Today’s Kremlin Wants People to Forget about August 1991 Coup Attempt, Malkova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 20 – Tatyana Malkova, the Nezavisimaya gazeta journalist who famously asked the putschists whether they recognized they were attempting to overthrow the state, says that the Kremlin today doesn’t want to be linked to the events of the August 1991 putsch. To that end, it has “systematically” sought to eliminate memories of those events.

            She says that the Putin regime doesn’t want anyone to associate it with either the plotters who lost or Boris Yeltsin who won – in the first case, lest some may draw comparisons with the current rulers and in the second because it doesn’t want to associate itself with the achievements of the first Russian president (ura.news/articles/1036282853).

            Despite this, however, Malkova tells Sergey Dianov who interviewed her for the URA news agency, there is more interest in those events now than in the past. On the one hand, this year is a round anniversary; but on the other, people are searching for answers as to why Russia has taken the wrong path.

            The Putinists have their own narrative, one that stresses how much damage Yeltsin supposedly did, and thus they have no desire for people to see that he stood up for his country and its people, the journalist says. Any honest discussion of the coup would undermine the story today’s Kremlin wants Russians to accept.

            And because it doesn’t have a credible alternative to seeing Yeltsin as a hero and the plotters as traitors, the Putin regime doesn’t want to talk about this event at all.

            Putin’s only comment this year on the 30^th anniversary of the putsch serves as confirmation of this. He did not address the event at all but rather said that “we don’t want more revolutions” and that we will do everything so that the situation in Russia will be stable and predictable” (finanz.ru/novosti/aktsii/putin-poobeshchal-sdelat-vse-chtoby-ne-dopustit-revolyucii-v-rossii-1030749412).

            The Kremlin leader added during his press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that “Russia reached its limit on revolutions already in the 20^th century.”