In July 1917, three months before the Bolsheviks seized power, a clash between soldiers and demonstrators turned bloody on the Nevsky Prospekt in Petrograd (Boon to be Leningrad). But in 1991 thousands of Muscovites took peacefully to the streets to cheer their hero, Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
In Petrograd, bonfires of imperial flags and emblems marked the overthrow of the czar in 1917. Three quarters of a century later, Russians took to the streets again, throwing up makeshift barricades and stockpiling firebombs to keep the junta’s tanks from advancing on the Russian parliament building.
Vladimir Lenin, the crafty and ruthless architect of the Bolshevik revolution, was for most of this century a kind of secular patron saint of the Soviet Union. Now his statues are falling, and Russia has new heroes–the martyrs of the August coup, who died defending their country’s fledgling democracy.
