Soviet coup attempt of 1991

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Gorbachev after being held under house arrest at his summer home in the Crimea during the Soviet coup attempt of 1991.

During the Soviet Coup of 1991, (August 19-22, 1991) also known as the August Putsch or August Coup, a group of members of the Soviet government briefly deposed Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and attempted to take control of the country. The coup leaders were conservative communists who felt that Gorbachev's reform program had gone too far and that a new union treaty that he had negotiated dispersed too much of the central government's power to the republics. Although the coup collapsed in only three days and Gorbachev returned to power, the event crushed the Soviet leader's hopes that the union could be held together in at least a decentralized form.

1 Background
2 The August Coup
3 The aftermath
4 Historic importance
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Background

Main article: New Union Treaty

Since assuming power in 1985, Gorbachev had embarked on an ambitious program of reform, embodied in the twin concepts of perestroika and glasnost, meaning economic/political restructuring and openness, respectively. These moves prompted resistance and suspicion on the part of hardline members of the Communist system. The reforms also unleashed some forces and movements that Gorbachev did not expect. Specifically, nationalist agitation on the part of the Soviet Union's non-Russian minorities grew, and there were fears that some or all of the union republics might secede.

In the unionwide referendum on March 17, 1991, boycotted by the Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova, the majority of the residents of the rest of the republics expressed the desire to retain the renewed Soviet Union. Following negotiations, eight of the nine republics (except Ukraine) approved the New Union Treaty with some conditions. The Treaty would make the Soviet Union a federation of independent republics with a common president, foreign policy, and military. The Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan were to sign the Treaty in Moscow on August 20, 1991. Though the treaty was intended to save the union, hardliners feared that it would encourage nonparticipating republics, particularly Estonia and Latvia, to press for full independence and join Lithuania which had already declared its independence on March 11, 1990.

[edit] The August Coup

Yeltsin (far left) stands on a tank to defy the coup.

On August 19, 1991, the day before Gorbachev and a group of republic leaders were due to sign the new union treaty, a group calling itself the State Emergency Committee (Государственный Комитет по Чрезвычайному Положению, ГКЧП) attempted to seize power in Moscow. The group announced that Gorbachev was ill and had been relieved of his state post as president. Gorbachev was holidaying in the Crimea when the coup began, and remained there. Soviet Union vice president Gennady Yanayev was named acting president. The committee's eight members included KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Internal Affairs Minister Boris Pugo, Defense Minister Dmitriy Yazov, and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, all of whom had risen to their posts under Gorbachev.

Vice President Gennady Yanayev took to the television and radio airwaves immediately after the announcement with other leaders of the coup and delivered a very sharp denunciation of the prior regime, but his weak posturing and shaky expressions during the speech immediately provoked the belief that he was not the man to deliver the public order desperately sought by others. Large public demonstrations against the coup leaders were already taking place in Moscow and Leningrad; divided loyalties in the defense and security establishments prevented the armed forces from mobilizing effectively and crushing the resistance.

Russian SFSR President Boris Yeltsin led the resistance from the White House, Russia's parliament building. Following Yanayev's announcement, Yeltsin vigorously denounced the coup. At one point during the demonstrations, using a megaphone, he stood on top of a tank to condemn the "junta". Yeltsin's forceful performance provided a stark contrast to the weakness conveyed by Yanayev's appearance. This image, broadcast throughout the world on television news, became one of the most enduring images of the coup and strengthened Yeltsin's position immensely. A planned assault on the parliament building by Alpha Group, the KGB's special forces, was aborted when the troops unanimously refused the order. A tank unit defected to the government's side and surrounded parliament, guns pointing outward.

There were confrontations in the nearby streets, including one where three protesters were accidentally crushed to death by tanks, but overall there was surprisingly little violence. On August 21, the great majority of troops sent to Moscow openly sided with the demonstrators or called off the siege. The coup collapsed, and Gorbachev — who had been held under house arrest at his dacha in the Crimea — returned to Moscow under the perceived protection of Yeltsin's forces.

On August 22, back in Moscow, Gorbachev acted as if he were oblivious to the changes that had occurred in the preceding three days. He promised to purge the hardliners from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and resigned as general secretary of the CPSU, which was banned by Yeltsin's decree, but remained president of the Soviet Union. The coup's failure brought a series of collapses of all-union institutions. Boris Yeltsin took control of the central broadcasting company and key economic ministries and agencies, and eventually Russia itself.

[edit] The aftermath

By December 1991, all of the republics had declared independence, and negotiations over a new union treaty began. In September, the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been recognized by the Soviet Union, and "re-recognized" by the United States and other western countries who throughout the era of Cold War had considered the 1940 Soviet annexation of the three Baltic nations illegal. For several months after his return to Moscow, Gorbachev and his aides made futile attempts to restore stability and legitimacy to the central institutions. In November seven republics agreed to a new union treaty that would form a confederation called the Union of Sovereign States. But Ukraine was unrepresented in that group, and Yeltsin soon withdrew to seek advantage for Russia. From Yeltsin's perspective, Russia's participation in another union would be senseless because inevitably Russia would assume responsibility for the increasingly severe economic woes of the other republics.

On December 1, Ukraine held a referendum, in which more than 90% of residents supported the Act of Independence of Ukraine. Canada, Poland, and Hungary were among the first to recognize the new independent state. On December 3, the Russian President Yeltsin issued a statement that "the Russian leadership declares its recognition of the independence of Ukraine in accordance with the democratic expression of the will of its people".

On December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (which adopted that name in August 1991) Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich, as well as the Prime-ministers of the republics met at Minsk, the capital of Belarus, where they created the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and annulled the 1922 union treaty that had established the Soviet Union. Another signing ceremony was held in Alma-Ata on December 21 to expand the CIS to include the five republics of Central Asia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Georgia did not join until 1993; the three Baltic republics never joined. On December 25, 1991, a now-defeated Gorbachev announced his resignation as Soviet president; the red hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced with the tricolour flag of the Russian state; the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Exactly six years after Gorbachev had appointed Boris Yeltsin to run the Moscow city committee of the party, Yeltsin became the president of the largest successor state to the Soviet Union.

[edit] Historic importance

The collapse of the Soviet Union was called by the current president of Russia Vladimir Putin as "the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" [1]. The Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk called the 1991 development as "the funeral of the empire" [2].

One way or the other, USSR, the former superpower ceased to exist. At the same time, the other superpower, the United States, significantly strengthened its position. The Cold War ended with the Soviet Union's collapse.