How DID the USSR Break Up?
A Literal Literary Loser Gets Historical
The Trump/Zelenskyy press conference had barely ended before my oldest son was texting me: Book sales! Book sales! Book sales!
I appreciate his support and his insight. (As a Princeton public policy major with a minor in Slavic Studies who lived and worked in Moldova and Moscow, he observed three years ago, “My, lots of people suddenly have an opinion about a country they couldn’t find on a map yesterday.”)
However, as I also wrote three years ago:
My feelings are too complicated to boil down into a pithy Substack post - designed to sell books. So despite my son’s enthusiasm, I am not going to leap into the publishing fray with yet another personal opinion nobody really cares about - to sell books. (The key words here are “sell books.” Anybody who knows me in real life knows where I stand on a whole host of issues, and how hard I work for causes I believe in.)
On the other hand, my husband did also ask me soon after the press conference ended, “How DID the USSR break up?”
I started to explain, then honestly told him, “There’s a scene in my upcoming book detailing the chain of events.”
I shared it with him. And now I am sharing it with you….
There were tanks in Red Square. How could there be tanks in Red Square? Sure, Emma had watched them lumber past the Kremlin on holidays like May Day and Victory Day. She’d sat on Dad’s shoulders and feverishly waved her little red flag along with every other child privileged to warrant such a close up view of the parade. But she’d never seen tanks on the street during a regular weekday. Except this wasn’t a regular weekday.
There were tanks in Red Square. There were tanks near the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic's Parliament Building, nicknamed The White House, lest the Americans think they were the only ones allowed to have one. Warships anchored at the port closest to Mikhail Gorbachev’s dacha, and the local airport had been ordered closed. Freedom of the press was officially dissolved by the newly formed State Committee on the State of Emergency, headed by the Vice President, the Premier, the Interior Minister, the Defense Minister, the Chairman of the KGB, the First Deputy Chairman of the Defense Council, the Chairman of the Peasants' Union, and the President of the Association of State Enterprises. Every hardliner who’d been against Gorbachev’s reforms. They wanted the General Secretary gone. This was a coup.
This wasn’t like Khrushev. Emma had been almost six years old in 1964, when she’d heard Mom and Dad discussing how the man who’d made the Soviet Union open enough for the Cains to move there had been voted out of office. The Central Committee blamed him for various failed economic policies, including giving more power to local provinces at the expense of centralized Moscow control. They derided him for his botched handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he gave in to the Americans and removed Soviet weapons from the allied island, followed, even more humiliatingly, by his withdrawing the IL–28 bombers. They accused him of voluntarism and immodest behavior. Mom stressed how wonderful it was that, in the USSR, an ineffective leader could be promptly removed by a simple, efficient vote of the ruling council, instead of like in America, where they either had to wait for the next, cumbersome election cycle or attempt a recall, which was time-consuming and allowed the bungling politician to keep causing damage while each vote from every polling place in the nation was tediously counted.
But this wasn’t like Khrushchev. This was a military takeover. They had Gorbachev under house arrest. And there were tanks in Red Square, and in front of The White House.
There was one more reason why this wasn’t like Khrushchev. There were people in the streets. Dozens of them, hundreds, thousands. And they were converging on the tanks, on Red Square, on The White House. Her whole life, Emma had been told that the USSR was famous for its spontaneous demonstrations of support for the government, one organized by the people. The boast had come up during Dennis and Donahue’s program. What had one of the audience members testified to? “I took part in a protest meeting, protesting not my own government, but against international militarization. We all fully agreed with the policy of our government against militarization. We do have demonstrations, and we demonstrate our views openly and frankly.”
Why then did Emma feel like she was only seeing her first such gathering now?
They were mostly young people, dressed in jeans and T-shirts and sneakers and light windbreakers. And they were climbing up on the tanks, over the tanks, towards The White House. And there was Boris Yeltsin, the President of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin was also climbing up on a tank, his silver hair blowing in the wind. Yeltsin in his brown suit with a brown tie, too fat to button it properly, but he was climbing up on a platform; the Russian Federation flag, not the Soviet one, but the Russian Federation flag behind him. And he was reading from a proclamation declaring the coup illegal, calling for a general strike in protest. His security detail tried holding him back, but Yeltsin promised, “They will not shoot their President!” He advised the armed soldiers who claimed they were only following orders, “‘Here is an order then: take your equipment and go back to base.”
The crowds cheered. Yeltsin grabbed the arm of the head of the Tamanskaya elite forces after the commander announced his soldiers would be joining the rebellion. Yeltsin pulled him up on stage, and handed him a Russian Federation flag to wave. Yeltsin held up his fist in defiance.
Emma asked Dennis, “What is happening?”
For the first time since they’d met, her husband mumbled, dazed, “I don’t know….”
By the time Dennis made it onto the air – no make-up, sweat dotting his hairline from the mad rush to midtown – US President George H.W. Bush had condemned the coup. Soviet Vice- President Gennadi Yanayev announced that Mikhail Gorbachev was ill and would be staying at his summer home for the time being. Lithuania’s president encouraged passive resistance, miners across the eleven time-zone nation went on strike, and Yeltsin proclaimed himself the legal head of Russia.
Dennis was reading the news live as it came in. Emma had never seen her husband so pale – and it wasn’t the lack of make-up. His hands were shaking, rustling the papers he was holding. He stumbled multiple times trying to keep up with the teleprompter. His accent, usually barely perceptible and prompting coos of, “You speak English so well, Mr. Kagan,” was out now in full force. He turned his W’s into V’s, rolled his R’s, growled his K’s particularly hard. He was breaking down in front of their eyes. Viewers at home attributed it to worry about his homeland. But Emma knew better. Dennis was worried about himself.
Emma was worried too. For him, for her, but also for Mom and Dad. She’d dialed their home number multiple times, never expecting to get an answer, unsurprised when it simply rang and rang. She tried friends from university and her former job. She even tried calling Soviet Central Television, hoping Dennis’ name might get her answers denied to everyone else, but nothing was getting through.
He stayed on the air for almost twelve hours straight. He reported that President Bush had called the coup leaders to negotiate for Gorbachev’s reinstatement. Bush then called Yeltsin to offer his support. Emma guessed Bush’s phone connection was stronger than hers. Dennis reported on the mayor of Leningrad condemning the coup, on the Ukrainian and Moldovan parliaments condemning it. He reported that the President of Kazakhstan had resigned from the Politburo and the Central Committee in protest. That Estonia was declaring its independence from the Soviet Union and that the Army's Baltic commander had declared control over not just Estonia, but Latvia and Lithuania, as well, followed by Yeltsin announcing he was now in control of Russia’s military forces.
Emma couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t think. What was happening? How could it be happening? The protesters kept coming. In Moscow and in Leningrad primarily, but in other parts of the country, as well. They were setting up barricades, braving not just the tanks and the machine guns, but the consequences of what might happen to them after everything had died down, after order was restored, after the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union again. Because this was not the Soviet Union. Emma had no idea what this was. She’d never seen anything like it before.
Dennis’ voice began giving out as he entered his fourteenth hour of broadcasting. He was constantly clearing his throat, needing to make an effort to swallow, choking on even the water he was sipping during commercial breaks to keep from sounding like a lifetime smoker.
By the time he finally got home, Emma expected Dennis to collapse into bed and sleep for at least the next few hours. She was prepared to continue watching the news so she could keep him posted on what had happened while he rested. But instead of stumbling in exhausted, Dennis came off wired. He couldn’t stop pacing, couldn’t stop talking.
“What are we supposed to do? I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. If I side with the coup plotters and they lose, I won’t have any credibility with this government anymore, much less with the American people. You know how they love their revolutions and their underdog stories. It’s in their DNA. But if I side with Gorbachev and Yeltsin and they lose, that’s it, I’m done. They’ll call us back home. Who knows what will happen to us then, how they’ll punish us. And hardliners always win in the end. Always. Look at Khrushchev. His reign was the aberration, just like Gorbachev’s will be. The logical thing to do is to back the coup. But what if I’m wrong?”
“We don’t have to go back,” Emma offered tentatively. “Even if you’re fired. We could stay here in America.”
“And do what? I told you, if I back the wrong cause, I’ll be ostracized. Nobody will want to hear anything I have to say.” He strode to the window, gazing over Central Park, muttering as much to himself as to Emma, “How did this happen? How can I not know what to do? I always know what to do. They made it so easy, so clear, so obvious. Why is it different this time?”
“The Emergency Committee didn’t expect this level of resistance. Did you expect it?”
“Hello, no. Who could have expected this? We’re Soviets. We’re programmed to take a kick in the back, hit the ground, and let the tanks roll over us, if that’s what our government tells us to do. But they’re fighting the tanks. Did you see? They’re standing up to goddamn tanks in goddamn Red Square!”
“I tried to call Mom and Dad,” Emma wasn’t sure if changing the subject would calm him or fan the flames. “No answer.”
“Oh, shit, and that’s another thing. You say if things don’t work out we could stay here. If we’re on the wrong side, what do you think will happen to your parents? If they can’t punish us, who do you think they’ll make an example of, instead?”
“No,” Emma shook her head. “No. Mom and Dad, they’re celebrities in Russia. They’re very important people. They wouldn’t dare… besides, Mom and Dad didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t think.”
“Cut it out, Emma. You’re talking to me. We both know what happens to very important people who cross the Soviet government, especially very important artists, especially very important Jewish artists. The Night of the Murdered Poets? Mikhoels beaten so badly they couldn’t even hold an open casket funeral for him, despite claiming his death was an accident? How many writers sent to gulags? How many composers, painters, filmmakers?”
But that was the problem. Emma didn’t know. Dennis just assumed she did. While the events he referenced may have been whispered around kitchen tables in the middle of the night in cramped Soviet apartments, Emma’s parents – rather, Emma’s mother – deliberately avoided any references to murdered poets, or to tortured Yiddish actors. Brutality didn’t fit the narrative she’d constructed around their new homeland.
“What are we supposed to do then?” Emma wasn’t used to Dennis asking questions. She was used to him having all the answers. It’s why she was with him. So she didn’t have to be responsible for doing either.
“I don’t know,” he screamed in frustration, voice cracking and devolving into a parched cough. “I don’t have any fucking idea!”
By the time Dennis slid back on the air for the evening broadcast, he’d sprayed his throat with enough analgesic to sound raspy, but intelligible. He’d showered, re-combed his hair, put on a fresh white shirt and dark suit to bespeak the seriousness of their crisis, and dabbed at the bags under his eyes with concealer. Dennis was calm and in control, everything he hadn’t been at home, everything the American public expected from their earnest, charming guide through the intricate world of Soviet politics.
An even-keeled Dannis briefed the Western world that Emergency Committee members were starting to resign – for health reasons. Nonetheless, the army was charging the barricades in front of the Russian Parliament building.
Protesters, numbering in the tens of thousands now, pushed back, setting two tanks on fire, even as a dozen others headed straight for the makeshift barricades, despite the clusters of people sitting atop them. Dissenters on the ground linked hands to form a human chain to keep the deadly machines at bay. Emma suspected they were thinking of China’s Tiananmen Square pro-reform uprising of two years prior. They were remembering the lone youth with the shopping bag in each arm, facing down a convoy of tanks. Emma suspected they were not thinking about the hundreds of thousands massacred or wounded in the six weeks which followed. They were not thinking about the pro-democracy advocates arrested, exiled, and executed. They were not thinking about the civilians murdered in riots outside the square. If Emma were still in the USSR, she might not have known either. But she’d watched it unfold nearly live in the US. So she knew, even if the Soviet young people on her TV now didn’t.
Shots rang out in front of The White House. In the smoke and the debris and the camera operators doing their best to dash madly from place to place and capture everything, it was near impossible to tell what was happening, who was hit, who was advancing, who was retreating, or who, in fact, was in the right.
Emma heard screams, she heard curses, she heard orders to stand down, and cries of defiance that they never would. These were all people she might know. Ones she’d gone to school with, worked besides, maybe gotten drunk with at parties. Now they were there, and she was here. Which one of them was on the right side of history?
There was no escape now, no end in sight. Another civil war, the pundits were predicting, just like in 1917, when the Reds battled the Whites, with the anarchists, the separatists and the non-ideological green parties sometimes fighting one, sometimes the other, sometimes among themselves. It lasted for six years and resulted in twelve million casualties, including civilians. Those who weren’t killed in battle or executed, died of disease, frostbite, or suicide. And, as Dennis pointed out earlier, the hard-liners always won in the end.
But, somehow, it felt different this time. The spontaneous demonstrations actually felt spontaneous. The political positions felt sincere, not merely calculated. And the people. Emma couldn’t stop staring, mesmerized, at the people. She’d spent large chunks of her life amongst crowds at Red Square. Mom never could resist a parade. It fed her love of drama, of pageantry. Those crowds were always orderly, always calm, always… resigned. Could such a word be used to describe a crowd? The crowd was there because they knew they were supposed to be there. They’d known they were supposed to be there for so long that they’d long forgotten why.
This crowd was different. It was loud, and chaotic, and unruly. Everyone looked like they’d been abruptly awakened from a dream they hadn’t realized was a nightmare. And they’d be damned if they’d ever be lulled into sleep again. This crowd was disobedient. This crowd was disruptive. This crowd was alive.
The only question now was how long they’d be allowed to stay that way.
Emma kept watching the news, even when a visibly exhausted Dennis was, once again, taken off the air with the promise that he’d be back soon, so don’t you dare change that dial! Emma presumed he was on his way home for a stolen nap and another change of clothes. She watched as, the morning of August 21, Gorbachev reportedly refused to return to Moscow as commanded by the coup’s leaders, and Yeltsin just as emphatically refused to travel to Crimea to fetch his one-time superior and forcibly return Gorbachev to the capital.
She kept watching even as the phone rang. It had been ringing non-stop since the start of the mutiny, a combination of fellow travelers dying to hear Emma’s take on events, and press corp members fishing for a quote from Dennis they could run in their own stories. Emma had let the machine answer them all.
She did the same with this one, expecting more of the same. She didn’t expect Mom’s voice to break through the reverie, which was why it took Emma a moment to realize who it was, much less what Mom was saying….
“Go On Pretending” officially releases on May 1, 2025. Pre-order your copy now at: https://www.historythroughfiction.com/go-on-pretending
Excellent!