Little Fanfare Marking ’91 Coup Attempt

The 10th anniversary of the bungled hard-line coup that accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union went all but unmarked in Russia on Sunday, with no official commemorations and only a few listless unofficial gatherings.

About 100 people gathered near the White House, the government building that was the rallying point for the coup resisters led by former Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. In central Moscow’s Pushkin Square, about the same number attended a rival gathering, led by ultranationalist lawmaker Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, in support of the coup plotters.

By contrast, in 1999, the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall drew celebrants by the thousands to commemorations in Germany.

The sparse turnout reflected Russians’ continued ambivalence about the Soviet collapse. While few want a return to Soviet-style political controls, including censorship and travel restrictions, most people have been deeply disaffected by the economic hardships, social dislocation and political corruption of the last decade. In a recent poll by the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, 74% of Russians said they regret the Soviet Union’s demise.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, who is careful not to trample on the sensitivities of older generations and Communist supporters, kept out of sight Sunday on vacation in the northern region of Karelia. His only official action, according to the Kremlin press service, was to send birthday greetings to former President Clinton.

Russia’s major commemoration was the gathering organized by former White House defenders. One of them, Vladimir Altshuller, recalled that for many, the decision to defend the building was not a gesture of support for one politician or another but an act of defiance against a police state and its untruths.

“I remember a girl near the White House who told me and other people, ‘I am here not because of [then-Soviet President Mikhail S.] Gorbachev, and I am certainly not for Yeltsin,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘I came here because I feel like the [coup plotters] have punched me in the face.’ ”

However, some of those at the White House rally expressed reservations about what their actions 10 years ago wrought.

“Ordinary people got nothing,” complained Yuri Yerushov, now 48 and unemployed. “Maybe we would have lived better under the coup plotters.”

In coming days, the city of Moscow plans several small-scale commemorations, especially to honor three young men who died in a confused confrontation with a tank in a road tunnel near the White House. Their deaths, generally understood to be unintentional, were the only bloodshed during the three-day coup.

But if Sunday’s turnout was any indication, such events are unlikely to draw crowds. For the most part, the coup anniversary has been marked by little more than TV specials replaying news footage.

In another sign of this country’s mixed feelings about the coup, the once-disgraced putsch leaders are now openly defending their actions. In recent public appearances, the plotters--most of whom spent time in jail before being granted amnesty by Yeltsin--have insisted that they were acting in their country’s best interests, trying to prevent its disintegration.

“[The State Emergency Committee] was against Gorbachev’s policies, policies aimed toward the collapse of the USSR,” retired army Gen. Valentin I. Varennikov, a former commander of the Soviet ground forces, told the ORT television network.

Several of the plotters have also noted that their goals have to some extent been adopted by Putin, who came to power 20 months ago saying that Russia needed to rebuild its “statehood.”

“We must admit that [the plotters] were right,” Zhirinovsky told those at his rally, repeating the claim. “And those who were against them--Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the democrats--were wrong and deeply guilty.”

For his part, Gorbachev, who was confined to his vacation residence by the plotters, has sounded on the defensive.

“The important thing [for the plotters] is to smear Gorbachev, to whitewash the reactionary forces and in this way to make themselves look like champions of the homeland,” the former Soviet leader told a news conference Thursday.

Yeltsin, whose actions during the coup brought him greater power and sealed his place in history, has not been seen in public in weeks.

*

Associated Press contributed to this report.