Hammer, Sickle, and Book

1.

The imagery of triumph and even comedy that attended the events of August 1991 in Russia comforted, and ultimately deceived, the world. The men of the Communist Party, the Army, and the KGB who had tried to seize power in the name of Leninist principles and imperial preservation betrayed their weakness before the cameras: their hands trembled, they drank themselves senseless, they could not bear to pull the trigger (except in the case of one conspirator, Interior Affairs minister Boris Pugo, who, when all was lost, shot his wife, then himself).

The images of Soviet collapse were as vivid as any imagined in Eisenstein’s October. On the night the coup failed, the statue of the founder of the secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, dangled from a crane, as if from a noose, outside the offices of the KGB. Aides loyal to Boris Yeltsin roamed the halls of the Central Committee, giddy and wild, searching for files and cash, the detritus of the old regime.

After Mikhail Gorbachev returned to Moscow from his house arrest in the Crimea, he tried, if only for a day, to speak up for the Party, but after one of his closest aides, Aleksandr Yakovlev, made it clear to him that trying to rescue the Party was tantamount to “serving tea to a corpse,” Gorbachev resigned as general secretary, dissolved the Central Committee, and, it seemed, put an end to the claque of Bolshevism once and for all. “The Party Is Over” was the headline dreamed up on a hundred different copy desks around the world.

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