August 21: Resisting the Soviet Coup

Ilya Krichevsky, 28, an architect and poet, was one of three young citizens of the Soviet Union who was killed by Soviet soldiers while protesting the attempted Moscow coup against Mikhail Gorbachev on this date in 1991. Rabbi Zinovy Kogan, who had founded Hineini, Russia’s first liberal congregation, helped officiate at the interfaith state funeral (for all three victims) after Adolf Shayevich, Russia’s chief Orthodox rabbi, refused to participate. Boris Yeltsin, who had led the resistance to the coup, and Gorbachev both spoke at the funeral. “Primarily an ethnic and secular rather than religious group in the Soviet period,” writes Sasha Senderovich of Tufts University, “the Jews were now beginning to be understood as a community marked by religious difference — not necessarily the most apt approach to a population that for the most part is still secular.” The coup helped lead to the demise of the Communist Party and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself.

“It was young people, it was our children, who rushed to defend Russia’s honor, its freedom, its independence and its democracy. Our heroes, sleep peacefully, and may the earth be soft for you.” —Boris Yeltsin