25 AUGUST 2001, Page 43

States of emergency

Michael Vestey

Great events are rarely dull in the retelling, and the story of the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in August 1991 produced some absorbing radio in The Archive Hour: Three Days That Changed the World on Radio Four (Saturday). The presenter, Bridget Kendall, was the BBC's Moscow correspondent at the time and with her BBC colleagues she recalled the confusion and tension of the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev's still-communist government.

As it was August Gorbachev was on holiday at his villa in the Crimea and most correspondents were on leave. Kendall was woken at 6 a.m. by her London desk and told that the Soviet news agency. Tass, was announcing the coup and the state of emergency. Gorbachev was said to be ill. Her colleague Tim Whewell remembered driving towards the office and seeing guided tours still taking place at the Kremlin as tanks were beginning to move. Television was showing Swan Lake, as in the bad old days of Soviet rule when something important was happening.

There was, of course, a comic element to this coup. Most of the leaders seemed to be drunk and failed to cut any communication links; they also neglected to secure the full support of the military. What it did achieve, without intending to, was the ending of 70 years of communism, something that Gorbachev himself hadn't planned during his great era of perestroika and glasnost. Boris Yeltsin seized the moment and became a hero by climbing on to a tank and shouting defiance. Within three days the coup had collapsed and a shaken Gorbachev was back in Moscow and giving way to Yeltsin.

Whewell told the classic BBC radio story of how he went from one radio interview to another until someone asked him about Yeltsin and the tank. 'What tank?' London had just seen the pictures on television and Whewell had to explain that he'd been broadcasting for the past hour and hadn't seen them. This is one of the frustrating things about radio reporting; there are so many outlets that while you're meeting their demands you're missing what is actually going on outside. On that first hectic day Kendall discovered at three in the afternoon that she was still wearing her pyjamas under her hastily donned clothes.

The Guardian's Jonathan Steele had also stayed in Moscow and after the coup attempt was able to fly to the Crimea to meet an exhausted but elated Gorbachev who told him he would never have given in to the plotters. Steele thought Gorbachev's mistake was not to go to Yeltsin at the parliament building and thank him; he might just have held on to power if he had. Swiftly. Yeltsin banned the communist party and ended the Soviet system, and shortly after the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time. Kendall and her colleagues told the story well. She has an outstanding broadcasting voice, at once warm and authoritative, and with clear and unfussy enunciation.

So does Joan Bakewell. She started Great Lives, a new series on Radio Four this week (Fridays), in which well-known people nominate someone they admire from history for a studio discussion. Curiously. Clement Attlee was the choice for Tim Waterstone, the entrepreneurial founder of the bookshop chain. I doubt if Waterstone would have been able to flourish so successfully under a Labour government of Attlee's type and yet he gushed of the 1945 administration, 'It was, I would have thought, the most effective government that Britain's had, certainly in the 20th century.'

Waterstone praised Attlee's post-war government for creating the welfare state and the NHS, but seemed to overlook the ruinous nationalisation programme which blighted the British economy until the 1980s. Even Ben Pimlott, a biographer of Hugh Dalton, Attlee's first chancellor of the exchequer, and Harold Wilson, noted that Waterstone had 'decorously avoided' saying that nationalisation was one of his achievements. It was a pity he managed to duck it altogether and wasn't pressed on the matter. Pimlott felt Attlee was to blame for the 1951 Labour defeat after failing to provide leadership over attempts to charge for spectacles and teeth.

Only socialists like Waterstone can really regard Attlee's government as a success. The welfare state is a huge drain on our resources and no one knows what to do with the NHS, which now arouses apprehension in many people about to enter its hospitals for treatment. Still, it was an interesting programme and augurs well for the series. I hope, though, that those who nominate political figures are challenged more robustly in future.