by Stefano Caprio

The attempted coup that led to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, the consecration of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2000, the 2004 Beslan children's massacre:Three summer anniversaries that are forcing Russians to rethink the uncertain evolution of their destiny.

The month of August, which manifests the first autumn weather uncertainties in Russia, is fraught with memories that are decisive for the course of events in recent decades, which relate back to the upheavals of recent times.

On August 19, 1991, the attempted coup by the KGB against President Mikhail Gorbačëv took place in Moscow, marking the beginning of the disintegration of the Soviet empire. 

The referendum had been held five months earlier, with an overwhelming majority of the citizens of the fifteen republics voting to keep the Soviet Union standing, and the empire still seemed to be able to overcome contradictions and divisions, remaining a superpower with a mighty atomic arsenal, capable of controlling half the countries of the world as its satellites.

The failure of the attempt to eliminate Gorbačëv, with a tank assault in front of the White House on the Moskva riverfront and the triumph of Boris Yeltsin waving the flag of Russia amidst a jubilant crowd, with no casualties or destruction, opened wide a completely different scenario: the “strong men” were now powerless, and only five days later, on August 24, 1991, Ukraine proclaimed its independence and de facto end of the empire, which was dissolved four months later, on December 25.

From the towers of the Kremlin the red flags with the hammer and sickle were removed forever (now preserved in a museum), replaced by the tricolor of the Russian republic, which shortly thereafter became the Federation, and the first and last Soviet president retired.

However much one tries to attribute responsibility for those events to the individual personalities of Gorbačëv, Yeltsin or the failed coup plotters, it is clear that a reality as gigantic and mighty as the Soviet Union could not depend only on the incapabilities of some, or the audacity of others.

Many factors then determined Russia's subsequent evolution: economic and administrative problems, the limitless spread of corruption, wartime failures, ecological catastrophes such as the Černobyl power plant explosion, the crisis of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the growth of national identity claims, and much more.

The effect of the collapse has left in the memory of Russians mostly resentment toward the West, but the truth is that historical opponents did not seek the complete dissolution of the Soviet monster in order to maintain a two-faced world order.

Time and again, Westerners saved the empire, such as in World War II, despite Stalin's initial alliance with Hitler, or in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which ended with hugs between John Kennedy and Nikita Khruščev, to the catastrophic invasion of Afghanistan, which was resolved regionally without transcending into a new global war.

Even the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall did not foresee the Union's demise, despite the reunification of the two Germanies and the decisive push for breakaway by the other Eastern European countries, including the Baltics and eventually Ukraine.

After 1991, the stages of disintegration continued with the Chechen War, and again the West sided with Moscow, without supporting the independence of the smaller peoples of the federation.

Now we have reached the next phase of the process that began 33 years ago, with the war in Ukraine and upheavals in the entire global geopolitical order, but we still cannot see what the conclusion will be, whether an effective “multipolar order” or just a new iron curtain between East and West.

Moscow Orthodox Patriarch Kirill (Gundjaev) attempted to turn the August memory into a new celebration of the rebirth of Greater Russia, recalling the solemn consecration of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which took place precisely on Aug.

19 of the Jubilee Year 2000, hosting the Council that declared the canonization of the last Tsar Nicholas II, and approved the document on the Social Doctrine of the Church, the manifesto of “Orthodox sovereignty” that guided the policies of the new President Vladimir Putin over the next quarter century. Russia's largest Orthodox church, built over several decades to celebrate the victory over Napoleon in 1812, had then been blown up by Stalin in 1931, by which time the Georgian dictator had assumed absolute power.

After the collapse of the USSR, the reconstruction of the cathedral next to the Kremlin constituted the first symbolic act of the recovery of imperial identity, and the work began thanks to the agreement between Patriarch Aleksij II (Ridiger) and the then all-powerful Moscow mayor Jurij Lužkov, in anticipation of the celebrations of the 850th anniversary of the founding of the capital, with a view to the replacement of Kiev as the “mother city” of all the Russias.

As early as August 1996, a few months before the following jubilee year, Aleksij celebrated the first liturgy in the lower chapel of the Transfiguration, and the work was completed in 1999, by which time power was passing into the hands of Vladimir Putin.

Kirill was then the metropolitan-oligarch seeking to lift the fortunes of Russia and its Church, humiliated by accusations of collaborationism with atheist power and undermined by waves of proselytizing by Catholics and Protestants from all over the West in the convulsive “religious revival” of the 1990s.

Fifteen years into his patriarchate, Kirill today has no doubts in crediting himself with the rebuilding of the cathedral and all of Russia's ecclesiastical power, recalling during the celebration how back then “I had explained to Mayor Luzkov the colossal lack of churches in the capital, which was on the margins of the statistics of church space in relation to the number of worshippers.”

Now instead he proudly extols “the extraordinary monument that stands in the center of Moscow,” whose significance lies in the fact that “even people who seem far from the faith have understood its necessity,” as they are nonetheless “bound to the faith by their origin, education and belonging to the Russian people.”

From the cathedral we then turned to the plan of “Two Hundred Churches” to be rebuilt in Moscow, which was realized and passed thanks largely to Lužkov's successor, the current mayor Sergey Sobjanin in office since 2010, in tandem with the patriarch himself.

 Kirill recalls that “Moscow is the only megalopolis in the world where so many churches are being built, while in the rest of the world they are being closed, and this testifies to the growth of faith in our people”; even though statistics state that in Moscow, and throughout Russia, the more churches are built, the fewer people visit them. Indeed, the patriarch insists that “we should not limit our preaching to the confines of the churches,” but make the entire people more involved in church life.

The memory of August thus turns from dissolution to rebirth, but another event forced Russians to rethink in these days the uncertain evolution of their destiny. Indeed, on the morning of September 1, 2004, the most tragic terrorist act in recent Russian history took place, the Beslan school massacre in North Ossetia at the start of the new school year, with 1,100 hostages held by terrorists for three days, with explosions and furious gunfights leaving 27 terrorists dead and 314 hostage casualties, including 186 children, on the ground.

President Putin, for the first time in 20 years, visited the “Mothers of Beslan” in recent days, making a propaganda tour in Chechnya as well, right during the Ukrainian offensive in the Kursk region.

Putin intended to show his superiority over Ukrainian claims, recalling the very motives that had brought him to power, when he had promised as early as prime minister in 1999 that he would take out all terrorists. The Caucasian crowd bath was reminiscent of the one following Evgenij Prigožin's coup attempt last year, when Putin (or a look-alike) indulged in hugs from the Ingush to celebrate his unbreakable union with all the peoples of Russia.

To the mothers of the children murdered in Beslan he had promised then to “tell the whole truth” about the massacre, but their representatives complained that they had not actually had any satisfaction in this regard. The president, in a dialogue that was not shown on television, embarrassedly replied that he would ask Aleksandr Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee, to resolve the issue “as soon as possible.”

n obvious confusion, Putin then inaccurately recalled the number of victims of the attack, speaking of “334 people, including 136 children,” fifty fewer than those who actually died. He then hysterically tried to blame “the forces from abroad that tried to justify and help terrorists, even on moral grounds,” linking back to current events, as “our enemies continue to disrupt our country, instigating and provoking the criminal actions in the Kursk region, in the Donbass and throughout

Novorossija,” i.e., Ukraine. By seeking help in the memory of past events, Putin and Kirill hope to shine the face of the new victorious Russia, making the confusion and impotence of an increasingly uncertain and contradictory system even more apparent.

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