By Scott A. Brinton
“The Event,” a 2015 found-footage documentary by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, opens with black-and-white images of mostly men marching in August 1991 through the streets of Leningrad, in the then Soviet Union, overturning a trailer and grabbing all manner of furniture to erect hastily constructed barricades. Worry was etched on the protesters’ faces.
People had assembled in Leningrad’s central Palace Square and surrounding streets to stop an attempted coup d’état that, they believed, was radiating from Moscow, the USSR’s capital, across the land.
“The Event” is a hopeful but strangely haunting film that I watched recently on Zoom. Hofstra University’s Department of Comparative Literature, Languages and Linguistics and the History Department presented it, with a panel discussion moderated by Dr. Ben Rifkin, a Hofstra professor of Russian.
I wanted to see the film because in August 1991 I was a Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Bulgaria, a Soviet satellite nation for 45 years, from the end of World War II through 1990, when it finally gained its freedom and turned to democracy. I cannot express the chilling effect the coup attempt had on many Bulgarians, who worried about a sudden return to hardline communism. I wondered what, precisely, had happened in Moscow and other Soviet cities from Aug. 18 to 21, 1991, as the coup unfolded. I had never seen images of it before.
The good people of Leningrad were concerned that Soviet Armed Forces tanks might roll against their city, and a sea of tens of thousands of people rallied, placing themselves in mortal danger to preserve the democratic reforms enacted under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
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