August Days

Why Russians fear them

What could be better than August? The sun and warmth of summer may be briefly interrupted by the occasional storm, but the weather soon recovers. The solstice is far enough in the past that the stars stand out against a dark sky, which is occasionally illuminated by flashes of summer lightning. You can stay out late in the sultry air watching meteor showers and waiting for a shooting star to wish on. In the countryside, the crops are being harvested, but for most city folk it’s a time of carefree vacations. Political life quiets down, cities empty – peace and tranquility reign!

But for some reason, over the course of the twentieth century, August developed a reputation as a time when Russians could expect something dreadful to happen. And whenever something dreadful did happen, people simply shrugged their shoulders and said, “What did you expect? It’s August.”

At two o’clock on the afternoon of August 12, 1906, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin was just beginning to receive visitors at this dacha on Aptekarsky Island outside St. Petersburg. Although he was spending time with his family at their vacation home, he was still taking time to deal with affairs of state. At approximately half past two a carriage pulled up to the home’s entrance. Terrorists disguised as officers of the security police emerged carrying briefcases filled with explosives. They tried to gain admittance to see Stolypin, but when they realized that would not be simple, they threw the briefcases and ran for the door. The explosion killed 28 people and injured many more, including the prime minister’s three-year-old son and, more severely, his teenage daughter, both of whom were tossed from the house’s balcony by the blast. The daughter remained disabled for the rest of her life.

By August 19 Stolypin had instituted military field courts that were empowered to hear terror cases and issue death sentences without a jury. The death sentences were to be carried out within 24 hours, a provision intended to prevent the Duma from granting pardons. Those courts existed for less than a year but remain a major blemish on the reputation of an otherwise great reformer. In a country that had grown unaccustomed to the execution of prisoners, the treatment of suspected revolutionaries was shocking.

Eight years later, a terrorist finally succeeded in killing Stolypin, but his agrarian reforms continued to transform Russia after his death. The country faced myriad problems, but many of them were being successfully addressed. Russia was advancing both economically and politically, albeit not as quickly as some would have liked. Alas, this progress was brought to a halt, again in August.

On August 1, 1914, Russia entered the First World War.

As if he could sense that neither the country nor his family would survive the turmoil of war, Nicholas II twice rescinded signed orders to launch a general mobilization. The third time, he finally let the order stand. Before August was over, Russian troops had already suffered stunning defeats in East Prussia. Seeing this month as pivotal, Solzhenitsyn aptly chose August 1914 as the name for the first novel in his Red Wheel cycle, which explores the complex web of events that led to the demise of the tsarist government.

The war deprived Russians of any semblance of normal life, and, just as it was finally coming to an end, the country was further upended by revolution. The monarchy was overthrown and a diverse array of political forces began to vie for power. By the summer of 1917, it was clear that the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, would stop at nothing. General Kornilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Provisional Government’s army, tried to seize power and prevent a Bolshevik takeover. Kornilov’s coup failed and wound up increasing the popularity of leftist forces. In October 1917, the Provisional Government collapsed and the Bolshevik dictatorship began.

Nicholas II and his family would not live to see another August: they were shot in Yekaterinburg during the early morning hours of July 17, 1918.

In August 1921 in Petrograd, a number of people were accused of involvement in a monarchist conspiracy and shot, including the brilliant poet Nikolai Gumilyov. That same month, Russian poetry suffered another major blow: on August 7 Alexander Block died in a state of desperate poverty and terrified by the prospects he saw for Soviet Russia.

Years passed and the Soviet government consolidated its power. The country was roiled by the first Five Year Plans, famine resulting from collectivization, show trials of party leaders, and countless executions. It is hard to identify any one month that was particularly awful in the twenties and thirties – they all were.

Nevertheless, August 23, 1939, stands out. That is the day that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed. The world was shocked to learn that the self-professed leading anti-fascist power had signed a non-aggression agreement with the Third Reich. Furthermore, by eliminating the possibility of an Eastern Front, the agreement gave Germany a free hand to launch the Second World War. By the following summer, the Soviet Union had taken over the Baltic states. One year later the former allies Germany and the USSR were at war.

The war with Germany ended in May 1945, and on August 2, 1945, the Potsdam Conference concluded. This conference was convened to decide the fate of postwar Europe, but in essence it paved the way toward the Cold War.

The atom bombs dropped by the United States that same August on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were little remarked in the Soviet Union, although they certainly caught Stalin’s attention. He clearly appreciated the tremendous power of the weapon his ally-turned-enemy possessed. This new challenge had to be dealt with, and not just through the intensified work being done at closed military cities in the Urals, where the race to come up with a Soviet atom bomb was underway. Stalin also felt a need to “clean up” the entire USSR. This involved restoring the industrial capacity that was destroyed during the war, but just as important in Stalin’s eyes, if not more so, it meant quashing any naïve illusions that the heroic efforts of the Soviet people to defeat the Nazis had earned them any sort of liberalization.

To drive this point home, in August 1946 a now infamous resolution was published by the Central Committee denouncing the literary magazines Zvezda and Leningrad and crudely smearing the reputations of two great writers: satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and poet Anna Akhmatova. This resolution represented the first, but far from the last, in a series of ideological campaigns that shook postwar Russia and attacked hundreds of prominent cultural and scientific figures, decimating entire fields of science, such as biology, which was the target of an obscurantist session of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, held from July 31 through… August 7, 1948. At this meeting, hacks lashed out at genuine scientists, countless human lives were destroyed, and genetics was declared “imperialism’s venal whore.”

In 1953, Stalin died. Khrushchev came to power and a few years into his famous Thaw was forced into retirement by his comrades. Brezhnev took the Soviet helm, ushering in an era that was less bloody but hardly less oppressive. When the leadership of “fraternal” Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party decided to pursue “socialism with a human face” – not a rebellion or a rejection of Leninist ideas, just a liberalization – it was perceived as a mortal threat to the Soviet system. On August 21, 1968, Warsaw Pact troops entered Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring ended in late summer.

Two decades passed. Perestroika swept the country, the winds of change began to blow, and a sense of hope was rekindled.

Then came August 1991, and suddenly it seemed as if the bad old days were about to return. Television screens showed a new pretender to the position of dictator, a man with trembling hands who muttered something about restoring order. Barricades rose up around Russia’s House of the Government to protect it from approaching tanks. Yeltsin – handsome, tall, and full of vitality – stood on a tank and promised to fight for freedom. Freedom won, the aura of gloom lifted, and it looked as if everything would be wonderful.

As fate would have it, it was specifically in August 1999 that Vladimir Putin was brought into the post of prime minister under the aging and increasingly feeble President Yeltsin, who stepped aside in favor of Putin on December 31, 1999.

Another year passed, and in August 2000 the Kursk submarine sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea. When Putin was asked by Larry King what had happened to the submarine, Putin’s calm, cynical response was, “It sank.”

Such was the Russian month of August throughout the twentieth-century.