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Russia marks 25 years since failed Soviet coup

Its defeat in 1991 is widely regarded as a triumph of democracy and civil liberties

By NATALIYA VASILYEVA, Associated Press
Published: August 19, 2016, 11:08pm

MOSCOW — Several dozen Russians gathered Friday for a protest reunion to mark the 25th anniversary of a coup attempt that heralded the demise of the Soviet Union, a holiday ignored in official circles because of its revolutionary, anti-establishment nature.

On Aug. 19, 1991, eight hard-line Communist leaders seized power from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, declaring him ill. In fact, Gorbachev was under arrest. Thousands of Muscovites took to the streets to protest against the coup and the clout of the powerful security services.

The defeat of the coup several days later set in motion the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and is widely regarded as a triumph of democracy and civil liberties in Russia.

Those who opposed the coup 25 years ago gathered on a rainy Friday evening outside the Russian White House — a massive government building where Boris Yeltsin, at the time the president of the Russian constituent republic within the Soviet Union, famously climbed atop a tank to defy the coup in possibly the most cinematic moment of the August resistance.

Several dozen mostly elderly or middle-aged people mingled outside the White House, some of them carrying Russian flags and photographs of the 1991 protests.

Lyudmila Skryabina, a nanny from St. Petersburg, said she takes a vacation every year to come to Moscow for this reunion.

Skryabina said she is proud that she had stood at the makeshift barricades at the same spot 25 years ago but is disappointed in today’s political regime, economic hardships and what she calls the cynicism of the government — “this flag-waving patriotism as if things are so great right now.”

Earlier this week, Moscow city hall refused to give protesters permission to march from the White House to the tunnel where three protesters were killed 25 years ago, the only victims of the otherwise bloodless coup.

Most of the August 1991 celebrations, lectures and exhibitions this weekend were organized by the grass-roots movement and a foundation established to honor the legacy of Yeltsin, who died in 2007.

Unlike the lavish state-sponsored celebrations of Victory Day, which marks the Soviet army’s victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War, the government mostly ignores the day that is largely regarded as the birthday of a new Russia.

Skryabina said that during Yeltsin’s presidency, from 1991 to 1999, there was always a government presence and wreaths at the cemetery where the three protesters killed in the coup are buried. “Now every time I come here I call my friends and ask: ‘Are they going to allow us at all?'”

The government has in recent years tightened its grip on public gatherings, and several dozen people were sent to prison for minor offenses at an opposition rally the day before Putin’s inauguration in May 2012.

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