August Coup (1991): The Failed Hardliner Putsch in Moscow

The August Coup was a failed attempt by hardline Communist officials to seize power in the Soviet Union between 19 and 21 August 1991. Its leaders placed President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and sent tanks into Moscow, but mass civilian resistance led by Russian President Boris Yeltsin made the putsch collapse within three days. Instead of saving the Soviet state, the coup destroyed the authority of the Communist Party and hastened the dissolution of the Soviet Union four months later.

Background: a union under strain

By 1991 Gorbachev’s reforms, perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), had transformed Soviet politics but had also unleashed forces he could not control. The economy was in deep crisis, shops were often empty, and nationalist movements were demanding sovereignty or independence in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, Ukraine and elsewhere. The peaceful Baltic Way protest of 1989 and the loss of the Eastern European satellite states after the fall of the Berlin Wall showed how quickly Soviet power was eroding.

Gorbachev’s answer was a New Union Treaty that would turn the USSR into a looser federation, with much more power for the republics. A referendum in March 1991 had produced a majority for preserving a “renewed” union, although six republics boycotted it. A first group of republics, including Russia, was due to sign the treaty on 20 August 1991.

To many leaders of the security services, the army and the party apparatus, the treaty meant the end of the centralised Soviet state. Gorbachev himself had tilted towards these hardliners during the winter of 1990–91, appointing several of the men who would later turn against him. Meanwhile Boris Yeltsin, elected President of the Russian republic by popular vote on 12 June 1991, had become a rival power centre with a democratic mandate.

The plotters

The conspirators called themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency, known by its Russian initials GKChP. Its eight members were among the most senior officials in the country:

• Gennady Yanayev, Vice-President of the USSR, named acting president
• Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB, widely regarded as the chief organiser
• Dmitry Yazov, Minister of Defence
• Boris Pugo, Minister of the Interior
• Valentin Pavlov, Prime Minister
• Oleg Baklanov, first deputy chairman of the Defence Council
• Vasily Starodubtsev, head of the Peasants’ Union
• Alexander Tizyakov, head of an association of state industrial enterprises

Other senior figures supported them without formally joining, including Anatoly Lukyanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s chief of staff.

What happened

On 18 August a delegation of plotters flew to Foros, the presidential holiday residence on the Crimean coast, and demanded that Gorbachev either declare a state of emergency or hand over his powers to Yanayev. He refused. His communications were cut and he, his family and his staff were held at the dacha.

Early on 19 August Soviet radio and television announced that Gorbachev was unable to perform his duties “for health reasons” and that Yanayev had assumed the presidency. A six-month state of emergency was declared in parts of the country, political parties and demonstrations were restricted, and most newspapers were suspended. State television filled hours of airtime with a recording of the ballet Swan Lake, an image that became a lasting symbol of the coup. Tanks and armoured vehicles, including units of the Taman and Kantemirov divisions, rolled into Moscow.

The plotters made a critical mistake: they did not arrest Yeltsin. He reached the White House, the building of the Russian parliament, and around midday climbed onto a tank parked outside. From there he read an appeal denouncing the takeover as an unconstitutional coup and calling for a general strike. Television crews, including foreign ones, broadcast the scene around the world.

That evening the GKChP held a press conference that went badly. Yanayev’s visibly trembling hands and journalists’ openly sceptical questions suggested that the committee was neither confident nor united. Some of the state media itself showed footage of Yeltsin on the tank.

Over the next two days tens of thousands of Muscovites, by some estimates more than 100,000 at the peak, gathered around the White House and built barricades from trolleybuses, construction materials and paving stones. Some tank crews declared their loyalty to Yeltsin. In Leningrad, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak rallied a huge crowd on Palace Square and persuaded the local military command not to act.

The night of 20–21 August

The committee planned an assault on the White House by special forces, including the KGB’s Alpha group, for the night of 20 to 21 August. Commanders of the units involved doubted the order and feared heavy civilian casualties, and the attack never took place.

Shortly after midnight, however, a column of armoured vehicles met a crowd in an underpass on the Garden Ring near Novy Arbat. In the confusion three young men were killed: Dmitry Komar, Vladimir Usov and Ilya Krichevsky. They were the only fatalities in Moscow during the coup and were posthumously named Heroes of the Soviet Union.

Collapse of the coup

On 21 August Defence Minister Yazov ordered troops to withdraw from Moscow. Several plotters flew to Foros, apparently hoping to negotiate with Gorbachev, who refused to see them. A Russian delegation also flew to Crimea, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow in the early hours of 22 August. He famously remarked that he had come back to a different country.

The conspirators were arrested within days, except Boris Pugo, who took his own life on 22 August. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, a military adviser to Gorbachev who had backed the coup, also died by suicide on 24 August. The surviving plotters faced trial, but the Russian State Duma granted them an amnesty in February 1994.

Consequences

The coup’s failure transferred real power from the Soviet centre to Yeltsin and the republics. On 22 August crowds watched as the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, was removed from Lubyanka Square outside the KGB headquarters. On 23 August, in front of Russian deputies and television cameras, Yeltsin signed a decree suspending the Communist Party’s activities in Russia while Gorbachev stood beside him.

Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party on 24 August and called for the party’s Central Committee to dissolve itself. Republics raced for the exit: Estonia declared full independence on 20 August and Latvia on 21 August, followed by Ukraine on 24 August and several others in the following weeks. The Soviet government recognised the independence of the three Baltic states on 6 September.

The New Union Treaty was never signed. In December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus agreed to replace the USSR with the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president on 25 December 1991, and the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist.

Myths and facts

Myth: Gorbachev secretly organised the coup himself. Some participants and commentators later claimed that Gorbachev knew of the plans and allowed them to proceed in order to keep his hands clean. No conclusive evidence supports this, and most historians accept that he was genuinely isolated at Foros and refused the plotters’ demands.

Myth: the army fought the people in the streets. Apart from the clash in the Garden Ring underpass, there was no large-scale violence. Many soldiers were confused about their orders, and the reluctance of commanders to fire on civilians was one of the main reasons the coup failed.

Timeline

• 1991, 12 June: Boris Yeltsin is elected President of the Russian republic by popular vote.
• 1991, 18 August: Plotters visit Gorbachev at Foros; he refuses their demands and is placed under house arrest.
• 1991, 19 August: The State Emergency Committee announces it has taken power; tanks enter Moscow; Yeltsin speaks from a tank outside the White House.
• 1991, 20 August: Crowds defend the White House; Estonia declares independence.
• 1991, 21 August: Three civilians are killed overnight; troops are ordered out of Moscow and the coup collapses; Latvia declares independence.
• 1991, 22 August: Gorbachev returns to Moscow; the Dzerzhinsky statue is removed.
• 1991, 24 August: Gorbachev resigns as party leader; Ukraine declares independence.
• 1991, 25–26 December: Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet Union is dissolved.

Why it matters

The August Coup was the Soviet hardliners’ last attempt to save the centralised union by force, and its failure achieved the opposite. It shifted power decisively to Yeltsin and the republics, broke the Communist Party, and turned the gradual unravelling of the USSR into a rapid collapse. For many Russians, the defence of the White House remains a defining moment of the end of the Cold War era.