For many hardliners in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), they knew who was to blame for this crisis. Mikhail Gorbachev. Since coming to power in 1985, the Soviet leader had pursued policies called perestroika and glasnost. These aimed to reduce the role of the state in the economy, and make the USSR less repressive and more democratic. The results, seen by the hardliners, had been the collapse of the USSR's communist alliance in Eastern Europe. Now their own country was coming apart at the seams.
So, on August 19th 1991, the coup began. Gorbachev was at his summer retreat in Crimea. He was due to return to Moscow to sign the treaty which would loosen the bonds between the republics of the USSR. The hardliners had to act now. Tanks and soldiers rolled into Moscow. All independent newspapers, TV channels and radio stations were suddenly taken off the air. Gorbachev was placed under house arrest. A state of emergency was declared across the USSR, and the 'Gang of Eight' assumed power. The Soviet Vice-President told the world that Gorbachev was ill, and so he was assuming power.
What they had not reckoned on was Boris Yeltsin. During the 1980s, Yeltsin had been the CPSU boss in Moscow, appointed by Gorbachev. A populist reformer, he had become popular with Muscovites for not tolerating the rampant corruption in the political system. He was appointed to the Politburo, the highest platform of state power. Yeltsin was clearly going somewhere.
And then in 1987 it all changed. Yeltsin became the the first person in history to voluntarily resign from the Politburo, blasting Gorbachev in his final meeting for the slow pace of reforms. From then on, he was a thorn in Gorbachev's side. As the USSR began to open up it's elections, Yeltsin constantly won positions, racking up enormous majorities, until in June 1991 he was elected President of Russia, with 59% of the vote. As he was fond of pointing out, that was more people than had ever voted for the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev.
The coup plotters had not taken the opportunity to delay Yeltsin in Kazakhstan, where he was until two days before their coup. Neither did they arrest him in Moscow. Instead, Yeltsin headed straight for the Russian parliament, which was besieged by the army. There, he mounted a tank, and addressed his supporters. He denounced the coup, and called for a general strike, as well as for Gorbachev to address the people on TV. Thousands flocked onto the streets, surrounding the Russian parliament. In Leningrad and other cities, wildcat strikes began.
The plotters spent the next day preparing to attack the parliament buildings. When it became obvious that they would not succeed without appalling bloodshed, they withdrew the army from Moscow on the morning of August 21st. Gorbachev was able to restore communications and denounce the coup.
Why is this significant? Two reasons. Had the coup not collapsed quickly, there was a real chance of political conflict inside the Soviet Union. In 1991, no nuclear weapons state had ever seen a coup d'etat. An already fractious situation had been made even worse by lobbing an armed takeover into the mix. Coupled with the fact that, despite cuts to the arsenal, the Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet several times over, this was a scary moment. The situation could have been extremely bloody, and no one knows how it would have panned out. As it was, the nightmare scenario was avoided.
The other significance is that this was the death knell for the USSR. Had the delegates from the republics met in Moscow on August 20th and signed the New Union Treaty, as they were due to, it is entirely possible that the USSR may have scraped through in some form or another. Instead, this showed that the power rested with the republics, not the Union. Estonia and Latvia used the crisis to declare themselves independent. During the autumn of 1991, this disintegration accelerated, until on Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev appeared on TV to inform the world that the Soviet Union was over. On Boxing Day, it passed out of history. Not, as many had predicted and feared, in the fires of a nuclear exchange, but because it was what the people wanted.
Russia's post-Soviet experience has not been a happy one. The enormous economic shock of switching suddenly from a command economy to a free market one caused misery through the 1990s. The war in Chechnya was brutal. It is easy to see why Yeltsin was elbowed out in favour of Putin. The post-Soviet world has also been challenging for the republics. Many have languished economically, or switched one dictatorship for the next. And the crisis in Ukraine and Crimea is a reminder that the problems of the USSR are still with us today. There is a certain nostalgia for the USSR in the successor states, as a time when things were better.
But the August coup, and its defeat, shows that the nostalgics are wrong. The Soviet people wanted the USSR to end. This attempt to reimpose it was defeated, not by bloodshed, but by people standing up for what they wanted. And that is what we deserve to remember.
Boris Yeltsin mounts a tank outside the Russian parliament, 19th August 1991
P.S. The Washington Post and New York Times put the consequences, and contemporary relevance, of it all much better than I ever could:
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