his house arrest and of how he made a secret videotape to preserve his case for history...
...On the other hand, his courage, tactical adroitness and popularity (particularly among "middle-aged Russian women," Morrison notes) cannot be denied...
...as he distrusts them ??”although he is a quick study...
...Morrison quotes the writer Vladimir Bukovsky discussing his first glimpse of Yeltsin on TV: "Atypical Bolshevik, aBolshevik straight out of central casting...
...Yeltsin's record since the coup supports such concerns: He has displayed a penchant for rule by decree, reliance on his old Communist cronies from Sverdlovsk, centralization of power through his own agents in the provinces, and surprises like the Commonwealth...
...Cronaca del golpe rosso (Chronicle of the Red Coup) By Giulietto Chiesa Baldini & Castoldi...
...Sobchak recognized this truth when he wrote that the putschists might easily have prevailed "if the people had remainedsilent...
...the militia and KGB personnel, soldiers and officers...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
