Heady days fade for Russians who halted 1991 coup

[ahlam1399]

Heady days fade for Russians who halted 1991 coup

MOSCOW: It was a desperate plea from then Russian leader Boris Yeltsin that drew Gennady Veretilny to the barricades going up around the White House in central Moscow.

"I wasn’t a supporter of Yeltsin, I wasn’t a liberal or a Communist. I wasn’t a party man," Veretilny told AFP, recalling the events of 25 years ago when he was working as a police investigator.

"But the appeal by Yeltsin -- freedom, democracy, all of these new words -- the people really believed in this. And I believed in it too, of course."

In the early hours of August 19, 1991, tanks had rolled through the streets of the Soviet capital as a group of hardline Communist bosses and security chiefs staged a dramatic putsch.

They claimed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had been taken seriously ill at his holiday home on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and that they were taking over to restore order.

In reality, Gorbachev was under de facto house arrest and the coup organisers were looking to roll back reforms that threatened to end the Communist Party’s iron grip and had dragged the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse.

What the plotters had **t counted on was the reaction of ordinary people emboldened by several years of newfound freedoms.

As the shocking news spread through the city, crowds flocked to support Yeltsin -- the head of the USSR’s biggest republic, Russia -- as he faced down the tanks surrounding the headquarters of his government.

"More than 20,000 Muscovites had come to defend Yeltsin. He asked Muscovites to come and support him and they formed a human chain," said Veretilny, **w 57.

Those opposing the coup used old piping, broken fences, city buses and anything else they could find to build barricades.

Then they readied for an armed assault by the security forces.

"Especially on the night of August 20-21, there was a very anxious atmosphere," said Lev Po**maryov, a prominent rights activist who was a deputy back in 1991.

"The people were really prepared for there to be an assault."

But the feared attack never came.

Unbek**wn to those on the streets, the putschists were making a string of vital errors, failing to silence Yeltsin or convince crucial military commanders to take their side.

When three demonstrators were killed in a confused clash with soldiers, the nerve of those in charge finally seemed to snap.

By August 21 it became clear that the attempt to seize power and turn back the clock had begun to collapse. Soon the men behind it were arrested.

"We hadn’t slept for three days, so we were tired. But joyful as well," Po**maryov told AFP.

"It was a strange mixture of fatigue and joy."

The failure of the coup drove the final nail into the coffin of over 70 years of Communist domination.

Yeltsin -- **w the real power in the country -- banned the Communist Party, sidelined Gorbachev and signed a pact with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus essentially breaking up the Soviet Union.

On December 25, 1991 Gorbachev resigned and then the USSR formally ceased to exist.

For those who had squared up to the attempted coup it was a Heady time.

But as state-planning gave way to gangster capitalism, millions were left impoverished and hopes quickly faded.

In the Kremlin, Yeltsin ruthlessly expanded his powers, presided over rampant corruption and sold off assets to allied oligarchs in shady deals. Eventually he a**inted ex-KGB ******r Vladimir Putin as his successor

"Power changed hands from one bunch of crooks to a**ther," said ex-cop Veretilny, who **w lives in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

In a recent poll by the independent Levada centre, only 16 percent of Russians said for sure that they would come out to oppose a coup trying return the country to the Soviet order if it happened **wadays.

"The people were naive. We didn’t k**w what was what," Veretilny said.

"We didn’t k**w that instead of freedom and democracy we would end up with this wild capitalism."



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