A History of Modern Russia
499 words, 1 image 
I previously mentioned that I’ve been reading about Russia. Specifically, I got Robert Service’s A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Putin from the library.
Early on, the book apologises for, or at least provides justification for, its concentration on politics. I’d like to find a book that concentrates a little more on the folk history — what it was actually like to live in Russia in the various periods discussed. Of course, Russia is so vast and varied that it’s impossible to know everything: life on a State farm would have been very different to life working in a steel foundry, or as a city dweller.
If you’ve a sketchy understanding of the Bolshevic revolution, or the Stalin era, it makes stark reading. Thousands die in a sentence. The author hasn’t room to afford more attention than that, such is the scale of atrocity.
Although I knew that the fall of the USSR was important politically, I had not expected any genuine drama from Brezhnev onwards. I was dead wrong, and here’s the crazy story that makes me wrong.
In August 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev was the Soviet president, and Boris Yeltsin was the president of Russia. Gorbachev was on holiday at his dacha on the Black Sea. A group of Communist traditionalists calling themselves the State Emergency Committee chose this moment to attempt a coup. They placed Gorbachev under house arrest in his holiday home, assumed control of the military, and held a press conference to announce that they had taken power.
Here’s where it gets dramatic: Boris Yeltsin gets in his car and races to Moscow and the Russian parliament building known as The White House. He and his associates prepare for a siege. The State Emergency Committee haven’t thought to institute any sort of communications blackout, so tens of thousands of ordinary people assemble around the White House to oppose the coup.
Yeltsin, “tall and bulky”, emerges from the White House, and stands atop a tank to announce his defiance.
What a proud image. Alas, if you look at the photo on Wikipedia’s account of the event, it’s not quite the lone figure railing against a mighty enemy you might imagine. Preserve the image in your mind, and stay away from the truth on that page.
Yeltsin and his compadres had every reason to suspect they would be killed that night. The throngs outside formed a human chain around the building. Everything was in place for a massacre.
Then, one by one, military commanders began defying their orders. The massacre was averted. The engineers of the attempted coup were forced to back down.
I was 17 when this happened. The previous year, I had visited Moscow. I really should have been fascinated by these amazing scenes, but if I was aware of them at the time I don’t remember it.
The book has it that from that point on, Yeltsin had a hold over Gorbachev, and it was shortly thereafter that Gorbachev resigned, allowing Yeltsin to complete the abolition of the USSR.