Q&A: Ann Cooper on a tale of two mutinies in Russia

In August 1991, with the Soviet Union liberalizing and on the verge of cracking up for good, a group of hardline Communist officials seized power from the bloc’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in an attempted coup. As armored vehicles rolled into Moscow, state TV rolled footage from the ballet Swan Lake, and told viewers that Gorbachev had been incapacitated by poor health. But many residents—and even some members of the armed forces—didn’t buy it. As protesters gathered, Boris Yeltsin, then the leader of the Russian Federation within the USSR, emerged as a lightning rod for opposition to the coup, climbing onto a tank and urging Russians to resist. Surprisingly, images of his defiance made it onto state TV. Within three days, the coup attempt had crumbled. Four months later, Gorbachev signed the Soviet Union out of existence.

Ann Cooper covered the attempted coup as Moscow bureau chief for NPR and later coedited a book about it, titled Russia at the Barricades. This past weekend, the episode was back in the spotlight as three dramatic days once again rocked Russia—Yevgeny Prigozhin, the hardline head of the mercenary Wagner group, launched a mutiny against President Vladimir Putin’s top defense officials then aborted it on the cusp of reaching Moscow—and reporters and analysts grasped for some kind of precedent. This time, Cooper kept tabs on events from afar, monitoring the coverage of Meduza, an independent Russian news site that now operates out of exile in Latvia, and texting with friends. “I didn’t sense a big panic, nor did I sense any optimism about this,” Cooper told me. “Some people might think, Oh, boy, we’ve heard for twenty-three years how increasingly repressive Vladimir Putin and his government are. Maybe this is gonna be his downfall; wouldn’t that be a good thing? Well, I think Russians understand that we don’t know what would follow Putin. Some analysts have said things could get even worse.”

Yesterday, I spoke with Cooper—who has also served as executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists and as a professor at Columbia Journalism School—about the many differences between the 1991 coup attempt and the Wagner mutiny, and the respective media climates in which they unfolded. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

JA: How would you evaluate the comparison between what just happened and the attempted coup in 1991?

AC: I guess I was a little surprised when I saw comparisons with 1991. First of all, it was the late Soviet era and the press had considerable freedom. In fact, freedom of speech and of the press was one of the factors that led hardline Communists to try to oust Mikhail Gorbachev. They sent censors into the major newspapers and sent tanks to surround the state broadcasting facility to try to take control of information, the way that Putin has over the last twenty years. But what was different then was that people were now used to a freer press: to some investigative journalism, to accountability journalism and questioning the people in power. And some of the journalists—some, not all—stood up to that coup. In Moscow, they banded together to publish an underground newspaper and got some video onto state TV despite the tanks surrounding the broadcast facilities, so that people were actually able to see—at least, people in some places; Moscow, critically—that what was happening was a coup attempt and that there was active opposition to it in the form of Boris Yeltsin. 

Today in Russia, Putin has so thoroughly repressed independent journalism that nothing like that happened this time. Yes, people could access independent news, but to do that they had to use VPNs, as all of these independent news sites are banned and blocked in Russia. Or they could go on Telegram. But if you sat there passively consuming state media, all you got is essentially the Putin line. It must have been incredibly confusing to be there the last couple of days. That’s the problem with state-controlled media. 

The other thing, for me, is that I look at 1991 in fairly black-and-white terms. There was a choice there—a real choice—between returning to the repression of the past, which is what the hardliners were trying to accomplish, or fighting to hold on to the changes of that late Soviet era under Gorbachev that had given people so much more freedom. This uprising—or rebellion, or whatever you want to call it—was a battle between two men, or two factions, neither of whom really has any interest in giving Russians greater freedom. For me, it was a choice between—and maybe this is overstating things—but between evil and evil. 

What was it like to cover the 1991 coup attempt?

It was scary at first. Here you are in the capital, and tanks are surrounding key places—the foreign ministry, Red Square, the state broadcasting facility—and you’re just wondering, Can this really happen, can they pull this off and roll things back? It felt in some ways like No, they can’t, freedom has gone too far, people have embraced it. But we lived in Moscow, and while correspondents traveled around quite a bit, Moscow was different from the rest of the country; it’s like trying to make judgments about America based on Washington or New York. So it wasn’t really clear how successful they might be. 

The first glimmers that maybe this thing wasn’t gonna work came from moments of rebellion by the journalists. A journalist stood up at a press conference held by the coup leaders, which was broadcast live to the entire country, and said to them, Tell me please, can you say whether you understand that what you carried out here was a state coup? To say that to their faces on live TV, putting a name on it, was amazing. So people were getting these bits of information, and there was an organized opposition. It wasn’t huge, but Yeltsin was, at that time, a greatly admired figure, and a strong figure. Over the course of three days, that coup attempt gradually collapsed. It was a thrilling thing to cover. You could begin to see people standing up for the changes that had been made: We do not want to go back to the way things were. Don’t take us back there. Yeltsin became the person that they could rally around to stand up to this coup.

Did you feel that you had the freedom to cover it, at the time?

You bet. We could go all over the city and talk to people. There would be tanks or armored vehicles parked around Red Square. People were climbing up to talk to the soldiers; there were babushkas shaking their umbrellas at these guys, saying You wouldn’t shoot at your own people, would you? Ordinary people were out there defying this. And again, that is something that we have seen very little of in recent years under Putin, because all dissent has just been squelched. People have been imprisoned for any sort of criticism of the military or the war in Ukraine.

The media environment now is just so different in so many ways. There are still some foreign correspondents on the ground who are doing good journalism—but the recent jailing of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is hanging over them. You have this ability to access independent Russian news—but you have to go looking for it and use tricks like VPNs, and it’s generally produced by people in exile. And then you have this direct line to Prigozhin via Telegram, at least before and during parts of the mutiny; you can get his unfiltered perspective, not that it’s reliable. So the environment is totally different, not just in terms of repression, but also who gets to set the agenda.

The situation is very different, in terms of free expression and the media, from 1991. Let’s say that this had been a coup attempt and somehow Prigozhin had been successful. If he then came to power, the situation for media, for free expression, would not have changed, and might have been even worse. Alexei Navalny, the leading opposition figure, is in jail, and he isn’t coming out anytime soon; Evan Gershkovich is awaiting trial as a lesson, I guess, for other journalists, especially foreign correspondents. He certainly would not have been treated any more fairly by Prigozhin or anybody else who might follow Putin.

To not have good reporting on the ground is a big handicap. On the other hand, if we had more reporters on the ground, I don’t know how much access they could gain to information at this point. Prigozhin is no friend of the media, and Putin certainly is not either. It’s very sad to see how few independent voices are left there, within Russia, to try to report the truth. All the journalists who’ve gone into exile are working as hard as they can, doing a good job with tools that didn’t exist in 1991—they can reach out to people within the country; I’m sure they have some people who are doing some reporting on the ground for them anonymously. So we are getting more of a picture in that regard. But it is not the same as having a free press—being able to hear people’s reactions, being able to talk to officials. 

It strikes me that in this very closed system Putin has created, it’s not just a question of repressing the media and then you can go about normal affairs of state with them weakened. It’s that so much of politics happens behind closed doors, between these hazy networks built on ill-defined personal relations. That sort of politics would be hard to cover even without all the additional restrictions. It’s like a doubly closed system.

Right. Surely there are some people around Putin who would love to challenge him, but he demands total loyalty, and they owe too much to him to want to speak to the press candidly. So even if you were there, I’m not sure how much access you can have. You can certainly get more of a sense of what people are thinking who are just watching these events unfold in their country. But that important story of what’s happening behind the scenes? For example, who actually worked out this deal with Prigozhin? The notion of Alexander Lukashenko [the president of Belarus, who ostensibly brokered the deal that would see Prigozhin back off in exchange for legal immunity] being the great negotiator is just laughable. One of my friends said, What a rogues’ gallery: Putin, Prigozhin, and Lukashenko, working out this deal to supposedly bring back peace and stability to Russia. Why do we believe that it happened the way they told us? We don’t have the independent means to verify anything that they’re telling us these days.

Other notable stories:

• A team of reporters from Reuters analyzed thousands of historical records to calculate how many members of America’s current political elite are descended from ancestors who enslaved Black people. They eventually tallied five living presidents, two Supreme Court justices, eleven governors, and a hundred lawmakers. Only a quarter of the politicians identified by Reuters were willing to offer comment on the findings. “Among the silent are politicians who previously have spoken publicly, sometimes eloquently, about the legacy of slavery and the need for racial healing,” the Reuters team writes. “The reticence underscores the enduring sensitivity of slavery as a political issue.”
• Three years after the pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd triggered a society-wide “reckoning” over racial injustice, S. Mitra Kalita concludes that “the diversity efforts of the last three years have been largely cosmetic, performative, and perfunctory,” including in media. As media and tech companies embarked on cuts recently, Kalita was struck to see that the bosses at one large organization that was making layoffs were “all Black, the result of multiple much-heralded hires and promotions made within the last three years,” she writes. “And yet people of color also bore the brunt of the cuts.”
• Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire reviewed recent research on the impact of tax credits that the government of Canada introduced in 2019 as a means to boost journalism, and assessed what lessons US lawmakers might take from the experience as they debate introducing similar incentives. One key finding from the research was “just how big of an impact the 25% labor tax credit has had in small Canadian newsrooms,” Scire writes. By contrast, a tax credit targeted at digital subscriptions has “been a bit of a bust.”
• Also in Canada, Meta recently moved to block links to news articles on Facebook and Instagram after the country’s Parliament passed a new law mandating that tech giants compensate publishers for their content. For Platformer, Casey Newton assessed the new Canadian legislation and a precursor law in Australia. (ICYMI, CJR’s Mathew Ingram wrote about Meta’s threats to block news as Canada’s law was being debated.)
• And the radio host Hugh Hewitt snared perhaps the most embarrassing viral gaffe of the 2024 presidential campaign so far when he asked Francis Suarez, the Republican candidate and mayor of Miami, whether he would talk about the persecuted Uyghur population in China. “What’s a Uyghur?” Suarez asked, later pronouncing the word “weeble.” (Suarez claimed afterward that he misunderstood Hewitt’s pronunciation.)

ICYMI: Prigozhin and the press