Ambivalence as Russia marks Soviet collapse

MOSCOW, Aug 19, 2006 (AFP)

Russia marks on Saturday the 15th anniversary of the day Boris Yeltsin climbed on to a tank and faced down a coup aimed at preserving the Soviet Union, but while demonstrations are expected, ambivalence may be the dominant emotion for many Russians.

Both communists and liberals are due to hold their own demonstrations at the start of a series of events this week marking the defeat of the coup and the subsequent re-birth of Russia as an independent nation.

For some it is a time of regret, not least perhaps for President Vladimir Putin, who last year called the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union the "biggest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century.

Today's Communist party, reformed as a nationalist centre-left party, plans a demonstration to mark what it regards as a "betrayal" by the Soviet Union's last leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

"What monstrous consequences there were for the country and its people is now clear to all," said one leader of the present-day party, Ivan Melnikov, this week.

"The state was destroyed, there was a terrible economic recession, whole branches of industry were destroyed," he said.

Meanwhile the liberal Union of Rightist Forces plans celebrations of the "15th anniversary of our democratic revolution and the birth of a new, free Russia," as the party's Internet site put it.

Gorbachev was holidaying in Crimea in August 1991 when he was placed under house arrest and power was briefly seized by a group of Communist hardliners calling themselves the State Committee for a State of Emergency, or GKChP, who were furious at his policies of "glastnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (restructuring).

Tanks rolled through the streets of Moscow that August 19, but they were soon surrounded by tens of thousands of Muscovites.

Yeltsin, who had just been elected president of the Russian republic, became the central figure among the anti-coup forces when he climbed atop a tank and called on fellow citizens to rally against the coup -- not in the name of the Soviet Union, but in the name of Russia.

Yeltsin is to head Tuesday to the ex-Soviet state of Latvia, now a member of the European Union and the NATO military alliance, to receive a state honour for his role in Latvia's re-birth after its occupation by the Soviet Union -- a rare friendly gesture between two neighbours that have long been at odds.

But those first confused months of independence are now a distant memory for many Russians as their country enjoys the fruits of oil wealth and tries to put behind it the hardships of the 1990s and two devastating wars in Chechnya.

In a poll this week by the independent Levada Center, GKChP won slightly more retrospective support (13 percent) than Yeltsin and his supporters (12 percent).

Just as telling is that the majority of the 1,600 people polled (52 percent) said they would not take sides. Those who expressed an opinion mostly saw the coup and its defeat as a simple power struggle among ruling elites.

That "time is passing, and people are forgetting what truly happened, as though their memories have lost the thread," said Gennady Burbulis, once a key coup opponent and now a member of Russia's parliament, in the newspaper Gazeta.