Vzgliad on the GKChP

The clips comprising this artifact derive from three separate episodes of Vzgliad, which were thrown together during the attempted takeover of executive power in the USSR by the State Emergency Committee (abbreviated, in Russian, GKChP) between 18 and 21 August 1991. Led by Gennadii Yanaev, who had been made Vice President of the USSR in December 1990 during one of Gorbachev’s innumerable administrative reshuffles, the GKChP confined the General Secretary to his Crimean dacha, and, on the pretext of his supposed “ill health,” took power in the Kremlin. As they did so, the putschists encountered a thousands-strong popular opposition in Moscow and, more importantly, resistance from the administration of the Russian Socialist Republic (RSFSR), then led by Boris Yeltsin. The opposition to the coup prevailed, the GKChP was disbanded and its members tried, and Gorbachev formally returned to power. However, Gorbachev’s was a pyrrhic victory. He returned only because Yeltsin convinced key parts of the Soviet military and civilian apparatus to switch loyalties from the USSR to his Russian republican administration. As a result, Gorbachev ceased to hold the real reins of power in the country. Four months later, Yeltsin would make his takeover official by simply evicting Gorbachev from his Kremlin office.

At the time of the coup, Vzgliad did not have a regular airing slot, as it had been taken off air by Gosteleradio decree in December 1990, possibly for overly bold discussions of the authoritarian turn taking place in the USSR. However, by this time, Gosteleradio was no longer making Vzgliad. Since October 1990, the show instead was being being produced by the privately held media group ViD (Vzgliad and Others). ViD was founded earlier that year by various members of the Vzgliad team, most prominently Vladislav Listyev and Alexander Liubimov, and it went on to sell several products to Central Television throughout 1991, such as the game show “Field of Miracles [Pole Chudes].” ViD proceeds made it possible to produce Vzgliad underground and to circulate it via videotapes and occasional airings on local TV. Within a couple of days of the coup, the White House defenders were able to take control of Central Television, and, on 20-23 August, Vzgliad aired three hours of coup-related footage nationwide.

The present clips are from these airings. These turned out to be Vzgliad’s last episodes, as its founders went on to pursue other post-Soviet projects. The clips highlight the intensity of Vzgliad’s participation in the anti-GKChP movement, with all key members of the team holed up in the RSFSR parliament building (the Russian White House). In the way they speak about this event, they also reveal the contingency of the ideology of the people opposing the GKChP. Vzgliad’s hosts, like the protesters they interview—including world-renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich—are certain that they are observing an anti-democratic putsch led by career Party cadres and supported by no one outside their circles. Elsewhere in the report, onlookers see in Yanaev’s “shaky hands and seasonal cold” signs of a return to the early 1980s, when government was dominated by doddering Party authoritarians. At the same time, throughout the coup episodes, Vzgliad and its interviewees remain skeptical of Yeltsin and prefer to associate the feeling of democratic solidarity at the White House with Gorbachev, who has “finally become our president.” Vzgliad’s in-the-moment perception of the 1991 events, including its remarkable lack of foresight, reveals the ideological distance that key actors of the Russian media ecosphere traveled throughout the 1990s, from radical, possibly utopian democratic activism, to resigned accommodation to the growing authoritarian impulses of the pro-capitalist Yeltsin government.