I hold the video camera for Paul while he conducts an interview with the demonstrators, but it’s clear they don’t know any more about what’s going on than we do. We mill about Red Square for another couple of hours or so, growing ever more bored by the minute. A few more people have now joined in with the demonstrators, and they’re all gathered in a polite circle around a small and scarcely audible transistor radio. It’s tuned, but just barely, to the BBC World Service, but the BBC has no news either. Onlookers multiply. They stand in small clumps and try to peer into the tinted windows of the black Zils—the Soviet equivalent of Cadillacs—that drive in and out of the Kremlin gate, shuttling apparatchiks from here to there, from there to where? To find Gorbachev? The whole thing seems so preposterous. The president of the Soviet Union can’t actually be “missing.” It must be a hoax.
But the curious crowds continue to grow, and then, sometime around noon, from somewhere in the distance, I hear a faint, low rumble.
“Did you hear that?” I ask Paul.
“Hear what?” he says.
“Shhh. Listen.”
The rumble grows louder. It seems to come not from a particular direction but from everywhere. The ground underneath us starts to shake. Pedestrians are now stopped in their tracks. A mother leans down to scoop up her child. “Yeah,” Paul says, “what the hell is it?” His laughing voice is suddenly nervous. “It feels like an earthquake.”
I fall to my knees and put my hands, then my ear on the ground. I can feel the smooth cobblestones of Red Square trembling in my palms. I stand up. What is it? The sound, now closer, has a metallic quality to it. It’s mechanical, sort of like . . . Hey, wait a minute! I know that sound.
Holy shit.
Suddenly, I can feel my heart bouncing like a paddle ball inside my chest. “Tanks,” I say to Paul, choking on the word. “Not an earthquake. Tanks. Come on, let’s stick together.” I take his hand in mine. I tell him if we lose each other, I’ll come find him at the ABC bureau.
“Holy shit,” says Paul. We run down the cobblestones, in the direction of the loudest sound, together.
As we enter Manezhnaya Square, the first column of tanks appears at the top of Gorky Street, a long green snake winding its way south toward us, pushing its way through the normal flow of traffic. “Oh my God,” Paul says, “APCs. BTR60s, driving down Gorky Street. What the fuck is going on?”
Paul, with his early Soviet education—which included a school-wide drive to collect scrap metal for the Soviet war machine, along with bake sales to help the napalmed children of North Vietnam—knows the names of every tank, fighter plane and warship ever created. He’s just never seen them in action.
This worries me.
“Armored personnel carriers, tanks, what’s the difference? Just don’t get in their way,” I say, practically screaming over the now tremendous din.
But Paul isn’t listening. He’s staring at the young soldiers, at the way their torsos and guns pop out of their hatches like armed gophers. The soldiers stare back at him, at us, at everyone. Their eyes are wide open, their eyeballs shifting back and forth in their sockets, surveying the crowds now instantaneously streaming out of buildings and subways and walkways and cars and buses and storefronts. One of the soldiers shouts something in Russian I don’t understand, but from his gestures I figure it must be “Move out of the way.”
Now larger tanks appear, the kind with caterpillar tracks and enormous gun barrels. They are careening into the center of town, spewing black smoke and grinding up chunks of pavement in their wake.
Paul takes out his video camera and, his hands shaking, turns it on. “Now those are tanks,” he says, holding the camera to his eye. “T72s. That’s it. Glasnost is over.”
All of the vehicles are moving quickly now, converging and heading straight toward us. My body feels stuck in the cracks between paralysis and flight, but I manage to pull out another camera from my bag and begin shooting wide shots. Because my hands, too, are uncontrollably trembling, I set the shutter speed to 1/250th of a second to avoid blurring.
Manezhnaya Square, like most public spaces in Moscow, is freakishly oversized, normally dwarfing the continual stream of cars passing through it. But now, as the plaza starts to fill up with hoards of angry Russians, as the tanks begin to muscle their way into its center, for the first time the space appears to have been built to scale, as if all along it had been designed not as a traffic circle but as a staging ground for a coup d’état.
The noise of all those engines sputtering and clanging up close is overwhelming, supersonic, like the Surround Sound thunder of an action film with the volume set too high. Layered underneath are the cries of the rapidly expanding, deeply enraged and slightly confused throngs, who are now coming in closer, surrounding the tanks. Fists are waving in the air. Brave babushkas (literally “grandmothers,” but used to describe all aging Russian women)—many of whom are old enough to have been alive during the revolution in 1917—are throwing themselves in front of the metal monsters and maternally tsk-tsking the soldiers, yelling, “Boys! Boys! We’re all on the same side. What are you doing? Go back to your barracks!” or “Who’s giving you your orders? Where’s Gorbachev?” or simply “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” One old woman, a tiny woman, is standing on the side of a tank, brandishing an old umbrella at its commander, the loose flesh under her arm shaking vigorously. “What are you going to do, shoot me?” she asks, only half joking. Teenage boys and girls, grown men and women are all either crying or screaming or running or yelling or doing some sort of combination of the four.
I’m shooting pictures like a maniac, burning through an entire roll of film in less than two minutes, but when I finally take my eye away from the viewfinder, I realize that I’ve lost Paul. “Paul! Pasha!” I scream, but my voice is barely audible amidst the cacophony. I jump up and down to try to peer over the heads of the crowd. It’s no use. I’ve lost him. I panic, my chest tightening like a tourniquet around my heart. Please, Paul, I think, don’t do anything stupid.
By now, the gigantic plaza is filled to capacity with flesh and metal. The tanks are effectively stalled, no longer able to move in any direction unless the soldiers intend to run over bodies, which, at this point, seems as likely as not. They are angrily revving their engines, sometimes lurching forward just far enough to elicit the full-throttled screams of the crowd: “Stop! You’ll kill us!” they yell. At this point, because I’m so small, I can’t see anything other than limbs, chins and clouds, along with the wheels of a single tank obscured through a sea of denim jackets. I’m frantically, claustrophobically scanning my eyes beyond the perimeter of the plaza, searching for a lamppost or a pole or anything sticking out above the crowd that I might climb on to get an unobscured view, a better shot, a breath of air. Maybe even a glimpse of Paul.
But Manezhnaya Square is so open and vast, and I’m so tightly crammed into its center, I have only one recourse. Exhaling deeply, I push my way forward through the sea of people until I reach the nearest idling tank. I can feel the vibrating metal in my hands as I attempt to pull my body up, but it’s too high. I can’t gain a proper foothold. I’m about to give up when a babushka standing next to me sees the camera around my neck and realizes what I’m trying to do. “Help her up!” she yells, her voice loud and admonishing. “Somebody help her up!” Suddenly a thousand arms are hoisting me off the ground and into the sky. “Good, good,” the old woman says, obviously relishing her role as director. “Be careful. Don’t hurt her.” When I’m finally standing on top of the tank, I look down at the woman and notice that she’s crying. “Shoot, young lady! Shoot!” she pleads, the tears seeping into the deep crevices of her wrinkled face. “Show the world what is happening here!”
“Uh, okay,” I say, holding the camera up to my eye, knowing that under the circumstances, this is pretty much the only thing I have to offer. Other protesters follow my lead, and now th
e tops of the tanks are covered with their writhing bodies. Like maggots on a corpse.
Suddenly, the tank lurches forward, almost throwing me to the ground. I grab on to a handle sticking out near the hatch, bend my knees for balance, and try to shoot one-handed. Unfortunately, this does not allow me to rotate the focus ring, so I go for a slower shutter speed, close down my aperture and pray. My viewfinder is filled with dozens of tanks and thousands of tiny heads, receding in the distance to mere pointillist specs of life. Snap. So this is what history looks like. This is how the wave swells. I usually arrive, like the rest of the press corps, just as the foam has started to recede.
I’m feeling euphoric, pressing the shutter, winding the film with quick flips of my thumb, when all of a sudden, my camera attacks me. Slams me right in the nose. For a second, I’m confused—is my Nikon alive?—but then I feel a hand clenched around my upper arm, shaking it violently. I whip my head around to investigate. The hand belongs to a red-faced tank commander. His head has popped out of the hatch on top of the tank, and his lower jaw is hanging wide open in stunned disbelief. He starts cursing at me in Russian, his eyes bulging out in fury. “Dyevuchka!”—“Young lady!”—he yells, his voice an equal mixture of machismo and rage. “Shto ti blyet zdyes sidyish?”—“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Oops.
“Fotografirovat,” I say, still shaky with my Russian grammar. “Ya malinki. Ya nichevo nye ovidyet,” which even though it means, “To take pictures. I’m little. I to see nothing,” gets the point across that I’m using his fancy armored personnel carrier as a step stool.
“Fotografirovat?” he screams, beside himself. “Fotografirovat!? Get the FUCK OFF MY TANK!”
Now he’s shaking me, trying to push me off the tank. The crowd hisses, the men threatening to kill the soldier, the babushkas admonishing him to be polite and keep his hands to himself. I’m yelling, in English now because he’s hurting my arm and because I can’t think straight, things like “Get off me!” “Leave me alone!” and “Stop it, ouch!”
While this is happening, although I don’t see it, an Associated Press photographer and a CNN camera crew climb up on the tank directly behind me. They start to shoot our silly altercation.
CNN will run the footage later that day, USA Today will splash us across their front page and hundreds of other newspapers and magazines worldwide (including The New York Times and Paris Match) will publish the photo of the tank driver grabbing my arm, his mouth clenched in fury, my face stunned in disbelief. The captions accompanying the picture will range from misleading—“A woman climbs on a tank on Moscow’s Gorky Street to argue with its driver”—to completely false—“Russian woman defends her city against oncoming tanks.” A journalist from a German magazine will even manage to track me down a week later to ask if she can send over a photographer and makeup artist to take a follow-up picture of me, the hero of the putsch. (“Just like that guy in Tiananmen!” she’ll say.)
“Wait a minute!” I’ll scream, to anyone who cares to listen. “It’s not what you think. I was just trying to get a better view!” But nobody wants to hear the truth when the myth is so much better.
THE NEXT SEVENTY-TWO HOURS of the coup are a sleepless blur. I’m mostly just running back and forth between Sheremetevo Airport, where I send off my film with willing passengers, and the Byeli Dom—the “White House,” home of the Russian parliament and ground zero for antiputsch activity. The burly cab drivers who chauffeur me between these two points curse out the putsch leaders, calling them things like money-grubbing Jewish horn-headed corrupted motherfuckers. Then, as usual, they make me pay them twenty dollars over the ruble fares on their meters.
During this time, Yeltsin is holed up inside the White House, strategizing with his cronies, while outside the White House, Soviet citizens are busy constructing antitank barricades out of old bed frames, steel girders, barbed wire and just about anything else they can lay their hands on. Even though the TV news has been preempted by Swan Lake, everyone understands the basics of what’s happening, that a group of hard-line communists have decided to overthrow Gorbachev and with him, their country’s newly emerging freedom. Within hours of the start of the coup, I run into our filmmaker friend Katya, who only a week earlier had made her doomsday predictions at our dinner party. I find her milling about the plaza outside the White House, shaking her head and clutching her mother’s hand. When we talk, she tries to make light of the situation, flashing a mischievous smile while saying, “Yeah, well, it’s only a matter of time before they start shipping us all off to labor camps again,” but I can tell by her white knuckles that she’s not convinced of the humor in her joke.
On that first day, I spend the afternoon shooting some of the barricade-building. Four men hoist a cement barrier. Two girls carry over an old ladder. One kid throws his bicycle into the mix. The whole scene reminds me of old Soviet propaganda films, except instead of happy Russians dressed in overalls, tilling the fields in perfect collective harmony, I’m watching happy Russians dressed in black market Levi’s collectively building a freakish-looking wall against communism. “Higher, higher,” one man yells, “we must build it higher.”
“Dima, go get that park bench. . . .”
“Lyosha, Shura, we need some of those metal barriers from the police station. . . .”
“Here, take my truck. It’ll stop a tank, and the piece of shit doesn’t work anyway. . . .”
I’ve never seen so many Russians getting along so well together.
Soon the trolley car drivers start arriving, parking their blue and white trams in the middle of the street while the burgeoning crowds hoot and cheer. The mood is festive, even hopeful. “I’m here to help,” one says.
“Where should I park this one?” asks another.
The taxi drivers decide to show their solidarity by ceremoniously tossing their fare meters into a big pile on the pavement. It’s a pretty lame gesture—Russian cabbies never use their meters anyway, and it’s not like a pile of small metal boxes would ever stop a tank—but I guess it’s the thought that counts.
I’m shooting the pile of meters, wondering if anyone back at Contact or Newsweek will have any idea what they’re looking at when they edit my film, when I hear my name called out. “Deborah! Deb!” I look around, but can’t figure out where the sound is coming from. “Up here! Over here! Look up!” the voice says. I look up, and there, atop a barricade jerry-rigged out of park benches and chunks of cement, planks of wood and an old trolley car, is my roommate Andy.
MOSCOW, USSR, 1991
He’s sitting on the roof of the trolley, swinging his legs back and forth. He has his arms wrapped around his fellow demonstrators, the attractive female ones, at least, and in one hand he holds a partially consumed bottle of vodka. He takes a big swig and smiles, happier than I’ve ever seen him. “They sent my father off to Siberia,” he yells down, his voice brimming with pride, “but they’re sure as hell not going to get me!” He repeats himself in Russian for the sake of his new buddies, and they all erupt into defiant cheers.
“Andy,” I shout back, “what the hell are you doing up there? This is not your revolution. You’re from New Jersey.”
“Who cares?” he says, taking another shot of the vodka and wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “I’m staying. They can try to run me over, but I’m staying!” The bravado is pure John Wayne, and it elicits even more cheers from his fellow barricade-sitters. He passes around his bottle for all to enjoy. I tell him to be careful, but I also understand that for the first time since arriving in Moscow, Andy has found something to believe in.
“You seen Paul?” I ask. He hasn’t. It’s been hours since we lost each other in the chaos of Manezhnaya Square, and I’m dying to run over to the ABC bureau to see if I can find him. But the word on the street is that the putsch leaders have scheduled a press conference, and the word from
the Newsweek bureau, where I briefly checked in, is that I’m on assignment, so I say good-bye to Andy and run over to shoot the press conference. Besides, I’m not really worried about Paul’s or about anybody else’s safety at this point. Since those first scary hours when the tanks rolled into Moscow, the army presence in the streets has turned from menacing to benign. In fact, with soldiers and tanks occupying positions on every major Moscow artery, somehow the city feels safer than usual, as if all that artillery and hardware might cause a policeman to think twice before stopping us foreigners, under the pretense of a traffic violation, to extort our money.
When I arrive at the press conference, the place is brimming with Betacams and wires, tripods and tungsten lights. It’s late enough in the day that all the usual suspects, at least the ones from European cities with up-to-date Soviet press visas, have had time to jump on their various planes and find their way to Moscow. Of the two hundred or so journalists here, I must know at least half. I say hello to some colleagues who’ve just arrived from Paris, most of whom greet me with a warm kiss on either cheek and some version of Can you fucking believe it?
The putsch leaders enter the room, led by Gennadi Yanayev. The others—Yazov, Pugo, Kryuchkov and Pavlov (all, ironically, Gorbachev appointees)—take their seats on the dais with him. Not one man is smiling. In fact, all of them seem scared, like criminals on a firing line. “Gorbachev is ill,” Yanayev says, his hands shaking violently. The reporter sitting next to me shakes his head and says, “Yeah, right,” under his breath. When it is later suggested that Gorbachev might be allowed to retake control if and when he ever gets “better,” the guy has to put his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
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