Paratrooper Dmitriy Komar was killed in the coup that led to the end of the Soviet Union, writes SÉAMUS MARTIN
THE FALL of the Soviet Union was a momentous event, less spectacular than the fall of the Berlin Wall but more significant in the long term. Unlike East Germany the Soviet Union was a nuclear super-power capable of destroying the planet several times over. It was the nemesis of the United States and of Nato and its fall changed the geopolitics of the planet.
Remarkably there was no bloodbath. The key event that brought the USSR to an end, the abortive coup d’etat of August 1991, cost the lives of just three young men in an underpass in central Moscow.
On the morning of August 20th, a burly Soviet general, who supported the coup, appeared on TV to announce there would be a curfew that evening and warned citizens they should stay indoors. Most Muscovites, politicised or apolitical, paid not the slightest heed to him.
The politicised went to the White House to support Boris Yeltsin and his team. Well into that night, when sending my report of the events to Dublin, I could see from the window of my office the cars of the apolitical pull up at the Night Shop on the ground floor of the building. Their drivers were breaking the curfew on an urgent mission . . . the purchase of bottles of vodka.
Another military man was more successful in his appeal to the people than the TV general was. Alexander Rutskoy, Afghan veteran and vice-president to Boris Yeltsin in the Russian Republic, issued an appeal to his fellow Afghan veterans to come out and oppose the coup.
One of those who answered the call was Dmitriy Komar a 22-year-old paratrooper who had served two years and three months as a conscript in the Soviet Union’s most costly war. He idolised Rutskoy who was regarded as a great hero by the young conscripts. The night of the disregarded curfew was to be the last of Dmitriy Komar’s young life.
Not long after midnight in an underpass at the top of Novy Arbat Street, Komar climbed on to a tank in attempt to put a piece of tarpaulin over the observation window to hamper the vision of its crew. He fell off, was run over and, some say, was shot dead. Vladimir Usov another youngster tried to help Komar and was killed possibly by a bullet that ricocheted off the wall of the underpass. Shortly after this another youngster, Ilya Krichevskiy, lost his life.
Early next morning Lyubov Komar, Dmitriy’s mother, was preparing to go on a trip to the closed city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod. She worked at military installation in the town of Istra in the Moscow region. One of her colleagues told her there was a phone call for her. At the other end of the line was a man who worked in the furniture factory where Dmitriy Komar had been posted after being demobbed from the army.
“Is that Lyubov Komar,” he asked. “It is,” she replied. “Your son is in the morgue,” came the reply. “What’s he doing there,” she asked. “He’s lying on the floor. He’s dead.” The message was curt and almost aggressive.
Some of the media that supported the coup branded Komar as an alcoholic and a drug addict, allegations no one believes now. “I don’t want to idealise him but he was brought up in an atmosphere of patriotism. His generation and mine were brought up in a different way from those we see today. Previously there was a sense of community. Young people would give up their seats on the trolleybus to older people. Now they just look at you and think only of themselves.” Mrs Komar recounted her story from her 13th floor apartment in the suburb of Krylatskoye in western Moscow. Her family’s fate in the Russian military has not been a fortunate one. Her husband Alexey Komar, who died in 2004, was a major in an air defence regiment but lost his job in most unusual circumstances.
In May 1987, a young German called Mathias Rust stunned the world by landing a light aircraft just short of Red Square. The Soviet authorities were furious. There was a purge of air defence staff. Alexey Komar was one of those who lost his job . “He was a scapegoat,” Mrs Komar said.
Just four years later the son of the scapegoated major was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union by President Gorbachev. Shortly afterwards the Soviet Union was dissolved and in the new Russia Dmitriy Komar’s parents were presented with the Gold Star of the Russian Federation by vice-president Rutskoy.
Lyubov Komar is not impressed with the Russia her son’s death helped create. There was, she said, “corruption, banditry and lawlessness and activities by criminal gangs.” Community spirit had died out, she said, but she liked Vladimir Putin as a prime minister and Dmitriy Medvedev as president. But she had “no feelings” for Boris Yeltsin and felt that Alexander Rutskoy was right when he rebelled against his president in 1993. Yeltsin responded by shelling the Russian parliament. More than 140 people died in those events.
From the balcony of her little apartment, awarded to her for her son’s heroism, Lyubov Komar can see both the golden domes of the Kremlin cathedrals and the skyscrapers of the new Moscow. Her preference, at 63, is for the old over the new.