“Vzgliad” on the GKChP

This artifact derives from three separate episodes of Vzgliad, which were thrown together during the attempted takeover of executive power in the USSR by the State Committee on the State of Emergency (abbreviated, in Russian, GKChP) between 18 and 21 August 1991. Led by Gennady Yanaev (1937-2010), who had been made Vice President of the USSR in December 1990 during one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s (1931-2022) many 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 (1931-2007). Ultimately, the opposition prevailed. The GKChP was disbanded and its members tried, while Gorbachev formally returned to power. However, Gorbachev’s was a pyrrhic victory. He returned only because Yeltsin had convinced key parts of the Soviet military and civilian apparatuses to switch loyalties from the USSR to his Russian republican administration. As a result, Gorbachev ceased to hold the real reins of power. 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, because in December 1990 it had been taken off the air by decree of Gosteleradio (the Soviet State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting)—possibly for overly bold discussions of the authoritarian turn taking place in the USSR. By this time, however, Gosteleradio was no longer making Vzgliad. After October 1990, the show was instead produced by the privately held media group ViD (short for “Vzgliad and Others”), founded earlier that year by leading members of the Vzgliad team including Alexander Liubimov (1962-) and Vladislav Listyev (1956-1995). The media group went on to sell several products to Central Television throughout 1991, including the game show “Field of Wonders [Pole chudes].” In 1990 and 1991, proceeds from ViD’s ventures made it possible to produce Vzgliad underground and circulate it via videotapes and occasional airings on local TV.

During the 1991 coup, the oppositionists were able to take control of Central Television, and, on 20-23 August, Vzgliad broadcast three hours of coup-related footage nationwide. These airings turned out to be Vzgliad’s last episodes as its founders went on to pursue other post-Soviet projects. The footage excerpted above highlights 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.
Their discussions of the coup unwittingly reveal the contingency of the ideology motivating those who opposed the GKChP. Like the protesters they interview—including world-renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich—Vzgliad’s hosts are certain 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 reveals the enormous ideological distance key figures in the Russian media traveled over the course of the 1990s: from radical, possibly utopian democratic activism, to resigned accommodation of the increasingly authoritarian impulses of Yeltsin’s pro-capitalist government.