Independence Day

June 12 

there is a particular mistake that seems to come up year in and year out in the school where I work. Somebody schedules an exam on June 12th, or one of the teachers sets up parent meetings on that day. At the last minute it hits them: “Wait a minute! June 12th is a national holiday! It is Russia Day… Russian Independence Day! We have the day off!” The forgetful teacher smiles in embarrassment and shakes his or her head in wonder. “How could I forget such a thing? Next year I’ll be sure to remember.” But next year comes and the exact same scenario plays out.

It’s an odd situation. June 12 was proclaimed a national holiday in 1994. Fourteen years have passed and somehow the idea still has not sunk in. You would think it’s the perfect time for a holiday: the beginning of summer, long hours of daylight, nice weather. And indeed, by the evening of the 11th, an endless caravan of cars is heading out of town, since holidays are almost always timed to form a long уик-энд (“weekend”). An intricate formula has been devised to make this possible. If the 12th is a Friday or Monday, then the three-day weekend happens automatically. If the holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, then, in keeping with an exceptionally humane rule that was adopted several years ago, Russians are “compensated” for the lost holiday and the weekend is lengthened anyway. If the holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, then Saturday or Sunday is made into a workday and either Friday or Monday turns into a day off. As a result, in almost every case, national holidays give Russians a three-day weekend and the opportunity to go to the dacha, where you can grill shashlyk over an open fire, relax, and enjoy the kind of sleep you only get after a day of fresh air. Or, for those who stay in the city, there are public festivities that include streets decked out in flags and holiday concerts on television and in public spaces. Cities are transformed, with stages quickly erected on streets and in city squares, performers entertaining passersby, and loudspeakers blaring upbeat music. How could we forget such a holiday? Why does it refuse to stick in our memories?

It really is strange. How could we forget the stormy early 1990s, when, on June 12, 1990, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR adopted a Declaration of Russian Sovereignty? During those ardent times, almost all of the Soviet republics adopted similar declarations, thereby proclaiming their desire to secede from the Union. The sovereignty of Russia was a last step in the fall of the Soviet Union. If Russia secedes – who’s left? The Baltic states and Georgia had long since declared that they wanted nothing more to do with the USSR. Ukrainians? Moldovans? Everyone had their own problems with the Union and in each and every republic (and even in autonomous oblasts) there arose a National Front and calls for independence. 

Nationalistic slogans began to surface in Russia as well, but they were not what was paramount in the country. Just thinking about it takes your breath away – the throngs of demonstrators, the rivalry between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, the hope and the fear, the overwhelming sense of exhilaration, the growing intoxication with freedom, the total lack of any sense of what would happen tomorrow, the emergence of unfamiliar expressions in our lexicon (“hot points,” “ethnic conflict,” “refugees”),  huge lines in the shops, and ration cards that were euphemistically called “purchaser visiting cards.”  

There was a stunning juxtaposition of the horrifying and the joyous, a breathtaking leap into the future, despite the fact that we had no idea whether that future would be glorious or gloomy. It would take another year and a half for the Union to completely collapse. On June 12, 1991, the first anniversary of the Declaration, Russia’s first presidential elections were held. Yeltsin’s triumph in those elections paved the way for his most important triumph – his refusal to submit to the putschists in August 1991. Just two months after his election, he was standing on a tank in a Moscow street, defiantly facing down the Communist conspirators, later giving a rousing victory speech in front of the Белый Дом, Russia’s governmental “White House,” his confederates shielding him with a bullet-proof jacket. Among those who shielded Yeltsin in August 1991 were some who, in October 1993, unleashed a new coup and were violently expelled – with tank fire – from that same White House. 

In 1994, when June 12th was declared a holiday, hostile tongues said, “We’re not celebrating Russian independence; we’re just celebrating Yeltsin’s election in 1991.” By then, the First Russian President was no longer the object of worship he once was. Russia had been through three hungry and violent years, and war with Chechnya was just a few months away.

For the past 14 years, we have celebrated our Independence Day, but for some reason resist recalling the ecstatic frenzy of those years. Some, disappointed by the changes that have taken place, lay the blame for the people’s suffering at the doorstep of the New Order. Some paint everything that happened in the 1990s in dark hues, trying to see today’s movement toward authoritarianism and the flowering of official corruption as the restoration of stability and the rule of law. Some now see everything that happened in the nineties as ridiculous. “Why did you go to all those demonstrations and mass meetings?” some in the younger generation now ask, with a mix of indifference and irony. “Shouldn’t you have been focusing on business, making money, taking care of your families and your own health, going to the health club, and vacationing under the palms?” 

In the end, the turbulent nineties are something nobody seems to care about. Nostalgia for those times is somehow unseemly. Public opinion surveys show that the majority of Russians do not know what they are celebrating on June 12th – they have simply forgotten the Declaration of Independence. And how, today, can you explain why Russia needed independence? From whom? Wasn’t it that the 14 republics seceded from Russia and not the other way around? The fact that all the republics were seceding not from Russia, but from the Soviet Union, from an empire that was sinking into oblivion, is all but forgotten. 

Perhaps the confusion lies in the fact that Russia declared itself to be the legal successor to the USSR, so that the country more or less continued to exist, just without some of its previously appended territories. But what independence represented at the time was independence from the old regime, from Communism. Today, Communists have become quite respectable. Their Duma speeches are full of the obligatory denunciations, but they conduct themselves in a more or less civilized manner. They make money just like anybody else, and they fit into the political scene just fine. Nobody feels threatened by their ideology anymore. 

The Soviet past no longer seems so unpleasant, and we are increasingly encouraged to remember the brighter sides of our history – our memories helped along by the nice comedies and love stories replayed on television. It’s even strange: why did we have to raise such a fuss and fight for independence if, as we can now see on our television screens, all the pig farmers, shepherds, and construction workers were living such a jolly life? 

In the end, it turns out that Independence Day is not such a cause for celebration after all. It is nothing more than a long summer weekend that might just as well be renamed Shashlyk Day or Beer Day. Nobody would even notice.  ◗