20 Years Since The Fall of the Soviet Union

Alain-Pierre Hovasse, 12/23/11

Twenty years ago, on December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, declaring the office extinct and dissolving the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a massive communist empire that had existed since 1922. The USSR had been in a long economic stagnation when Gorbachev came to power in 1985. In order to bring about change, he introduced several reforms, including perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Glasnost opened the floodgates of protest and many republics made moves toward independence, threatening the continued existence of the USSR. In August of 1991, a group of Communist Party hardliners frustrated by the separatist movement attempted to stage a coup. They quickly failed due to a massive show of civil resistance -- but the already-faltering government was destabilized even further by the attempt. By December of 1991, 16 Soviet republics had declared their independence, and Gorbachev handed over power to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, ending the USSR. Collected here are photos from those tumultuous months 20 years ago. Bonus: Memories of photojournalist Alain-Pierre Hovasse, first-hand witness to these events, are collected at the end of this entry. [43 photos]

In 1991, I was hired away from Reuters in London to be Chief Photographer for the Agence France Presse and the European Press Agency in Moscow. It was perestroika (restructuring) under Gorbachev's tenure in the USSR; changes had been taking place since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and other Soviet satellites in 1989, and AFP had until then no permanent photographer in Moscow.

Two weeks after I arrived, the biggest spontaneous political gathering since the Revolution took place near Red Square. These were pro-Yeltsin people, a few months before the very first democratic elections took place in the history of Russia and the USSR elected him president of the Russian Federation and put him on a collision course with Gorbachev. It wasn't always easy knowing what to cover and how, and my only assistant was a really bad KGB-apppointed photo stringer whose only claim to fame was to be the illegitimate grandchild of Lenin's French mistress! There was a great team of AFP reporters at the time, however, and little by little I began to hire local photographers and train them from scratch as events unfolded.

Sending photos back to Paris had to be done through the only international phone line our office was allowed to have, and since the correspondents used it as well, there was always a certain amount of delay. For assignments outside of Moscow, photographers simply had to fly back the same day with their film.

Although there was plenty going on, mostly the political movement took place out of sight, and I did a lot of features to show how Moscovites lived and the rapid changes taking place. Moscow was relatively quiet that summer. Most correspondents were away on holiday and on Monday morning, August 17, I woke up to the BBC World Service announcing a Coup against Gorbachev and a certain mobilization of troops. I sprang out of bed, grabbed my cameras and started driving around town looking for activity, of which there was very little. Finally, around 9 in the morning, a line of armed personnel carriers parked on a quiet street. Then a line of tanks crossed a bridge across from the Russian Parliament, and crowds started to gather. It was a photographer's dream and as my apartment was right next door to the Parliament, I had front row seats to the events. I took a lot of photos, and knowing that Paris would be anxious for some early photos, I raced off to the office to file them.

My wife had been standing outside our apartment when she saw Yeltsin emerge from the building and climb on top of one of the tanks. Her snapshot of the event became one of the iconic images of the coup, showing the courage of the Russian leader refusing to surrender to the aging and inept Soviet cabal supposedly in charge.

The next few days were a blur, as hundreds of people gathered around the Parliament amid rumours of counter-coups, army and air attacks, and so on. It was all quite tense and I had by then flown my pregnant wife back to London. No one knew what would take place. The tank commanders, initially placed to protect the coup itself, had quickly changed their allegiance to Yeltsin and so "protected" the White House. The leaders of the coup, all so-called "friends" of Gorbachev, were inept and disorganized and the whole thing fell apart quickly. Yeltsin's appearance on the tank, and his general pugnacious nature, really shifted a lot of popular opinion to him.

A few days later as the coup collapsed, Gorbachev came back but really miscalculated the significance of the event, and Yeltsin took advantage of his growing popular support to consolidate his power. I took hundreds of photos at the Russian Parliament nearby and the Soviet parliament across town in the Kremlin. We really had a notion that life here was changing dramatically, almost every day. Being a child of the Cold War, I remember feeling elated and privileged to be there at that time, to witness the apparent demise of this repressive political regime.

Before the coup, Yeltsin's photographer, Dima would come by once in a while to sell me photos. On the day of the Coup however, I had an idea of putting him on exclusive contract with me, something he readily accepted since TASS, his agency, tended to bury all Yeltsin photos. But it was obvious that Yeltsin's star was rising fast, and having open access to him would be a good thing!

From the coup onwards, the job was 24/7 and my crew grew to around a dozen very able local stringers. It was such a big story. We covered everything and Paris was very, very happy. I was in the Kremlin the day Gorbachev dissolved the Communist Party, which was pretty momentous. The Soviet Union was falling apart, with conflicts and protests in the Ukraine, Georgia, Abkhazia, and many other places. We covered as much as we could and by the fall and winter of that year, food was in short supply. The ruble was nearly worthless. The major concern from the world's major powers was over control of the huge Soviet nuclear arsenal, and I sat countless times in Gorbachev's private office while various world leaders and their representatives came to offer help and get reassurances.

On Dec 25, Gorbachev signed the decree finally dissolving the USSR, and I watched as he read his speech in the Kremlin. This was a key moment, of course, but Gorbachev's relations with Yeltsin had gotten worse, and he failed to announce a peaceful transfer of power to Yeltsin, which was the moment we had all been waiting for. Yelstin was nowhere to be found, but as I stepped out of the Kremlin, I saw that the Russian flag had replaced the Soviet flag over the Kremlin. One of my stringers had caught the moment of transfer earlier that night, which won us a double page in Time magazine.

Later that night, Yeltsin's photographer called around midnight to offer me photos of Yeltsin sitting with General Shaposhnikov, the new head of the Russian Armed Forces (he had prevented an air attack on the Russian White House during the August Coup, and had been well rewarded) along with a couple of KGB experts being shown the famous briefcase which controlled the nuclear arsenal. This was a huge scoop and the two photos were played worldwide.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/12/20-years-since-the-fall-of-the-soviet-union/100214/