In the week of the coup we saw them up close in all their familiar human variety-the heroes; the bullies; the trimmers; the hotheads; the sly guys; the long-suffering, had-it-up-to-here, sensible ones. And once Gorbachev had been brought back, we were treated to a kind of rundown of who in the governing establishment had behaved in which treacherous ways and what their smiling, competitive, resentful relationships among themselves had been. No one who works in an office with more than four people in it could have been entirely surprised.
There was to my mind something symbolically wonderfully fitting about the way these real people chased out the caricature conspirators, did so in fact, in reality. I will confess that I was deeply disappointed to learn that the rumor was untrue that five of the fearful eight had attempted to leave for the outermost republic of Kyrgyzstan in an airplane whose take off was aborted on the runway. My mental picture of them, all seat-belted in, heavily bemedalled and sweating profusely in their prickly wool suits and well-desererved anxiety was hard to give up. But the inglorious rout of the Moscow Eight did have star quality and, as anticlimax, was deeply satisfying: what had clearly aspired to be Julius Caesar ended up as Police Academy 208.
What was so symbolically fitting was that the people who gave chase were exploding so many outdated assumptions that had lingered beyond their time concerning the iron power of the Soviet state. There are better and worse ways to think about this. One of the current traps into which people fall is that of thinking that because the Soviet Communist Party and its repressive police, military and intelligence apparatus have taken such a big hit they were always in this condition. But they were in years gone by enormously more potent. Their setback is testimony not to their pussycat nature but to their capacity over the years to inflict terror and privation and to generate smoldering hatred; their defeat was a function not of their complaisance, but of the volatile resistance they finally provoked in a population they had abused. We should be clear about that.
Their malice, however, was neither superhuman nor inhuman but rather thoroughly and depressingly human, and that is the point-the point that became clearer in the week of the coup. We have in this country for so long regarded the Soviet Union and its ways as a product of military, political, economic and strategic “forces” that we have greatly underappreciated the fact that it was-is-a place of people, not just of bombs or space shots or international troublemaking, though it has been a center for all of that. What we have learned since the coup failed is nothing that we did not already know about villainous human behavior and its sources in the various sins and weaknesses and appetites recounted in literature and theology since records began to be kept. It was, equally, human instincts and appetites, not superhuman virtue, that tangled with the worst in the system and eventually brought much of it down. Again and again what looked invincible, irreversible, lethal was undermined by aggressive assertions of the most fundamental human impulses: people wanting better material lives, adolescents wanting a share of the hell their contemporaries were raising elsewhere.
It is a cliche by now, but no less true for being one, that the technology of sharing information has been the real saboteur of the communist countries. You had only to look at those crowds in Moscow to see, for instance, the evidence of the total spread of the Western kid-culture styles that got started in the 1960s. Iron Curtain youth have long since been part of the program. That music, that body language, that whole mode of being is antithetical to the old Orwellian world. The people in Moscow had also seen what the people in East Berlin and Prague and Bucharest had done. They knew what they had in the way of food and housing and clothes and had seen what the rest of the industrialized world had. And they knew, too, how preposterous and humiliating was the prisonlike social fate to which the repressors would consign them. In Poland, as early as the 1970s, there was civil disobedience, sometimes colloquially referred to as the ham and salami riots for the foodstuffs being demanded. People riot for freedom. They also riot for sufficient and edible food. The second is surely as reasonable and respectable a motive as the first.
If we have finally seen the faces of people in Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, have acquired some sense of them as normal, life-size figures understandable in our own human terms, it would be an awful waste to go on to sentimentalize them, to make our same old mistake in a new way. What we saw in Moscow were not throngs of unambiguously, even divinely good guys contending against the forces of pure evil. There were some awfully good guys and some awfully evil guys and evil institutions and ideas in play. But the most interesting and important people were the mixed-bag masses and the part-this/part-that players with the big roles. Boris Yeltsin, who surely knows what courage is and knows how to lead, like the fascinating Gorbachev who seems terribly fearful of what he has wrought, and the others on the main stage need to be seen and dealt with by us in this country as if they were the imperfect, mixed, normal-size people that they are. If we are a little closer to this today, we have those gruesome, time-warp fellows who neglected to cut the fax lines and close down the airports to thank for it. Thanks guys-wherever you may be.
