A little after midnight on August 19, 1991, I started hearing that there was an attempted coup d’etat in the USSR. At 7 AM, Moscow time, midnight in New York City, the radio broadcasters announced that a national crisis required the takeover of the government by the State Committee on the State of Emergency, headed by eight members from the government, military, and the security services. For appearance’s sake, the head of the toothless Peasant Association was also thrown onto the board.
The Vice President of the USSR, Gennady Yanayev, tossed down a few tumblers of vodka before going on television to declare himself as the “acting president” due to Mikhail Gorbachev’s tiredness and “illness.” His hands were shaking as he read the declaration.
Our social research and public religion group at the International Research Institute on Values Changes (IRIVC) started gathering information from our networks in the Soviet Union. We wanted to find out what was happening and whether we had anything to contribute to forecasting what would happen.
IRIVC was a unique partnership of Americans, Soviets, and, eventually, Chinese scholars and journalists to study the role of religion in the making of a new society from within a totalitarian state. Nothing like this group had ever been gathered before: independent; multi-national; multi-religious; and well-inserted within the Communist governments. Paul de Vries, an American ethics professor, and Samuel Kliger, a Moscow sociologist, brought several others together including me to found the Institute in June 1990. We had already been meeting and working a few months before then.
There were six founders, two Americans, four Soviets (one from Tartarstan), two evangelical Christians, one Jesuit priest, a humanist, and several Jews of varying beliefs. In time, the IRIVC network included dozens of Soviets and Americans working on social research, crime and prisoners, corruption, new entrepreneurs, sexology, government, military, and intelligence officials, and more. The group helped to produce several books, magazines, newsletters, a television network and gave advice to many Soviet, American, and Chinese leaders. At one point, we hosted one of the chief advisors to the Soviet government, a high-level official in the Chinese Communist Party bureau responsible for managing religion, the childhood friend of Deng Xiao-ping’s daughter, and many more. One of the spin-offs of our efforts was the setting up of the Journey Data Center, which specializes in gathering data on religion in New York City and other cities.
The moment was unusually personal to me. I was newly married, and my bride and I had split our time in a 1991 trip between staying in one of Gorbachev’s residencies in Moscow, facilities provided by the father of the Chinese submarine program in Shanghai, and a high ranking party official in Beijing. We took the overnight express from Moscow to Leningrad with a Chinese-speaking colonel on his way to military headquarters and stayed at a military hotel in Beijing that featured such tourist attractions as visits of the shooting ranges of the Beijing area and lessons in how to operate the latest tanks. It was a HINGE moment in history when the status quo was coming undone and possibilities seemed endless.
Like most of those situations, the status quo got reformed in ways that were unexpected: a non-Communist, Orthodox Christian authoritarian and a new Emperor for an Imperial Communist China modernizing by adaptation of Western ways and technology. At times, we were literarily present to see the future being born. Sometimes, that meant that the blood of our friends was spilled. My wife and I had dinner with a heroine of reform, Galina Starovoitova, shortly before she was assassinated.
But what does religion have to do with the coup in 1991?
Actually, as we studied the mechanics of coups, of which I previously had made a special study, we realized that there were certain steps that the coup plotters must make in a quick fashion or everything would fall apart within three days.
First, a coup is not just any sort of violence. It is not a civil war, for example. A coup is a quick replacement of the heads of government before anyone can coordinate an opposition. If the opposition finds enough time to get together, the coup either fails or a civil war ensues. A coup is relatively bloodless; a civil war usually entails mass causalities.
Once the coup has started, the different major actors like the military, security services, political organizations, and civic associations usually hesitate to act in case they end up on the losing side.
Act too slow, and the dock upon which you are standing will burn up. Act too fast, the boat on which you hopped may sink.
Coup leaders take advantage of this feature of a coup: they know that if they can keep everyone in the dark and act fast before there is a gathering of opposition, then they have a likelihood to gain a bandwagon effect which leads to a successful conclusion of a coup.
Here, religion in Russia was playing a part. The 1991 coup plotters, for one, were relying on military and security services that were newly split by a spiritual seeking. The nomenklatura, that is the leaders of the party-state, no longer believed in Communism and rather quickly a substantial portion of them was finding new direction from a belief in God and His teachings in the Bible or tradition.
In April 1990, we did a general population survey of Muscovites, heavy with members of the nomenklatura, and found that 12% said that they were sure God exists. Based on previous research, we know that few people would have admitted this, even if they agreed with a Christian believer like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and dissident religious Jews. In fact, most were previously socialized into atheistic Communism but prompted by their ideology’s failure, many were seeking a new spiritual home.
Consequently in our April 1991 survey, we found a surprise. Revolutionary ideological changes were changing the social landscape of the Soviet Union. Now, 34% of the people in Moscow said that they were sure God exists. 36% of the university students said this. And the numbers for government, military, and intelligence officials were similar. This was a rise of 300%! There was a vast search for a new ideology, a new faith.
Further, the respondents freely said that they highly distrusted the government and the KGB. Only 2% of Muscovites trusted those political actors. Inside the nomenklatura, there was disillusionment. Often, the only thing the insiders believed in was their privileges. They were corrupt, old, and had risen through insider privileges to levels above their competence. They were a bunch of scared sofa sitters trying to act tough. They tried to kill their fears with massive volumes of alcohol and illicit sex. Their cynical underlings were not likely to snap to attention by appeals to Communism or loyalty to the state. In fact, many of them were looking for a moral, spiritual renewal.
The political and ideological split created the pre-conditions for a coup and for its failure. 25% of Muscovites favored an authoritarian government. So, the coup plotters had just enough company to make them believe in their inevitability. Further, 50% of those who leaned toward democracy and faith in God were fearful of chaos. This group was liable to be slow to react to any coup attempt. The coup plotters, if they were quick enough, could show a reassuring iron hand. 25% of Muscovites supported democracy. In fact, this meant that the coup couldn’t succeed. One out of four colleagues at Military District Headquarters 4 (Moscow) and Lubyanka (the KGB headquarters) was going to put sand in the works and leak out the coup plans. On Sunday, we got calls from within military headquarters.
So, the coup plotters couldn’t be swift, secret, and in control of the information flow that would keep people frozen from action.
They committed many other technical errors. They didn’t shut down the phone lines (which we were using to gather information), they didn’t have firm control over the media and alternative media were quick to get back to broadcasting (that is an interesting story). Finally, they didn’t isolate Mikhail Gorbachev effectively. Some “guards” allowed Gorbachev to smuggle out a video saying he was healthy and denouncing the coup plotters.
By Sunday afternoon, we were pretty certain of the above facts and a few others. We urged our students and friends in Moscow to keep reporting and not flee to the American Embassy (where they would have been buried in the basement with no means of knowing or communicating what was happening). We advised one of our colleagues who lived on the road to Moscow’s Military District HQ to just watch what units were going and returning and advised some young visitors to Moscow to get a good seat across the river from the Russian Parliament building (called the White House) in order to see the coup sputter to a halt without much gunfire.
On Sunday evening, we went on a large audience radio program here in NYC and rather brashly predicted that the coup would fail by Wednesday. The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexy II, was persuaded by a Soviet official to support Gorbachev and the Soviet president Boris Yeltsin. Then, we sweated out to see if we were going to have egg on our face and be scrambling to protect our colleagues in the Soviet Union.
The plotters planned to attack the Russian Parliament and take or kill Yeltsin at 2 PM on Tuesday, August 21. Calling their attack Operation Thunder, they unleashed the military and intelligence special forces. But too many of them refused to act. Armored personal carriers started to head back to Military District Headquarters and to the airfields. Gorbachev escaped captivity and landed in Moscow on August 22. He announced the arrests of the plotters. One plotter and his wife killed themselves. Their putative leader Yanayev was arrested. On August 24, the statue of the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was dismantled. So, it turns out that my wife and I got some of the last photos of Old Felix before he went on the skids to a Communist junkyard. Yanayev was eventually pardoned and ended up teaching history to tourist guides.
What did we learn from this experience?
1. Catastrophe theory. A catastrophe is likely to be an important religious moment. A catastrophe undermines social restraints and social conformity to received ideas. There is actually a moment of psychic freedom in which individuals can decide their future themselves. Consequently, there were tremendous opportunities to preach. Russians were exploring every common and uncommon religions and beliefs.
2. Expectations. Fears and hopes arise during a catastrophe. These drive a lot of the actions and spiritual searches.
2. Moral pollution. The Russian populace experienced strong feelings of unholiness and contamination. The pervasive corruption, degraded natural environment, and economic crisis left Russians feeling soiled, in needing some sort of cleansing. In Biblical terms, the Russians were awash in unholy times looking for a baptism of faith. “Cleansing” was an important aspect of social change. Quite naturally, this opened the door even wider for religions that spoke about holiness and unholiness. There was a great demand for the teaching of public and private ethics.
3. Corruption. Corruption was a major source of the sense of dirtiness: one had to lie and pay bribes to survive. This was just an everyday occurrence. At the meat market, you would only get fat unless you offered a gift to the butcher, then there was always something better in the back freezers.
Yet, Western religious missionaries were unprepared. There was not one course on the theology of corruption in all of North America. Yet, it was consistently voted the number one issue in the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, Africa, and South America. The amazing gap was even more amazing when you consider that many of the religious revivals in the past started with anti-corruption preaching, from Jesus against the money changers in the temple to Martin Luther denouncing the selling of indulgences. Bible translator John Wycliffe invented the word “bribe.”
4. Secularism. The United States didn’t understand deeply the moral-religious element in social change in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Therefore, the democratic changes didn’t have staying power. The American government’s efforts to aid “liberalization” were mainly based on secularizing strategies. It repeated the same mistake in Iraq and Afghanistan.
5. Four responses to catastrophes. The four possible responses to catastrophe were: the reassertion of the status quo; the invention of a new status quo; retreat and migration; and dissolution. There are vast similarities between the USSR and China. The end result for both is a sort of hybrid of West and East. Russia leans more to the West, adopting authoritarianism, not continuing or re-animating the totalitarian state. China has reanimated Maoist totalitarianism with Western characteristics.
6. Migration. One response to the Soviet and Chinese catastrophes was fleeing in the form of migration. We were able to follow the Russian emigration to the United States and Israel and the Chinese emigration to the United States.
7. Urban religion. We were also to discover the future rise of religion in global cities like NYC.
8. Death. Our losses of human life were significant: Galina Starotoinova; Anna Politkovskaya; and others almost too painful to talk about.
9. Publication. Although we published quite a bit, there is still much ground to cover.
10. Journalism. The need for more and better religion journalism in Russia, China, and NYC.
11. Visions. A catastrophe opens up an opportunity for new visions of personal and social lives.
12. Leadership. Secular Western leadership ideas are quite good in many ways, but they have a huge deficit on how to incorporate religious and cultural concerns.
