Moscow, USSR, August 19, 1991 By Tony Hanmer USSR.

My wife has lived her life half during it, half after its fall. I visite d the Soviet Union once before that fall; was there as the beginning of the end occurred. Some friends and I visited Moscow, summer 1991. Having no money to travel outs ide, we stayed on the city's edge with a Russian family. Impressions: Hare Krishnas chanting, Sheremetyevo Airport. African refugees squatting there too. Greyness, shops' lack of food. Quiet desperation. St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, swirling colour spiral fantasy. Lenin, entombed in a modern pyra mid, aura of soundless "awe". His hands and ears - surely wax! Concrete apartm ent jungle in this huge city. Sombreness of people's public faces; deep friendl iness when you saw them at home. Great Russian Soul. Introduction to Soviet ic e cream in "stakanchiki" (integral cones), hot day when we needed cooling most creamily delicious! Solzhenitsyn, whose writings first inspired me to reach th e USSR, peering over my shoulder from exile: remember the Gulag Archipelago, no t yet sunk. Daring to take one photograph of the ominous Big Lubyanka, found thanks again to Aleksandr Isayevich - beside a huge toy shop. Metro, unparallel ed and so efficient for getting across the city, best avoided at Rush Hour. Fee ling under something heavy, yet revelling in the strangeness, privilege of seein g and experiencing it. Being shepherded around lest we get lost, useless in Rus sian. December 1989, I was with relatives in England when Romania erupted. Christmas Day, the world watching the executions of Ceaucescu and his wife, live on TV. S urreal. Machine guns cut them down mid-protest at the audacity of it all. Then the rest of the Eastern Bloc came down, one country after another abandoning wh at Moscow had forced. We dared not imagine it happening in the USSR, Communism' s Ground Zero, as soon as it did. Nor could we fathom the changes to come every where from then until now. Who could? August 19, our month in Moscow ending. In the afternoon, I took the Metro towar ds the centre, alone for once, to finish my last roll of film. I got more than I bargained for. Crowds of people outside Red Square, itself all blockaded by buses. Tanks near the Square as well. Some people listened to megaphone speeches, orators perched on top of vehicles for height. Then I first saw not the USSR's gold hammer and sickle, red ground, but other unknown flags: Russia's tricolour, other Republ ics' banners. I couldn t follow the speeches, but another foreigner said: Gorbac hev ill in his Black Sea dacha; hard-liners taking over, sick of his perestroika of their pure communism. He said, take care where I pointed my camera. But ot hers were also photographing. It was history; I decided to take my chances and not miss it, although reportage has never been my strongest photographic genre. I continued, remembering but ignoring video cameras on poles turning silently, Big Brother watching, recording us as we watched and recorded. Instead of needing to finish that film, I now had to buy more, which I did in a nearby shop. I could afford just one more roll. Manezh Square, some people atop a trolleybus, removed from its overhead wires. Great vantage and speaking point. How I wished to understand Russian! Others a rgued with tank commanders who, unknown to me, were caught between following ord ers - disperse this somehow - and avoiding bloodbath. Mercifully they took the latter path, or it could have been horrendous. There were only a handful of dea ths recorded, accidental.

Someone ran through the masses distributing leaflets, or rather having people gr ab them from him. I acquired one - a photocopied communique from above, from th e hard-liners. I followed the crowds, staying with the action, not knowing where to. We stoppe d at the Russian White House, where someone unrolled a huge Russian flag. Cheer ing. Yeltsin. I managed to call our hosts, from a pay phone (no cellphones in those days!), te lling my friends what was happening. They arrived that evening, with the light failing, my ability to shoot ending, with no flash. We spent some time there, t hen home; our last evening in the Soviet Union, full of questions, uncertainties . Next morning, August 20th, all too calm. Budapest flight on schedule. Nine rol ls of film from our month in my trouser pockets; I prayed not to have them x-ray ed or taken away at Sheremetyevo. Neither happened; I felt my pockets full of g old. Handing out copies of yesterday's Pravda on the plane... the last one went to the person next to me. Fool for not trying to beg a copy of that historic e dition from anyone! Budapest, after austere Moscow, was the West. August 21st: with other friends in Austria discussing events. Phone ringing. It was over! Yeltsin had saved the day! Hard-liners had lost! Euphoria in the West: too soon, blissfully ignorant of what would come. For months, back in Canada, I collected all local newspaper stories of the new o rder emerging in the soon to be FORMER USSR. This entity indeed, by Gorbachev ' s order, ceased to exist on December 25, 1991, along with his own job. The 15 U nion Republics automatically became sovereign states; provinces with a big grudg e like Chechnya could not; chaos flourished alongside some simultaneous wars and growing hyperinflation. Sowing was over; reaping must follow. I returned, to live in Petersburg, in 1992, until mid-1999. There I first discovered the other former Soviet peoples... the Caucasus... the Svans. I moved to Baku, then to Tbilisi. But early in those Russian years, my precious coup films - and many ot hers, all irreplaceable - were stolen from my Petersburg apartment, leaving me with only the prints which I had had made; the handful of slides; and my memorie s.