CentenniAL

Cover of the October 1991 issue, which covered the Soviet coup d'etat that took place while IFLA held its conference in Moscow.

“Lucky” is probably not a word most people would use to describe being trapped in Moscow during a violent coup d’etat, but the small band of librarians who stayed behind during the IFLA conference in August of 1991, while the airports closed and tanks rolled into the city, will never forget what we saw. To help me remember, I have the photographs I took of soldiers, barricades around the Russian parliament, and burned-out buses where three protestors died confronting a tank. Some of those pictures are still hanging in my living room. Most of them never got into American Libraries. But it was certainly as close to hard news reporting as I ever got, and I have to say, I wasn’t prepared for it.

Sixteen years after the fact, those of us who witnessed the failed attempt by hard-line Soviet officials to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office still think of those bizarre days every time we see one another. Most of us believe that it was indeed a privilege to have been witnesses to those historic events. Several Russian librarians told me long after the fact that it was the foreign librarians’ determination to stay in Moscow that permitted them to resist the coup, publishing leaflets and participating in the demonstrations under the guise of innocently attending a library conference. The photograph American Libraries ended up using on the October cover did, in fact, show some of those leaflets being distributed during the coup.

The photo that blocked CNN.

There was a moment behind one of the photographs that I will never forget. I had pushed my way closer to one of the tanks, which was surrounded by young men, several of whom were trying to persuade a soldier to shift his loyalties from the coup plotters to Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. I was taking my sweet time, trying to get the soldier’s face in the frame, trying with an amateur’s enthusiasm to shoot faces instead of the backs of heads. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me say, in perfect English, “Are you finished?” I turned around to see a CNN cameraman waiting impatiently for me to get out of the way. I slinked off. But there were dozens of other photo-ops that day; the next thing I knew I was photographing a young Russian planting a flag on a tank that had come over to Yeltsin’s side.

I don’t think the severity of the situation we were witnessing really hit most of us until we got back to the United States and saw what it looked like through the CNN lens. It still seems to me that the coverage in American Libraries doesn’t come close to conveying what I had seen, and neither of those photos appeared in the magazine. After all, we didn’t have the page budget for it, and I had already overspent my film budget.

I look back on that time now and take some satisfaction in knowing that I brought back a fascinating story, but I also look back with some regret that I did not have the wherewithal to call the New York Times right then and there. While the coverage of the coup was extensive and dramatic in the American press, pretty much none of it bothered to mention the role that librarians had played.

—Leonard Kniffel, Editor in Chief, American Libraries

See page 2 of this post for more photos from Moscow that were not published in the magazine.