https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1I-qzMS8f0
Clips of Vzgliad's reports during GKChP in 1991. These include being holed up in the White House (the RSFSR parliament) alongside its defenders and celebrities, such as Mstislav Rostropovich.
Perestroika
1991
The following clips have been taken from three episodes of Vzgliad, which were thrown together in the middle of the attempted takeover of executive power in the USSR by the Emergency Committee (GKChP), in August 18-21, 1991. Led by Gennadii Yanaev, who had been made USSR’s vice president in December 1990 during Gorbachev’s innumerable administrative reshuffles, the Emergency Committee confined Gorbachev in his Crimean dacha, and on the pretext of the latter’s ill health took power in the Kremlin. As they did so, they encountered an opposition composed of thousands of protesters in Moscow and, more importantly, the administrative apparatus of the Russian Socialist Republic (RSFSR), led by Yeltsin. The opposition to the coup prevailed, the Emergency Committee was disbanded and its members tried, and Gorbachev formally returned to power. However, Gorbachev’s was a pyrrhic victory. He returned only thanks to Yeltsin convincing key parts of the Soviet military and civilian apparatus to switch loyalties from the USSR to his Russian republican administration. As a result, Gorbachev ceased to hold the real reins of power in the country. Four months later, Yeltsin would make his takeover official by simply evicting Gorbachev out of his Kremlin office.
At the time of the coup, Vzgliad did not have a regular airing slot, as it had been taken off air by Gosteleradio decree in December 1990. However, by this time Vzgliad was no longer being made at Gosteleradio and was actually being made by the privately held media group VID (Vzgliad and Others), which had been created by Vladislav List’ev and Alexander Liubimov, among others in late 1990. VID sold other products to Central Television throughout 1991, which gave them the budget to produce Vzgliad underground and to circulate it via videotapes and occasional local TV airings. Within a couple of days of the coup, the White House defenders were able to take control of Central Television, and on August 20-23 Vzgliad aired three hours of coup-related footage nationwide. The present clips are from these airings. These turned out to be Vzgliad’s last episodes, as its founders went on to pursue other post-Soviet projects.
The clips highlight the intensity of Vzgliad’s participation in the anti-GKChP movement. They also mark out the contingency of the ideology of the people opposing GKChP. Vzgliad’s founders, like the protesters whom they interview, such as the world-renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, are certain that GKChP is an anti-democratic putsch led by career Party cadres and supported by no one else. Elsewhere in the report, they see in Yanaev’s “shaky hands and seasonal cold” a sign of return to the days of doddering Party authoritarians of the early 1980s. 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.”
Listyev, Vladislav, Liubimov, Aleksandr (Alexander), Zakharov, Dmitry, Politkovsky, Alexander, and Rostropovich, Mstislav
Moscow
VID, August 20-23, 1991