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1991 Soviet coup attempt

Failed attempt to unseat Mikhail Gorbachev

  • 56 min read
  • 7 chapters
MOSCOW. A meeting was held at noon on 22 August 1991 near the RSFSR House of the Soviets in honour of the victory of Russian democracy over the reaction and was attended by many thousands of people. T
ITAR-TASS · CC BY 4.0

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Through Mikhail Gorbachev, Revolutions of 1989 and Soviet Union

The GKChP hardliners dispatched KGB agents who detained Gorbachev at his dacha but failed to detain the recently elected president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who had been both an ally and critic of Gorbachev. The GKChP was poorly organized and met with effective resistance by both Yeltsin and a civilian campaign of anti-authoritarian protesters, mainly in Moscow. The coup collapsed in two days, and Gorbachev returned to office while the plotters all lost their posts. Yeltsin subsequently became the dominant leader and Gorbachev lost much of his influence. The failed coup led to both the immediate collapse of the CPSU and the dissolution of the USSR four months later.

Following the capitulation of the GKChP, popularly referred to as the "Gang of Eight", both the Supreme Court of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and President Gorbachev described its actions as a coup attempt.

Background

Since assuming power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, Gorbachev had embarked on an ambitious reform program embodied in the twin concepts of perestroika (economic and political restructuring) and glasnost (openness). These moves prompted resistance and suspicion on the part of hard-line members of the nomenklatura. The reforms also caused nationalist agitation on the part of the Soviet Union's non-Russian minorities to grow, and there were fears that some or all of the union republics might secede. In 1991, the Soviet Union was in a severe economic and political crisis. Scarcity of food, medicine, and other consumables was widespread, people had to stand in long lines to buy even essential goods, fuel stocks were as much as 50% lower than the estimated amount needed for the approaching winter, and inflation exceeded 300% per year, with factories lacking the cash needed to pay salaries.

In 1990, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Armenia had already declared the restoration of their independence from the Soviet Union. In January 1991, a violent attempt to return Lithuania to the Soviet Union by force took place. About a week later, a similar attempt was engineered by local pro-Soviet forces to overthrow Latvian authorities. These attempts failed, and Lithuania and Latvia retained their statehood.

Russia declared its sovereignty on 12 June 1990 and thereafter limited the application of Soviet laws, in particular those governing finance and the economy, on Russian territory. The Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR adopted laws that contradicted Soviet laws (the so-called War of Laws).

In the unionwide referendum on 17 March 1991, boycotted by the Baltic states, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova, a supermajority of residents in the other republics expressed the desire to retain the renewed Soviet Union, with 77.85% voting in favor. Following negotiations, eight of the remaining nine republics (Ukraine abstaining) approved the New Union Treaty with some conditions. The treaty was to make the Soviet Union a federation of independent republics called the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, with a common president, foreign policy, and military. Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were to sign the Treaty in Moscow on 20 August 1991.

British historian Dan Stone wrote the following about the plotters' motivation:

The coup was the last gasp of those who were astonished at and felt betrayed by the precipitous collapse of the Soviet Union's empire in Eastern Europe and the swift destruction of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon that followed. Many feared the consequences of Gorbachev's German policies above all, not just for leaving officers unemployed but for sacrificing gains achieved in the Great Patriotic War to German revanchism and irredentism – after all, this had been the Kremlin's greatest fear since the end of the war.

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