(MOSCOW) – Russian newspapers are marking the 35th anniversary of the August 1991 coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with a range of conflicting interpretations, reflecting a nation still grappling with its history. The failed putsch by hardliners, which lasted three days, is remembered by some as a betrayal and by others as a doomed attempt to save the USSR.
The events of August 1991 were triggered when citizens turned on their televisions to find an unscheduled broadcast of the ballet “Swan Lake” and news of a new authority, the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP). The committee had seized power in a bid to halt Gorbachev’s reforms.
Thirty-five years on, public memory of the event has largely faded. In Moscow, a monument to the three people killed during the coup, known as the Monument to the Defenders of Democracy, receives little attention.
However, the anniversary has generated significant column space in Russian papers, revealing that the Kremlin has not fostered a definitive national consensus on the events. On one hand, the coup leaders claimed they were trying to save the Soviet Union, the collapse of which dictator Vladimir Putin has called a “geopolitical catastrophe.” On the other hand, the very idea of senior officials staging a coup against their leader is a precedent the current Kremlin would not wish to encourage.
Various perspectives are presented in the press. In Komsomolskaya Pravda, Sergei Stipassen, who headed a parliamentary commission investigating the coup, is quoted as saying, “A coup is a coup. They usurped power.” Conversely, an investigator in Moskovsky Komsomolets suggests the coup leaders acted in a “bad way, but their intentions were pure,” as they were trying to preserve the Soviet Union.
Others place blame externally. Ultranationalist writer Alexander Prokhanov in Argumenty i Fakty describes the GKChP as “the final act of a giant special operation to destroy the Soviet Union,” a “powerful provocation by the enemy we now call the collective West or NATO.” This contrasts with a view in Komsomolskaya Pravda, which states, “We are to blame for our own calamities. We brought the country to collapse.”
The government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta reflects on the event, stating that “time will judge what those days meant for us.” It notes that for some it was “treachery and betrayal,” while for others, it was “an attempt to preserve the country they served.” The paper speculates on the consequences of a successful coup, concluding that the leaders, who “lived their whole lives in the Cold War,” were “objectively heading towards Stalin.”
The article observes that Russia today has become the very thing the coup leaders intended: an authoritarian state. It points to the rehabilitation of Stalin and the erection of new statues, noting that “a liberal democracy, modern Russia is not.”
The press review concluded with a joke from Komsomolskaya Pravda about large-scale job losses in the health sector, leading a local clinic to hire a single “ear, nose, throat, eye, heart, kidney neurologist, tooth doctor.”
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