An anniversary

25 years ago, in our tiny Moscow apartment just off of the Garden Ring, my mother heard the unmistakable sound of tanks moving down the street. 

 

It was familiar - she heard it during every official holiday parade. The tanks’ route was close enough to our house that the cupboards and the windows shook as they passed. 

 

It wasn’t a parade this time. It was the August Coup - a last attempt by communist hardliners to undo everything Gorbachev had done, and to keep the Soviet Union whole and communist. 

My mother was 22, just out of college, married for five months, and three months pregnant. My dad was out of town on a hiking trip, unreachable.

 

Her brother called. “Are you at home?” he asked. “Yes, obviously.” “Good. Stay there. Don’t turn the TV on, you’re pregnant, you’re not supposed to worry.” And then hung up. 

 

(No one has ever called my uncle tactful.)

 

The first thing my mother did after that phone call was turn on the TV. The Bolshoi’s production of “Swan Lake” was being broadcast on all channels. Long experience of the system told her this meant something extremely important was going on, and the Powers That Be didn’t want people to know what exactly it was. “Swan Lake” would stay on for three days straight, until the coup attempt was over.

Elsewhere in Moscow, barricades went up, shots were fired, people killed. Remarkably few people, but still. People flooded the streets, holding signs that said, “Soldiers! Don’t shoot your brothers!” “Freedom today or - never” “Better death than slavery”. My uncle was there. 

 

It could have ended like Tiananmen Square in ‘89, like Prague in ‘68, like Budapest in ‘56. By some miracle, it didn’t. The army went over to the other side. The leaders of the coup were arrested. In December, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

 

I was born in February.

http://ria.ru/spravka/20110819/415632412.html

https://www.adme.ru/tvorchestvo-fotografy/redkie-kadry-avgustovskij-putch-545205/