August coup attempt in Moscow

On August 19, 1991, Soviet citizens woke to state television announcing that President Mikhail Gorbachev was ill and that a State Committee on the State of Emergency had taken control. The plotters included the vice president, the prime minister, the heads of the KGB and the interior ministry, and the defense minister. Gorbachev was actually being held at his holiday villa at Foros in Crimea, and tanks rolled into Moscow.¹²

The hardliners acted to stop a new Union Treaty, due to be signed on August 20, that would have handed major powers to the republics. Gorbachev's reforms of the late 1980s, glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), had loosened party control, and the loss of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 convinced conservatives that the union itself was next. Several republics, starting with the Baltic states, were already pushing for independence.¹

The coup was poorly planned. Boris Yeltsin, elected president of the Russian republic two months earlier, was not arrested. He climbed onto a tank outside the Russian parliament building, the White House, and called for resistance. Tens of thousands of Muscovites built barricades around it, and some army units refused orders. Three young men died in a clash with armored vehicles on the night of August 20 to 21. By August 21 the plotters had given up, and Gorbachev flew back to Moscow. Power had shifted decisively to Yeltsin: the Communist Party was suspended, and within days Ukraine and other republics declared independence. Four months later the Soviet Union was dissolved.¹³