MOSCOW — Twenty years ago today, communist hard-liners staged a coup here, sending tanks rumbling to the Russian White House in an effort to preserve the Soviet Union. Instead, they touched off a powerful expression of democracy.
Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president in Russia’s thousand years, galvanized the resistance when he climbed atop one of the tanks and called on citizens to defend the freedoms he had promised to deliver. They mounted the barricades, unarmed, willing to risk their lives for democracy. The coup leaders lost their nerve. A few months later, the Soviet Union was dead.
All these years later, so is democracy.
Today, Vladimir Putin presides over an authoritarian government in that same White House, a bulky 20-story skyscraper on the edge of the Moscow River. Occasional demonstrations in favor of democracy are small and largely ignored, except by the police.
Those who defended the White House thought they had changed the course of history, that in standing up so assertively, the people had shaken off their Soviet subservience to the state and that the state would begin to serve the people. But today, elections are not fair, courts are not independent, political opposition is not tolerated and the reformers are widely blamed for what has gone wrong.
“The difference is this,” said Georgy Satarov, president of the INDEM Foundation and a former Yeltsin aide. “Then, people had hope. Now, they are disappointed and frustrated.”
Yeltsin’s voters wanted him to take them in a new direction, said Satarov, but the operative word was take.
“We saw the old train was taking us in the wrong direction,” he said, “but we thought all we had to do was change the conductor and we would have comfortable seats and good food. Democracy would take us where we wanted to go, not our own effort. Sometimes you have to get off and push.”
Citizens still speak, but few listen
Today, Russia works on bribes, and Putin’s opponents call his party the party of crooks and thieves. People can say whatever they want — unlike in Soviet times, when they feared the secret police knocking in the middle of the night — but television is controlled, and any opposition is publicly invisible.
“They cannot let people on television who will say Putin is a thief,” said Igor Klyamkin, a scholar and vice president of the Liberal Mission Foundation.
Many Russians despair about their country, its prospects and their own, but they say little and do less. Not Satarov, whose life’s work is researching and writing about that corruption.
“During the last 300 years, there has never been such an inefficient government,” he said. “The state is disappearing because those who have the job description of working for the state have much more important things to do. The problem is, the more they steal, the more they fear losing power.”
In 1991, there were leaders who could inspire people to act, he says. “Now there are none, and anything can happen.”
Only a tiny percentage of the population takes part in civil society, about 1.5 or 2 percent, at the level of statistical error.
“Now, we can speak as much as we want,” said Sergei Kanayev, head of the Moscow office of the Russian Federation of Car Owners, “but they don’t listen. It’s useless and very sad.”
Nostalgia for Soviet era
For years the Levada Center, an independent polling and analytical group, has been studying Russian political and social behavior, watching disillusionment with democracy set in.
“At the end of the 1980s, anything to do with the Soviet system was reviled,” said Boris Dubin, Levada’s director of sociopolitical studies. “Then people lost everything in the economic upheaval of 1992 and 1993. They lost all of their savings. They were threatened with unemployment. There was a bigger gap between the more successful and the less successful, and this was very painful for anyone brought up in Soviet times.”
Instead of blaming the legacy of the unsustainable Soviet economy, Russians blamed the reformers. Democracy began to acquire a dubious reputation.
Long-entrenched interests proved more difficult to subdue than coup plotters. The old legislature, still sympathetic to the bloated industries sustained on a rich diet of state subsidies, opposed many reforms and refused to disband. Yeltsin turned his own tanks on them as they holed up in the White House in 1993, traumatizing the nation. Later he made what he would describe as his biggest mistake, sending tanks into separatist Chechnya in 1994.
“Yeltsin lost the support of most people,” Dubin said. “There was a question of whether he could win the next election in 1996, and he dropped democratic tools step by step, drawing closer to the power structures.”
By the end of the 1990s, many were feeling nostalgic for Soviet times.
“They wanted a young, strong leader who could create order,” Dubin said. “So most were ready for Putin, and they did not think they should be frightened because he was a man of the power structure,” the former KGB.
Putin used state-controlled TV to relentlessly send the message that life was better and Russia stronger under him than it was in the 1990s. When he restored the old Soviet anthem, people hummed right along.
The next presidential election is in March, and Putin has not declared who will run — the decision is considered his.
