Ross: Looking back on a time when Russians chose freedom over force

What’s happening to Ukraine is sad. But there’s something else just as sad, and that is what’s happened to Russia, because there was a time when Russians chose freedom over force.

It was in August of 1991, and I know, because I was there.

“I’m here at what used to be a monument to Sverdlov, one of Lenin’s aids, and the statue is gone — it’s been removed, and the pounding you hear is that of souvenir hunters who are chipping off pieces of the monument,” I reported at the time.

Hundreds of thousands of Russians rose up under Boris Yeltsin and disbanded the Communist Party. The tanks rumbled through the streets, but the soldiers refused to fire on their own citizens.

The next morning, when I went to Lenin’s tomb looking for communists, I couldn’t find a single one. I was in Red Square, the heart of Russia – not a single commie!

I visited Joe Adamov, a long-time commentator for Radio Moscow, who had spent his career spreading propaganda he knew not to be true. But now, he was able to speak freely. As we sat in his apartment, he said Russia would never be the same.

“Now, what makes you think the change this time is permanent?” I asked.

“What makes me sure that people are different? Once they’ve tasted liberty, they can’t be the same,” he answered. “Among these young people are many former veterans of Afghanistan. They knew they were sent to fight for an unjust cause. You see, the people are different, …. the number of people that are for democracy, for freedom, for human rights, for a government based on law, for honest, free elections, for incorporation into the world economy, the number of people that are for that, they outnumber the old fogies.”

And so I asked Joe why so many people had tolerated Communism for so long.

“Well if comrade David Ross knew that it was wrong, but if comrade David Ross tried to in some way to show his feelings or slightly look the wrong way, it would have been the end of comrade David Ross. That’s why it took so long to come about,” he said.

So that was 1991: the year a generation of Russians decided to join the free world. And also, the year that a KGB officer named Vladimir Putin resigned his post to begin his political career.

He would persuade the generation that overthrew the old fogies – the generation that ended Communism – to turn back the clock. Back before the 1991 revolution, back before Stalin, before Lenin, all the way back to the Tsar.

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