The Event (СОБЫТИЕ). 2015. Netherlands/Belgium. Written and directed by Sergei Loznista. DCP courtesy Atoms & Void. In Russian; English subtitles. 74 min.
Some 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sergei Loznitsa revisits the fateful and dramatic events of August 1991 that seemed to augur the birth of Russian democracy. On the morning of August 19, ordinary Soviet citizens sensed something was amiss when they turned on their television sets to discover a preemptive broadcast of the Bolshoi Ballet performing Swan Lake. Their compatriots, meanwhile, were gathering outside Moscow’s White House to defend the stronghold of democratic opposition led by Boris Yeltsin, cordoning off the square with barbed wire and sharing rumors of Mikhail Gorbachev’s death at the hands of the conspirators even as thousands were pouring into the streets of Leningrad to join in solidarity. Loznitsa finds in the archival footage of this tumultuous and precipitous moment a sea of faces with wavering expressions of confusion, fear, and yearning, faces writ with the morbid humor of the cynic and the unbridled outrage of the brave. But even as the tricolor flag of Russia is raised and the Soviet hammer and sickle mothballed, even as Western historians boldly predict the end of history, Communist loyalists will attempt to destroy evidence of their crimes and continue to hold power in the former Soviet states, ruling with the impunity and corruption of gangsters. “Mother Russia, half decomposed, wants to make a quick buck at last,” one unseen observer observes. “What’s in store for us, Boris? Boris? Do you hear? The rest is silence.”