By Robin Munro

A man shaking hands with a soldier as paratrooper units left the city Aug. 21.

An Izvestia reporter called the pullout unforgettable

    Maxim Yusin, 35, who has worked at Izvestia since 1988 and is now a senior correspondent in the foreign section, said much of the newspaper staff was liberal thanks to Ivan Laptev, the editor from 1984 to 1990. But the editor in 1991, Nikolai Yefimov, was the Party's man and had proved his loyalty to the men behind the coup.

    "Thus we escaped being on the list of banned newspapers," Yusin said. "Some people thought not to be on the list was a mark of shame."

    Izvestia was all prepared on Aug. 19 to print the proclamations of the State Committee for a State of Emergency, or GKChP, in its evening edition. Then some of the reporters brought in a copy of Yeltsin's appeal calling for resistance to the GKChP and with the help of the printers — who worked on the second floor of the Izvestia building on Pushkin Square — they set it in type.

    Yefimov rushed in and pulled Yeltsin's appeal, but the printers did not back down. They refused to print the paper without Yeltsin's appeal. So for the first time in the paper's history, Yusin said, the evening edition did not come out.

    A compromise was finally reached and when Izvestia finally appeared on Aug. 20, the front page was devoted to the coup leaders and the second page contained Yeltsin's appeal.

    At Moskovskiye Novosti, editor Yegor Yakovlev decided to fight the ban against his and other newspapers by creating Obshchaya Gazeta, or Common Newspaper.

    After watching the coup leaders' news conference, Yakovlev, then 61, said he was not afraid of the consequences. "I was certain they would fail," he said in a telephone interview.

    Using material gathered from the newsrooms of 11 banned newspapers, the paper came out on Aug. 20 in Moscow and Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was still known, and free copies were distributed by hand in the streets, Yakovlev said. He estimated at least 100,000 issues of the first Obshchaya Gazeta were printed.

    Soon after the coup failed, Yeltsin appointed Yakovlev chairman of the State Committee on Television and Radio, or Gosteleradio, but then fired him in 1992. Not long after that, Yakovlev started to put out Obshchaya Gazeta as a weekly, and on occasions he considered to be of national importance, he has produced special joint editions like the one produced during the coup. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, perhaps the boldest major paper of its time, decided not to defy the ban by publishing a newspaper on Aug. 20, but instead put out a leaflet-style special issue.

    The editor, Vitaly Tretyakov, got in touch with the then-director of the Library of Foreign Literature, acclaimed philologist Vyacheslav Ivanov, who agreed to let the paper use the library's photocopiers — still a rarity in Moscow in 1991 — to produce the leaflet.

    Pavel Kryuchkov, who was then a 25-year-old journalist in the paper's culture section, was sent to the library. He said Ivanov addressed the library staff and gave them a choice: Those who wanted to pledge resistance to the GKChP should stay; the rest could go home. Everyone stayed.

    "The phones at the library were ringing off the hook," Kryuchkov, now an editor at the Novy Mir literary journal, said Thursday. "Ivanov was giving interviews in about five different languages. The Library of Foreign Literature was a bastion of democracy."

    When he had left the newspaper's offices that afternoon for the library, Kryuchkov took a stack of leaflets with Yeltsin's appeal to the people and hid them under his jacket.

    "I boarded the trolleybus. It was frightening. I remember there was a big bunch of policemen on board, which was unusual."

    But Kryuchkov hadn't read Yeltsin's address yet and was dying to see it. He surreptitiously pulled out a copy and started reading.

    "Suddenly I felt someone's hands on my shoulders and I figured it was all over. Someone said loudly, 'Look, it's Yeltsin's address!' And then the whole trolleybus was screaming for copies. … The cops asked me for extras to take back to the boys at the station."

    Another liberal newspaper, Kuranty, put out by the Moscow City Soviet, also distributed an extraordinary photocopied issue on the first day of the coup. The headline said: "The Plot of the Doomed."

    Konstantin Eggert, then 27 and a staff reporter for Kuranty, said the issue compared the coup leaders to Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic.

    "Our printing press was shut down so we had to put it out on a Xerox, and then we went and distributed it to the soldiers," said Eggert, who is now an editor and presenter for the BBC's Russian-language service. "They were pretty sympathetic. Their lieutenant took me aside and said 'Don't worry, we are not going to shoot anybody.'"

    There was a feeling of solidarity between journalists, Eggert said in a telephone interview. "We were a much tighter and a much more idealistic team than most of us are today."

    On the morning of the third day, Aug. 21, the journalists at Izvestia took the first agency reports that the coup was over, photocopied them, and distributed them in streets full of crowds of people and tanks, Yusin said. "We were shouting: 'It's all over, the coup leaders are fleeing.' People were kissing each other in congratulation," he said.

    "It's a moment that I will never forget. Aug 21 and 22 were probably the happiest days of my life. Later, many of the expectations that we had failed to be realized, but at that moment we were united," Yusin said.

    "The printers came up from the second floor to us on the fourth floor and we watched as the tanks that had gone down Tverskaya Ulitsa with red flags were leaving town with the Russian tricolor. It was unforgettable."

    On Aug. 22, the journalists told Yefimov they no longer considered him the editor because he hadn't followed journalistic principles and that they were now the owners of the paper because its nominal owner, the Supreme Soviet, had discredited itself. These moves were upheld by Yeltsin soon after.

    Natalia Yefimova contributed to this report.

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