Aborted coup 30 years ago set stage for Soviet collapse
MOSCOW — The world held its breath 30 years ago when a group of top Communist officials ousted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and flooded Moscow with tanks.
But instead of bringing a rollback of liberal reforms and a return to Cold War confrontations, the August 1991 coup collapsed in just three days and precipitated the breakup of the Soviet Union a few months later, an event the plotters said they were trying to prevent.
The putsch began when several of Gorbachev’s top lieutenants arrived at his Black Sea vacation home on Aug. 18 to urge him to impose a nationwide state of emergency. They were trying to stop the signing of a union treaty between Soviet republics set for two days later, which Gorbachev saw as a way to shore up the crumbling Soviet Union.
After he refused to endorse the state of emergency, the coup plotters cut off the Soviet leader’s communications and left him isolated at his residence.
The next day — Aug. 19, 1991 — Soviet Union residents woke up to the televised broadcast of the Bolshoi Theater’s “Swan Lake” ballet and state TV anchors reading a terse statement declaring that Gorbachev was unfit to govern for health reasons.
The statement said the State Committee on the State of Emergency was created to save the country from sliding into “chaos and anarchy.”
At the same time, hundreds of tanks and other armored vehicles rolled into Moscow in a massive show of force.
Thousands of people opposed to the coup quickly gathered around the government building for the Russian Federation, one of 15 Soviet republics, which was led by Boris Yeltsin, who enjoyed broad popularity as the leader of prodemocracy forces.
Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB chief and top mastermind behind the
coup, had the KGB’s Alpha commando unit surround Yeltsin’s residence near Moscow but never issued an order to detain him.
After arriving at his headquarters, Yeltsin climbed atop a tank deployed to block the building and passionately urged people to stand up to the coup.
The following day, up to 200,000 people rallied near the Russian government headquarters to defy the coup, building barricades, roaming the streets and ignoring a curfew imposed by the coup leaders.
The coup plotters were then arrested and Gorbachev flew back to Moscow on Aug. 22 only to see his power dwindling and Yeltsin calling the shots.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has described the Soviet collapse as the “greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century,” has been accused by critics of steadily rolling back post-Soviet freedoms during his two decades in power.
“Thirty years later, we are still stuck in the post-imperial mindset,” Yeltsin’s top associate, Gennady Burbulis, said. “Power has become the ultimate value for some, along with restrictions of freedoms and controls over civil society, not to mention direct restrictions of freedom of election.”