Week 28 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge is “Trains.” Having already written about all of my known railroading ancestors, Alex suggested I write about a train trip he took that ended up being scary and stressful due to political events.
It was August of 1991, and Alex left the smog-filled streets of Leningrad behind for a vacation with friends on the Black Sea in Crimea. Den, Den’s girlfriend Natasha, and Alex had recently graduated from high school. The three friends along with Den’s mother and younger sister boarded the train in Leningrad for the two-day journey. They rented an apartment and had a fun-filled time swimming in the sea, relaxing on the beach, exploring a castle, and making memories.
Unfortunately, the memory that sticks with all of them the most is what happened at the end of their two-week vacation. On August 19th, just two days before they were supposed to head home, strange things started to happen. Their first inkling that something wasn’t right occurred when they switched on the TV and Swan Lake was airing in a continuous loop. “When that started happening, we knew something was wrong,” Alex said. “We found out in bits in pieces what was going on when Swan Lake was sporadically interrupted by communiques from the coup leaders.”
The August Coup had begun.
President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, wasn’t popular with the communist party. Under his leadership, many of the Soviet republics gained more autonomy. They feared Gorbachev would sign the New Union Treaty, a move that would decentralize the Soviet government’s power and distribute it among the fifteen republics. Members of KGB, military officials, and Vice President Gennady Yanayev formed the State Committee on the State of Emergency to overthrow both Gorbachev and the newly-elected Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. The coup leaders failed to secure Yeltsin, but Gorbachev was put under house arrest at his dacha (summer home) in Crimea, a couple of towns over from where Alex and his friends were vacationing.
“That was standard op for removing leaders – they’d go on vacation and never return. There was a small naval base near where we were staying and we saw the ships take off and go in the direction Gorbachev was at the time to arrest him.
“The apartment we were renting had no phone, so to make a phone call to my parents we had to go to the central post office in the city where there were phone booths. We were finally able to call them and find out a little bit about what was going on. We decided to wait and see what happened. We had to go home through Moscow, and we knew by then there were soldiers and tanks on the streets there. I had a small, shortwave radio with me, so I was able to tune into Voice of America here and there when the government wasn’t jamming the signal, and we got more, scarier information from there. We heard people were putting up a fight against the coup. There were barricades in the streets, and people were trying to block the roads so tanks couldn’t get through. Some actually got crushed. We were like, ‘Shit! People are getting killed in the streets and we have to go through Moscow, what are we going to do?’ Den’s mom was freaking out because she had her two kids and Natasha and me home safely.” Alex’s parents told him that a tank column was heading towards Leningrad. His father was prepared to head to the barricade if he was needed.
Den’s mother and the teens came up with a plan. They would board the train in Ukraine as scheduled, and check with people at each stop along the way for news. If the coup was still underway as they neared Moscow, they would get off the train on the outskirts of the city and attempt to hitchhike the rest of the way. It was a crazy plan. Moscow and Leningrad are almost 400 miles apart, and there were five of them travelling, but it seemed like the best of all their bad options. “We got on the train, and overnight every stop it made, we’d pop out and ask the station crew if they heard anything from Moscow. For a while we heard there was nothing new, but as we got closer, we found out it was all over. The people took to the streets and started resisting. People brought flowers to the soldiers and asked them to join their side. At some point, some high-ranking military commanders said, ‘The Army is with the people!’ The Army switched sides and refused to support the coup leaders who were then arrested.”
While Alex and his friends were trying to make their way back, the situation had calmed down considerably in Leningrad. By the second day of the coup, his parents knew everything was going to be okay. Unlike the official state government-controlled television stations which continued to play Swan Lake, the local Leningrad channel was broadcasting actual updates from the city. Thousands of people were gathered in Palace Square, supported by city government officials. Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who was on vacation when the coup broke out, immediately flew back to Leningrad and appeared on television in his vacation clothes. He worked with the military officials in the city who agreed not to deploy troops in the streets.
Elena and Evgeny’s biggest worry was that Alex would get stuck somewhere. Not knowing if he’d have to hitchhike, Elena told Alex not to worry about bringing anything back for the family. When people from the city travelled to the countryside, they brought back boxes of fruit and produce because it was fresher and cheaper right from the source. He brought her food anyway, though he doesn’t remember if he bought it in Crimea or from a farmer at one of the train stops once they learned the coup was over. His mom got the fresh food that was so hard to come by in the city and Alex had an exciting story to share.
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