Muscovites Hail ‘the Victory of Democracy’

“Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

Crowing their triumph in voices ragged from fatigue, applauding and raising their fists high, the tens of thousands of Muscovites who had shielded the Russian Federation government building with their bodies over two long, tense nights declared their victory Wednesday evening with roars of joy.

Konstantin I. Kobets, the Russian Federation’s defense minister, mounted the balcony of the towering edifice on the Moscow River that had become the headquarters of opposition to the rightist coup attempt to announce proudly, “The threat of an armed attack has passed!”

To the repeated cheers from the crowd below, Kobets went on to proclaim: “The emergency situation on the territory of Russia is revoked! The curfew is canceled! This is our victory! This is the victory of common sense! This is the victory of democracy!”

Despite warnings throughout Wednesday that it was too early to relax, that the putsch had not been decisively put down and its leaders not yet arrested, euphoria swept the exhausted, bleary-eyed defenders of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government building.

Even the weather conformed to the outbreak of happy relief, with days of rain giving way to a glorious rainbow over the Moscow River and a colorful sunset glinting off the golden onion domes and towers of the city skyline.

A Dixieland band tweedled its tunes near the “White House,” as the Russian Federation building is known, and the serious, historic speeches of defiance and anger that had rung out from the balcony for two days gave way to entertainment from folk-singers and comedians.

Nikolai Karachentsev, an actor from one of Moscow’s best theaters, told the crowd that he had the surreal feeling that “we’ve been watching a bad play put on by lousy directors with a stupid script and no-talent players.”

“But at least we were professionals in the main thing,” he said. “We’re united, and we want to be free.”

As reports filtered in that the coup was collapsing, political chatter inside the headquarters turned to analysis of the astonishingly poor tactics and indecisiveness of the coup leaders.

“It’s incredible,” Parliament member Leonid Gurevich of Murmansk said. “They never even cut off our phones. The caliber of Soviet leadership is so low it can’t even handle an elementary coup.”

Russian lawmaker Victor Sheinis speculated that “part of the reason the coup is failing is the intellectual capabilities of Marshal (Dmitri T.) Yazov,” the defense minister. Sheinis also questioned the brainpower of the other seven who seized power.

But as they scoffed at the ever-less-threatening reactionary leaders, Russian deputies also began to draw the lessons on what to do in the future if they ever face a similar threat.

Gurevich and other deputies complained to the Russian Federation Parliament that it had been extremely ineffective at getting out Yeltsin’s decrees and general information to the public, and that it needed a broad alternative communications network, including printing presses, portable phones and walkie-talkies.

With all but a few newspapers, television channels and radio stations banned by the coup’s leaders, “people have been forced to live blind, resorting to half-whispers and rumor mills,” an adviser to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev told the Parliament.

“Society has been thrown back not only to the times of stagnation but a full half-century back,” to the Stalin era of total media control, the adviser, Georgy Shakhnazarov, said.

During the day, intriguing rumors repeatedly swept the Russian government building, including unconfirmed claims that Yazov had shot himself and a particularly choice one in the afternoon--like the buzz about Yazov, it later proved false--that Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev, the putative head of the State Emergency Committee created by the coup’s leaders, had been arrested and was being brought to the building in a truck.

“Give him here!” the crowd chanted in swelling anger. “Bring him to justice!”

The thousands surrounding the building also called for army Gen. Mikhail A. Moiseyev, believed to have taken over command from Yazov, to be held responsible for several people killed the night before in a clash with armored personnel carriers not far from the nearby U.S. Embassy.

In the underpass where the personnel carriers involved in the incident had been trapped by an angry crowd, Muscovites laid out crosses of soil and set memorial candles in the dirt.

Deputies proposed the declaration of official mourning days for the victims of the clash and that they be given heroes’ funerals, with special pensions for their dependents.

“All of Moscow will come to their funerals,” said Gleb Yakunin, a Russian Orthodox priest who was a dissident in pre-Gorbachev days.

For all the sense that the high drama was winding down, the crowd remained outside the Russian government building into the night, heeding Kobets’ warning: “We must remain vigilant. A beast is most dangerous when it is wounded.”

Even after two nights in the rain and mud, many in the crowd did not appear to mind the prospect of a third. Some had put up tents on the yard facing the building, and others had fashioned handy full-body ponchos out of industrial plastic.

“The putsch is almost over,” radical politician Ilya Zaslavsky told the thousands facing him below the balcony. But he begged them to stay until the last shred of danger to Yeltsin and his government was removed.

“To the end!” the crowd chanted in response. “To the end!”