The Russian Revolution

By LANCE MORROW

An abyss opened for a moment, and black bats flew out. They filled the air with old nightmares, throwbacks to a style of history that the world had been forgetting. The Soviet Union was seized by a sinister anachronism: its dying self. Men with faces the color of a sidewalk talked about a "state of emergency." They rolled in tanks and told stolid lies. The world imagined another totalitarian dusk, cold war again, and probably Soviet civil war as well. If Gorbachev was under arrest, who had possession of the nuclear codes?

Three days: then the bats of history abruptly turned, flew back and vanished into the past. By act of will and absence of fear, the Russian people accomplished a kind of miracle, the reversal of a thousand years of autocracy.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, the brilliant, bitter memoirist of the Stalin era, wrote in the early '70s: "Evil has great momentum, but the forces of good are inert. The masses . . . have no fight in them, and will acquiesce in whatever happens." Until last week the Russian character was judged to be politically passive, even receptive to brutal rule. At first the coup seemed to confirm the norm. The news administered a dark shock, followed immediately by a depressed sense of resignation: of course, of course, the Russians must revert to their essential selves, to their own history. Gorbachev and glasnost were the aberration; now we are back to fatal normality. "Every country has the government it deserves," Joseph de Maistre wrote in 1811.

Now, after 74 years of communist dictatorship and, centuries before that, of czarist autocracy, the Russians may get a government they have earned -- a democracy. For the first time, they did not subside into an acceptance of overlords. Instead they turned last week's reactionary coup into a transforming rite of passage, an epochal event that forced even Gorbachev to re-examine his most basic beliefs and resign his post as head of the Communist Party.

Citizens poured into the streets, determined, methodical and -- the biggest change in a Russian experience suffused with a genius for official terror -- astonishingly unafraid. They defied the junta's curfew, built barricades around the Russian Parliament Building, where Boris Yeltsin had organized his resistance. They had absorbed something about people power from Prague, Berlin, even Vilnius. A crowd of Muscovites brought a column of armored personnel carriers (APCs) to a halt, stuffing rosebuds and wildflowers into gun barrels. A line of women stood ready to face down troops with a single banner: SOLDIERS: DON'T SHOOT MOTHERS AND SISTERS. Clearly the soldiers had orders not to use force. One of a dozen soldiers who marched to the central telegraph office on Tverskaya Street, when confronted by outraged Muscovites, showed them that the clip of his automatic weapon was empty. When the tanks did move, people were ready with gasoline-filled bottles (named, of course, after the old Stalinist V.M. Molotov). Tank drivers, even paratroop commanders, defected to the resistance. Miners went on strike.

With all of that, the people of Russia last week purchased their freedom and citizenship. They abolished serfdom in Soviet political life. The event is one of the turning points of world history, proclaiming the end of a totalitarianism that has destroyed so much of the 20th century.

The course of the coup was surreal. Has television, which helped unravel the putsch, come to enforce its own brief attention span upon history? Recent great events -- the breakup of Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf war, the failure of the coup -- seem to be enacting themselves in shorter and shorter time frames. Three days last week undid 10 centuries of civic dormancy. It is possible that the world is dividing between blood feuders and channel changers. The blood feuders, like zealots in Ireland or the Middle East, cannot forget revenge, even over many years; the impatient channel changers of the electronic age favor fast-paced, variable and possibly shallow new realities. The old communists are blood feuders. The new Russians are channel changers.

The Gang of Eight was caught between the feud and the change. Its coup looked like Stalin's ruthlessness written on the fifth carbon, a smudgy, illegible piece of work. It was fitting that stupidity should be a prevailing theme. An oafish brainlessness has for decades hung over the Soviet communist venture like one of Nikita Khrushchev's suits. Its secret has never been intelligence but rather ruthlessness. The cardinal rule of coupmaking, says Edward Luttwak of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, is "to seize control of all the centers of power in one fell swoop, to paralyze the situation." Even banana republics know this. The Gang of Eight was inexplicably though mercifully inept. Perhaps the conspirators picked up some debilitatingly humane manners during the Gorbachev era. They did not launch a coup but proffered a sort of half-coup, saying complimentary things about Gorbachev and holding out the possibility of working with him again. The Gang was a bit like an assassin named Karakozov, who tried to shoot Czar Alexander II in 1866, missed, and is said to have shouted to bystanders as the police led him away, "Fools! I did it for you!"

The biggest mistake the Emergency Committee made was not to kill both Gorbachev and Yeltsin. But the plotters craved constitutional legitimacy for their illegitimate act and could not bring themselves to be ruthless about it. "They may have had Leninist nostalgia," says Luttwak, "but they didn't have a Leninist temperament -- which is to shoot the bastards."

Many ineptitudes: tyranny does its best work in the dark, and information is often more powerful than guns. But the committee did not grasp that rudiment either. It did not shut down the country's television, telephones and other communications with the rest of the world. Or maybe it could not have done so anyway, so pervasive, adaptable and versatile are the electronic instruments of our age.

More broadly, the cabal failed because it was an old-style coup in a new- style society. The Russian people have been transformed over a period of years. They are not the Russians whom Bertrand Russell was talking about when he justified Bolshevik despotism by saying "If you ask yourself how Dostoyevsky's characters should be governed, you will understand." The new Soviets owe much of their transformation and fearlessness to Gorbachev -- and by last week they were using that freedom to outgrow him.

Independent power centers have taken hold in the new Soviet Union. There are republic leaders, legitimately elected mayors, legislators, independent journalists. The society is too various and too well educated for rulers to control in the old Stalinist way. Russians are not, as Marx called them, "rude Asiatics." Blair Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, has observed, "There has been a general trend throughout the postwar period toward increasing education, urbanization and professionalization of the labor force. Those trends bring with them different attitudes toward authority and a greater desire to control one's destiny. It's not the same society it was a generation ago."

The Soviet military-security apparatus tried to use ominously rumbling, fume-belching columns of tanks and APCs to bring Moscow to submission, but proved no more potent than the Wizard of Oz. The communist system by last week had reached such an advanced state of debility that the brain was no longer capable of sending commands to the limbs. What most Soviets will remember about "Acting President" Gennadi Yanayev is his trembling hands as he tried to explain himself on television.

The coup was not necessarily doomed to failure. Many millions of Soviet citizens did not demonstrate against the takeover, but sat back, awaiting the outcome. If other conspirators try again to overthrow the government, they will have learned some lessons from August 1991. They will not make the same mistakes. Suppose the plotters had killed Gorbachev and Yeltsin, found army units to invade the Parliament Building, locked up the country's media, communications, airports and roads . . . The outcome might have been infinitely messier and more dangerous, both for the Soviets and for the world. And a spirit of vindictiveness against all communists may still come to haunt the land.

But the event is probably irrevocable. Russian history is a progression of false dawns, from Catherine the Great to Peter the Great to the Bolshevik Revolution to the Khrushchev thaw. Last week's looked like the real thing.

With reporting by John Kohan/Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington