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How the Media Killed the Coup
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19548 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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11 / 1991 |
2,634 Words |
| Author
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Lee Edwards
Lee Edwards is senior editor for the Current Issues section
of THE WORLD & I. His latest book is The Power of Ideas: The
Heritage Foundation at Twenty-five. |
There are many reasons why the Soviet coup attempted by the Gang of Eight failed: the total absence of public support for it; the coup plotters' failure to jail Russian President Boris Yeltsin and other key opponents; their unwillingness to use military force against the opposition; and significant disagreements within the Red Army and the KGB about the legality of the coup being some of them. But a major cause was undoubtedly the coup plotters' blunder in failing to control the means of mass communication. They did not understand that in today's electronically connected world, political power flows, not through the barrel of a gun, but through television and the telephone.
In vivid contrast, Yeltsin, Mayor Gavril Popov of Moscow, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak of Leningrad, and other members of the resistance adroitly used the media to stall and ultimately defeat the so-called Committee for the State of Emergency. Rejecting Stalin's cynical remark about the Pope, the reformers were more concerned with how many telephones and fax machines they had rather than divisions.
Yeltsin used the media brilliantly. In an act of real courage and unforgettable political imagery, he stood on top of a tank and exhorted his fellow countrymen to stand firm for freedom and against the coup. Some 74 years earlier in the same city, another revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, climbed on to a similar vehicle to announce the coming of communism. Yeltsin proclaimed it was through.
The image of Boris Yeltsin standing atop a tank confronting the armed might of the hard-liners was flashed around the world by the Western television networks (especially Cable News Network) again and again. It helped convince President Bush and other Western leaders to condemn the coup and praise Yeltsin and other resistance leaders quickly. Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Liberty beamed Yeltsin's defiant statements, relayed to them by telephone, back into Moscow, Leningrad, and other Soviet cities where hundreds of thousands of reformers were demonstrating against the coup. The American broadcasts helped energize the resistance; VOA estimates that the number of its Soviet listeners tripled from the usual 30 million to about 90 million during the attempted takeover.
Uninterrupted phone service enabled the anticoup leaders to organize, release statements, and receive and send news. At the height of the crisis, Yeltsin received calls from Bush and British Prime Minister John Major, whom he urged to reaffirm their opposition to the coup as well as their endorsement of his efforts;
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