The Coup effect

It is 25 years since the failed Communist coup, but Russia is still feeling the effects

Ilya Klishin

The term “butterfly effect” has long outlived and outgrown Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. With a nod to Leo Tolstoy’s discursive epilogue to War and Peace, the tale is less about time travel than about understanding history: can one individual alter the course of history through a single act, or is historical predetermination as immovable as a mountain?

The hero of a recent Stephen King novel is obsessed with travelling back to 1963 to prevent the assassination of JFK. This, he believes, will fix everything. Today’s Russia is not short of self-styled “patriots” who would gladly relive 1991 to avert the collapse of the Communist putsch.

Maybe they’d force an audience with the coup leaders and persuade them to hang in till the end. Or maybe they’d talk with the Alpha commandos, who refused to open fire on the people. And no doubt they’d take a shot at Boris Yeltsin during his photogenic pose atop a tank. Or maybe they’d just try and stop Usov, Komar and Krichevsky (the only three people in Russia whose epitaph says they died for democracy) from leaving home that day.

Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, it all went according to plan. What would have come next?

The Soviet Union would hardly have remained intact, even through military force. In any event, the republics would have peeled away one after the other, because that’s what the local elites hankered after. More likely, without the mechanism of the CIS there would have been no amicable “divorce.” Instead, authoritarian 90s Russia would have fought a border war with Ukraine or Georgia much earlier than actually transpired.

Media censorship would have continued unabated, as would the biting anti-Western propaganda on state television. Come the noughties, the Internet and mobile phones would still be widespread, but subject to strict laws and special oversight.

Local wars would keep Russia pinned under constant sanctions, and the country itself would be prone to introducing schizophrenic sanctions against its own citizens, who would also be banned from visiting certain countries.

Young people would have gone on being herded into patriotic organisations like the Soviet pioneer movement and Komsomol, which might well have been rebranded, say, Nashi or Young Guard.

The real opposition in the country would have been stifled and sidelined, and constantly harassed by both the media and pro-government activists. Dissidents would have remained under the watchful eye of the “relevant authorities.” Parliament would probably have continued its (ostensible) existence, and at some stage may even have been renamed the Duma. But that’s secondary. In power, the putschists might have allowed virtual parties to coexist with their own political vehicle Communist tag for something more neutral and inclusive, say , which, incidentally, could have ditched the United Russia.

On the whole, the Brezhnevera dementia would have gone unchecked. The sa me faces (or lack of) would have sat unchallenged for years and decades, fabricating election results and tinkering with the laws to ensure lifelong rule, all to thunderous applause from the updated politburo, which would still govern.

Thank goodness, 25 years ago the a host of state coup-owned companies worth billions of dollars. failed, and today we live in a free and democratic Russia.