manifesto.
Composed by writer Alexander Prokhanov and signed by him and other foes of liberalization like the writers Rasputin and Yuri Bondarev, “A Word to the People” called for ousting the traitors from power and replacing them with patriotic leaders: “Let’s wake up and come to our senses, arise old and young for the country. Let’s say ‘No!’ to the destroyers and occupiers. Let’s put an end to our retreat…. We are starting a popular movement, calling into our ranks those who have recognized the terrible adversity that has befallen our country.”
The critic Vladimir Bondarenko, who shared their views, called these people “flaming reactionaries.” Their alarmist slogans were supposed to provide ideological cover for the coup planned by the counterreformers. On the night of August 18, 1991, the conspirators declared martial law and pushed Gorbachev aside. They brought tanks into the capital, assuming that this display of military might would scare off the populace, but it quickly became obvious that the putsch had failed. Thousands of Muscovites gathered at the House of Soviets of the Russian Federation (known as the White House) to demonstrate their support for charismatic Boris Yeltsin, who headed the resistance to the coup.
The conspirators’ tanks did not dare storm the White House, and the troops loyal to Yeltsin arrested the putsch leaders three days later. The Soviet Union fell apart, and its president, Gorbachev, turned over his authority to Yeltsin. Soviet Communism collapsed after seventy-four years. “The empire ended, history ended, life ended—it didn’t matter what came next. It didn’t matter in what order firebrands and shards would come flying or at what speed,” wrote Andrei Bitov.21
A cultural artifact of that historic moment is the poem Yevgeny Yevtushenko declaimed on the morning of August 20 from the balcony of the White House to the crowd of two hundred thousand defenders of democracy, in which he compared the White House to a “wounded marble swan of freedom.” It was, according to Yevtushenko, his “very best bad poem.”22
Gorbachev was better educated than Khrushchev or Brezhnev, but less well read than Stalin or Andropov. Yeltsin’s cultural worldview was apparently much narrower than Gorbachev’s. It’s unlikely that Yeltsin could have recited a Lermontov poem extemporaneously or do chitchat about the latest play or novel, like Gorbachev. But Yeltsin could act as a battering ram at dramatic moments, which sometimes helped and often hindered the cause.
The liberal wing of the Soviet cultural elite, which had bet on Gorbachev, recoiled from its idol as soon as it became clear that the reforms were stuck, and followed Yeltsin as the more decisive leader. Yeltsin, even though he had been formed like Gorbachev in the depths of the Party nomenklatura, was initially more democratic and more accessible and appeared to be more pliable: Russian intellectuals assumed that he could be eventually shaped into a “good” ruler for Russia. And why not: after all, Yeltsin spoke respectfully to them, using the formal pronoun “
Yeltsin seemed to appreciate the imagination of his new liberal advisors, but unlike Gorbachev, he did not see high culture as his useful ally. In breaking the Soviet system, Yeltsin rejected its cultural policies as well. The new president must have considered (not without reason) all those thousands of writers, poets, artists, and musicians who, as members of the “creative” unions, had been supported by the Communist state, as wastrels and spongers, living off the people.
The Soviet cultural apparatus had been in place since the Stalin era, around sixty years. It was well oiled by state subsidies and controlled from top to bottom. Stalin knew why he needed high culture and he managed it with carrot and stick. The Soviet leaders after him did not have his clarity on the issue, but they followed in his wake— however, using the stick less and counting more on the edifying nature of carrots. Under Gorbachev the stick had turned into a twig that no one feared, and the intellectuals wanted to take over the allocation of carrots: this was their golden opportunity.
When the Soviet regime fell, the totalitarian stick vanished completely, but so did the carrots. The state- sponsored film industry withered; the circulation numbers of the traditional “thick” literary journals, which had climbed astronomically under Gorbachev, declined sharply; the publication of poetry and prose also fell; the only source of income for symphony orchestras and ballet troupes were foreign tours; thousands of Russian musicians and dancers moved to the West, since the borders were open for the first time in decades. New Russian stars like the singer Dmitri Khvorostovsky, pianist Yevgeny Kissin, and violinist Maxim Vengerov settled in Europe. Many people in Russia and the West had expected an immediate flowering of culture after the fall of the Communist regime. Almost the complete opposite occurred.
The catastrophic drying up of the cultural flow took place amid general impoverishment caused by the radical turn toward a market economy by the Yeltsin team. Prices rose thirty times over, salaries and pensions were paid irregularly, and savings became worthless. The silent dissatisfaction of the masses was used by the parliament leadership, which had turned into a center of opposition to Yeltsin; in the fall of 1993, parliament tried to overthrow him. As it had been during the failed coup of 1991, the sympathies of the intelligentsia were divided: the president was supported by those who wanted the reforms to continue, while the “flaming reactionaries” inspired the conservative parliament. Both sides thought their opponents were dragging Russia into an abyss.
Subsequent events brought the final splash of participation by the cultural elite in Russia’s political life in the twentieth century. There was a whiff of civil war in the air, which both sides feared even as they realized that things were heading toward armed confrontation. The embattled sides needed ideological cover, which could be supplied only by the intellectuals. The reactionaries heated up rhetoric about Yeltsin’s “criminally cosmopolitan regime” that was destroying Russian culture and the state. The reformers called on the president to deal forcefully with the “fascist” opponents.
Manifestos from both sides exacerbated the situation, but Yeltsin’s tanks had the last word on October 4, 1993, firing on the opposition White House, which was then taken by storm. This confrontation between president and parliament ended in Yeltsin’s victory, but the fact that there were many casualties, including civilians, shocked the country.
Yeltsin found determined supporters here, too, including influential ones like Academician Dmitri Likhachev and the poets Akhmadulina and Okudzhava. Yeltsin’s firing on the White House united Communists with former dissidents like Zinoviev and Maximov against him. Sinyavsky complained bitterly, “Today the most horrible thing is happening: my old enemies are starting to tell the truth sometimes, and my own tribe of Russian intelligentsia, instead of creating some sort of opposition to Yeltsin and somehow correcting the mistakes of Yeltsin’s rule, is once again hailing every move of the regime and supporting its harsh measures. All that has happened before. That is how the Soviet regime began.”23
Among the defenders of the White House were the writers Alexander Prokhanov and Eduard Limonov. Only the bizarre zigzags of post-Soviet politics could have brought such disparate personalities together. Prokhanov, back in the Brezhnev era, burst onto the scene with his novel
Limonov, on the contrary, was always marginal. He started out as a sophisticated avant-garde poet, known in Moscow’s bohemian circles also as someone who could sew a pair of durable jeans inexpensively. With many other nonconformists, Limonov ended up in the United States in the mid-1970s, and in 1979 published his first novel,
