6 p. National Attitudes, focusing first on Russia, with Dmitry Olegovich Rogozin

Could Rogozin’s resolute character ever become the voice of Russia? What would that mean to the world? (Guest Post).

There are so many entry points into why Rogozin had a first-person view of the breakup of the Soviet Union. He had worked almost a decade at the Committee of Youth Organizations, the KMO.  “I loved my new job right from the start. The level of political responsibility of a young professional in the Committee of Youth Organizations was not inferior to that of a diplomat of a counselor rank, and the creative aspects of the job were far superior.” (3,500 words)

Formally, the Committee of Youth Organizations, set up during the Great Patriotic War under the name of “Anti-Fascist Committee of Soviet Youth” had been autonomous from the apparatus of the Central Committee of VLKSM.  I was accepted and immediately appointed a junior desk officer in the South Europe, the USA and Canada sector, assigned to work with European countries of my language specialty groups — Spain, Italy, and Portugal. The desk officer’s circle of responsibilities included the following: establishing personal contacts with potential “agents of Soviet influence” among young and promising politicians in the assigned countries; organizing and maintaining regular communication with the youth leagues of leading political parties;

__________

Let’s go to the events of August 1991. In the evening of 18 August 1991, I was at home finalizing the article that explained our position on the issue of the USSR preservation.  Instead of calculating possible and necessary measures to establish order and correct the past mistakes which had pushed the USSR to the edge, the incapable cowards of the GKCHP, (State Committee on the State of the Emergency), and government showed that they were afraid of their own shadows.  Under those circumstances, when the threat of elimination of the constitutional power became all too real, no steps, up to internment of the top Soviet and Russian Federation government officials represented by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and neutralization of their most aggressive aides, could have been deemed excessive.

But as life would have it, real men ceased to be in charge of the Communist Party a long time ago. Idealists and romantics of the past who led soldiers into battles by their own example and who honestly believed in the Communist utopia, and were ready to sacrifice their lives for the Motherland, were not listed among the Party nomenclature of the Yeltsins, Gorbachevs, Shevardnadzes and the like. The latter only wanted to save their own skins. They saw their purpose in clinging to power, and stealing from their country, bit by bit. 

I do not belong to the category of men that regard Stalin as “our everything”. In what way did the launch of the first space satellite and victory in the most atrocious war necessitate the physical destruction of one third of the opposition and the imprisonment of millions of “seemingly suspicious” people?  No, I am not at all inclined to downplay the gravity of Stalin’s atrocities. Neither am I keen on the ways of our modern “elite”, which are more noticeable when observed from a distance, or after some time away from Russia.

In those historic days of GKChP’s irresponsible demarcation I saw all kinds of people on the streets of Moscow. Unsuspecting of consequences, not knowing much about finesse of politics, people instinctively sensed that the power and the history belonged to Yeltsin now. The masses trusted Yeltsin and were ready to march under his banners. Many sincerely thought that Russian leaders — Yeltsin and Gorbachev — would manage to lead Russia out of the crisis and preserve the Soviet Union. As early as at dawn of 19 August, defenders of the Russian Supreme Soviet started to gather outside the parliamentary building on the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment. By the evening the crowd had grown, and in the morning of 20 August the square between the House of Congresses and the Pavlik Morozov Park was filled with hundreds of thousands of people.

By dawn I had finished the draft statement to be made by Mikhail Astafiev on behalf of the party at the rally next day. I chose the words carefully, but still, the final text came out overly emotional. That night I did not manage to get any sleep as if sensing the next day’s life changing events.

In the morning, the space around the House of Congresses was swarming. It was hard to tell exactly how many people gathered there, but they were definitely in the hundreds of thousands. Astafiev and I met at an agreed spot. I handed him the text of his statement that I had printed out that night, and we both started elbowing through the crowd towards the parliament’s entrance. To my surprise, Astafiev’s face was recognized by many (Oh the power of television!); he was greeted warmly and let through the crowd closer and closer to the coveted destination — the entrance to the parliament where a bottleneck of MPs had already formed. I followed Astafiev along the human corridor, trying not to fall behind my celebrity boss.

Militia could hardly keep the human flow into the building under control and gave preferential treatment to the actual deputies and the foreign press. For some reason, “the guardians of order” were not quite as favorable towards national journalists. “Representatives of the ancient profession” encircled the entrance, voicing their indignation.

I couldn’t believe my good luck — in the pocket of my leather jacket I found my Moscow International Press-club membership card. The membership had long expired, but I hoped that the militiamen were too busy to pay attention, especially, given that the membership card was worded in English. However, a young lieutenant took his time to study the document, despite the crowd and excitement around him. I felt it was time to take over, held out my hand to shake his, and said, “ Merci!” That seemed to do the trick, and in a blink of an eye “a French journalist” (me), was running up the stairs to the second floor, which led to the spacious balcony of the White House. On the balcony everything was set up for “revolutionary leaders” to address the crowd. The leaders showed up that very minute — President Yeltsin, Vice-President Rutskoy, and Chairman of Congress Khasbulatov. In a mere two years, these “leaders” would be ripping at each other’s throats over the division of power and would flood the streets of Moscow with puddles of blood of their supporters, not sparing random passers-by who’d get caught in the gunfire. But on that day, 20 August 1991, they stood together, and the human sea beneath them moved and hummed.

The balcony was over crowded but I still managed to get closer to the microphone. The brightest episode from the Russian uncertain times unfolded right in front of my eyes, and I was afraid to miss anything important. At last, Astafiev was called out to speak. Mikhail Georgievich pushed through the crowd towards the microphone, fixed his eyes on the text that I had written the night before, and read it out with great expression and diligence. I listened to the reaction of the crowd on the square. People met the speech with approval.

Some other important democrats spoke after my boss’ speech when suddenly the balcony went into motion; there were excited exclamations: “Shevardnadze! Shevardnadze!”; people on the balcony were stepping aside to make more space. The Grey Fox approached the microphone slowly, carrying himself with great dignity and conscious of the effect that he produced on others. The human corridor closed behind him, and, pushed from the back, I unexpectedly found myself right behind this man. Perhaps I was mistaken for one of his bodyguards due to my height and build. I cannot remember exactly what the freshly resigned Minister of Foreign Affairs was saying but I do remember what happened after his speech. The spokesman said good bye to “the Great Georgian”, turned around, spotted me and inquired, barely hiding his annoyance, “So, are you going to speak, or what?”

I do not know whom I was mistaken for at that time, but I reacted instantly and stepped out to the microphone. I started out quietly and without much confidence, but in just a few moments my voice started to sound firmer and firmer.

I felt like I had prepared for, expected, and sought this moment all my life. All my concerns for my huge and miserable country, for its future, hidden behind a thick fog, for its national integrity that we had to protect despite GKChP’s provocations and rebellions of national separatists — all the words that were so important to me came out of my mouth and fell into the waves of the human ocean. The crowd echoed my words, and, at that moment, it seemed that hundreds of thousands of people in the square in front of the Supreme Soviet were united into one wholesome nation. That day saw the awakening of a politician in me.

The speeches ended soon but the crowd did not dissipate. The euphoria was gone. What remained, was the uneasy expectation of the imminent climax.

It wasn’t until much later that we would learn of what was happening in the Kremlin, in Moscow City Council, in the Military Headquarters, and in the offices of Yeltsin and Khasbulatov. We will never learn what really happened there. But at the time it was the last thing on my mind. I swiftly made my way to the office of RAU, which was just five minutes’ walk from the White House, got on the phone and called all my friends and acquaintances. Soon we formed a volunteer squadron of about sixty people, all set to go to the building of the Supreme Soviet building for the evening and possibly night watch. By seven o’clock in the evening we arrived there in an organized fashion. The square was filling with people, just like in the morning. Like ants, people carried logs and some armature. Something resembling barricades were erected. Skips loaded with construction rubbish arrived under an instruction from the mayor’s office, loyal to Yeltsin.

The loads were immediately taken down by the ant-people. Apparently, someone rather smart commanded hundreds of people, thus setting an example to thousands.

I do not think that the heaps of construction rubbish around the building of the Supreme Soviet could withstand a Special Forces’ assault, should an order to storm the building be issued. The ring of desperate obstacles could not have stopped heavy artillery from coming close to the building and descending there. However, the mountains of metal and concrete would have definitely obstructed movements of thousands of people. In case of an offensive, the majority of “defenders of democracy” would have been trapped in the sack of their own making. In panic, masses of people would have crushed one another; such casualties would have been written off as victims of “the bloody regime”.

Who knows, that could have been Yeltsin’s exact plan, to call tens of thousands of Muscovites for the defense of “freedom and democracy”, thus building a human fortress around the building of Congress; then, using human shields, to give GKChP a choice either to storm the building, which would have meant a massacre of civilians right in front of global TV networks, or to give up the political initiative and shamefully surrender, acknowledging total fiasco.

Our group located next to entrance #24 by the Gorbaty (Hunch) Bridge. Trucks omitted from that area, and so there was a wide-open space in the improvised defense position. Without asking anyone, we lined up in a thick human chain along the glass windows by both sides of the entrance, and took the zone under our control. I gave my name to the armed militia guards and told them firmly that all security issues on this part of the building’s perimeter “in the defense sub-district assigned to me” were to be agreed upon with me. The militia officer nodded indicating that he understood.

In about one hour I exercised the authority that I had usurped so boldly. A rumor was spread that Special Forces intended to use gas. A group of drunken lads climbed up on one of the trucks and tried to tear off a piece of the Russian flag in order to wet the shreds and use them as masks. We could not let that happen and had to use physical force getting the guys out of the barricaded area. With this harsh and immediate restitution of order we demonstrated that random actions without our sanctioning would not be tolerated. Selective use of physical force in situations like these has a great educational effect. If those drunken youths did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent them; the diverse crowd, worn out by the long wait for an attack, needed a manifestation of some kind of order and authority.

I noticed the two processions among the masses of people moving about. One of them was the limousine of Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silayev. For him to pass through, we had to take down some of the barricades built by the “ants.” The other procession consisted of military men — senior officers. I noticed the tall, grim man among them — Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Ground Forces. That was my first sighting of General Lebed who was yet to play a significant part in my life. Much later, recalling the events of that night, Alexander Lebed said to me: “By supporting Yeltsin, we managed to avoid shedding floods of blood”. But this was not so. All the blood was yet to be shed. The violent collapse of the USSR claimed hundreds of thousands of human lives. The civilian conflicts in ✓Transniestria, ✓Abkhazia, ✓South Ossetia, and the ✓two Chechen wars were conceived on that warm night, when GKChP grumbled impotently, and both the Army and the KGB refused to carry out its orders.

As the curfew hour ordered by GKChP to be at 23:00 approached, the tension in the square rose. I kept glancing at my watch, as people usually do around festive tables on a New Year’s Eve waiting for the clock to strike midnight. When arrows indicated 23:00, we spontaneously hugged one another. Everybody was happy and resolved to fight till the end. For the first time in my life I, the son of a Soviet general, “a golden youth”, crudely overstepped the bounds of the old life and broke curfew! That was a point of no return.

Loud speakers were installed from the White House onto the buzzing square. They broadcast the news on an independent radio station Echo of Moscow, exhilarant speeches of deputies and visiting “prominent intellectuals”, as well as emotional chattering of young journalists from the TV programme Vzglyad (Glance).

My impression was that they all were intoxicated with adrenaline from their own statements that periodically seeded panic in the square. News that “tanks and APCs breached the first echelon of our line of defense on the Kalininsky prospect” and the like, combined with machine-gun fire that we were hearing from the distance in the direction of Sadovoe (Garden) Ring, caused an unhealthy commotion among demonstrators. When the radio of the Supreme Soviet reported that there were casualties as a direct result of a clash between the Army and demonstrators, the tension reached its climax. Any sound would have been taken for a sound of a shotgun, any whisper — for a scream.

If anyone suddenly “detected” silhouettes of soldiers on approach, rumors of that traveled momentarily along the human chains, with “observations and information” added along the way. Suspiciousness towards anyone who could cause suspicion, at least in theory, rose along with the overall tension. As I was head of a squadron, people regularly came up to me, dragging along the captured “discovered KGB agents”. The “insurgents” demonstrated miracles of security awareness in those hours of the Great Night Watch, and in some cases the “agents” had been beaten up a little. In order to calm down the night-watchers, each time we “arrested” those passers-by and onlookers, led them out of the danger zone, and let them walk free. I have no idea why those poor things were brought to me. Maybe, because of the way we had treated the banner thieves earlier, my comrades and I turned into some kind of SMERSH-2 . I don’t know. It was neither the time, nor the place for jokes.

Every now and again, new incidents occurred in the square. In the parking area a light burst in a lamppost, causing real panic. Everyone assumed the attack had begun. People scattered in all directions, crashing into one another. Thank God, there were no victims.

Recalling the events of August 1991 now, I come to the conclusion that a tragedy is not always repeated as a farce in history. The opposite is also true. The ambiguous and incoherent escapade of GKChP; the farcical false arrest of Gorbachev and his voluntary imprisonment in his Crimean residency in Foros; the “heroic defense” of the White House — all this was a farce. The suicides of Marshall Akhromeyev and Minister of Internal Affairs Boris Pugo (they were practically the only two decent individuals in the Perestroika government and could not bear the shame of their defeat); the arrests of key GKChP members (only one of whom, general Valentin Ivanovich Varennikov, did not make use of the declared amnesty but instead waited for his trial, at which he was acquitted); deaths of three young people in a pointless clash with heavy machinery during the endless night from 20 to 21 August — none of these events could change the operetta reputation of 1991 coup-d’etat. But for my friends and me, the coup was the first political experience, and a priceless one.

It was August 1991 that had fully revealed Gorbachev’s cowardice, Yeltsin’s cunning nature, and the readiness of both to sacrifice their country’s future and their people’s lives for their own power dispute. I think that those days had also divided the huge human ocean by the walls of the Supreme Soviet. People who took the collapse of their massive country with a sense of great loss stayed on one shore; on the other shore settled the foam of party officials, and it was they who managed to get hold of the power and the assets of the agonizing USSR.

So, what was Perestroika, initiated by Gorbachev and killed off by the GKChP Decree? Was it a revolution in people’s minds, a search for a national identity, an awakening of our own national identity in the peoples of the USSR, or was it a manifestation of chaos inside the Party bosses’ minds? The answer is neither the first, nor the second, nor the third. And it is most definitely not the fourth.

Perestroika was the fruit of the nomenclature — the Communist bureaucracy that wished to maintain its power and control over state assets in the environment of chaos and disintegration. The bureaucracy needed a peaceful overturn that would have excused the usurpation of state assets and portrayed the ongoing as an inevitable consequence of social calamities on a larger scale. To destabilize the country, experienced manipulators directed the wave of ethnic chauvinism (hate) toward the USSR — gigantic masses of people were consciously set in motion, the process that remained under manipulators’ control at all times. Then at the crucial moment, these manipulators promoted themselves as “national leaders”, using their unlimited administrative power as well as their control over mass media and state finances. The Old System did not die — it merely changed its façade.

Yeltsin so easily outplayed his opponents in August 1991! Would his triumphant stroll for power have been possible without the nomenclature’s support while entrenched in the Moscow Mayor’s office? Or without the criminal solidarity with his actions on the part of the Communist bureaucracy that sat around in the Smolny Palace in Leningrad, in the Kazan Kremlin, in Russia’s regional and local administrative offices, not to mention the hosts of the Republican presidential residencies in Kiev, Tbilisi, Ashkhabad, Almaty, Tashkent, Dushanbe?

And could Yeltsin have acted so confidently without the silent approval of his influential foreign advisers? If the CPSU governing body really wanted to preserve the Great Empire, there would have been no place for Yeltsin and his circle in the Empire’s history. They simply would not have existed.

August 1991 had a profound influence on the course of my life. I suddenly realized that I, too, could influence my environment. I felt that I possessed the qualities of a leader. While observing Yeltsin and his retinue, I glanced inside the abyss of political cynicism and averted my eyes in disgust. For the first time ever, I came to believe in the power of public speaking, the strength of national vigor, and the importance of initiative in politics. That was when I resolved to have my own destiny always connected with the fate of my nation.

.