The Soviet Union's Last Stand

Emerging crisis

Just over ten years ago the unthinkable happened. The Soviet Union - the world's first communist state - was consigned to the pages of history. Just a few months before, in August 1991, there had been an attempted coup and the world held its breath as tanks rolled onto the streets of Moscow. President Gorbachev was held a virtual prisoner by his own government. It seemed that the bad old days were back, with communist hard-liners in charge. So what drove Gorbachev's government to rebel against him, provoking a chain reaction of events which brought about the disintegration of one of the great forces of the 20th century?

On the morning of 3 August 1991, President Gorbachev held his last Cabinet meeting before he went on holiday to his luxury villa in the Crimea. US President George Bush had just departed after another superpower summit and a new treaty with all the Soviet Union republics was in its last stages of negotiation. In the West, Gorbachev was a legendary figure, an icon of our times, who had reshaped the world order and who had ended the Cold War. Under Gorbachev the threat of nuclear war had diminished, totalitarian control had been abandoned, a free press had been established together with elections and major economic reforms. He had won the Nobel Peace Prize and was viewed as one of the great leaders of modern times.

But inside the Soviet Union, the picture was very different. It was in crisis. Soviet troops had withdrawn from Afghanistan, from the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Wall had fallen and perestroika had not led to communism's reform but to its rejection across Eastern Europe. The economy was in a nosedive, there were food shortages, rising crime and a wave of populist nationalism swept the entire country. Boris Yeltsin had been elected as President of the Russian Republic and the challenge he provided to the old order was clear. He wanted Russia to be independent from the Soviet Union. Separatism now posed the most immediate threat. In fact the fate of the Soviet Union was in the balance.

New treaty unveiled

Valentin Pavlov in the Supreme Soviet, 14 January 1991  © For many outside observers, the crisis in the Union stemmed directly from a lack of faith in communism as an ideology. Once there was no longer a historic battle between communism and capitalism, the ties that bound the Union together, with its 15 different republics, began to loosen. Communism had always overridden nationality but now, with many ceasing to be communists, there was an ideological vacuum: issues of nationality rose to the fore.

At that last Cabinet meeting Gorbachev told his largely conservative Cabinet not to be overly concerned; he had the situation under control. If it worsened, he would be ready to take immediate action and implement secret plans for a state of emergency, drawn up some months before. Reassured, they all went on holiday. But two weeks later, according to them, they received the shock of their lives.

On the morning of 15 August, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov received a revised text of Gorbachev's new Union treaty. This was to be a landmark agreement, involving the devolution of power, which would redefine the relationship with all the Soviet republics for the future. According to Pavlov, the text had changed substantially to the one he had last seen and which the Supreme Soviet, the Union's highest law-making body, had approved. He called together his Cabinet colleagues, circulated the draft and, because the treaty would be signed in just a few days' time, he decided to leak it to the press.

At the highest levels of the Soviet government there was turmoil. Most of the senior ministers and officials were traditional communists who believed in the Union and believed that the text spelt the death of the Union as they knew it. Instead of being the best solution to separatism, to them the treaty now seemed like a disaster. It seemed that the independence movement, championed by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, had won. Their response was immediate. As Gorbachev had personally led these negotiations, some of which had taken place behind closed doors, they had to talk to him and get him to change his mind.

Meeting with Gorbachev

The Kremlin and the Moskva River  © Stunned, they all returned from holiday for a crisis meeting and resolved to send a delegation down to plead with Gorbachev to stop the treaty. Their trust in him had disappeared but he was still the President. This was their last chance, their last stand.

In the Crimea, Gorbachev had already received his ministers' views on the treaty but had not replied. But when the delegation arrived with a representative from the Communist Party, the Army, industry and finally his own administration, Gorbachev was surprised. They hadn't told him they were coming. As General Medvedev, the head of Presidential Security, announced that they wanted to see him, Gorbachev picked up his phone. But the line was dead. In fact, every one of Gorbachev's phones inside his luxury villa had been cut off from the moment the delegation arrived.

The results of their meeting have always been disputed. According to Gorbachev, the delegation demanded that he resign and transfer all his powers to Vice President Gennadi Yanaev, and that he told them to go to hell. According to the delegation members, they asked him to return to Moscow, postpone the signing of the treaty and act resolutely to resolve the crisis by declaring a state of emergency. They claim that he refused to travel, blaming a bad back, but that he told them to act as they saw necessary.

Whatever the truth of their conversation, Gorbachev remained at the villa and remained isolated without telephone communications for the next three days. They had effectively stopped Gorbachev from being President and from signing the Union treaty. The group returned to Moscow, knowing that they had taken an irretrievable step, and went to the Kremlin to meet other senior government officers. In a heated debate, they faced a stark choice. Valery Boldin, Gorbachev's Chief of Staff, was at the meeting in the Crimea and inside the Kremlin. 'For us it was the moment of truth. There had to be a point where we took responsibility and stopped merely reporting what was going on. Some were saying we don't need this - let Gorbachev sort it out for himself. We can just leave the stage. But others were saying that's cowardice. Instead of doing all we could within our power, we would be rats leaving a sinking ship.'

Political stand-off

After a heated discussion the group decided not to resign. They decided to use Gorbachev's backache and his refusal to travel to Moscow as a way of justifying their actions. They persuaded a reluctant Yanaev to sign the state of emergency decree and told Prime Minister Pavlov to be ready to meet Boris Yeltsin and make him an extraordinary offer. According to Pavlov, they hoped to lure Yeltsin into co-operating with them by offering him not just the leadership of the Emergency committee but their backing to become leader of the Soviet Union.

For reasons that are unclear, face-to-face negotiations with Yeltsin never occurred. Instead, at 6am on 19 August, a state of emergency was announced by sombre newsreaders. The tone was funereal, as was the rhetoric. The ballet Swan Lake replaced the normal programmes and tanks, troops and armoured cars poured into Moscow and other major cities, supposedly to 'protect and secure' government buildings against any unrest. The free press was shut down and the marks of a repressive regime were everywhere.

The committee had to hope that the rest of the population would agree to their strong-arm tactics. But with Yeltsin and his fellow Russian nationalists able to organise their opposition, they made full use of what media attention they could gather. For Yeltsin, this was an unconstitutional coup and he threatened any officials or army officers who carried out any of the Committee's orders with prosecution and the sack. But over the next few days the war of words became a war of nerves. Protestors took to the streets, confronting the troops, and the army was caught in the political stand-off. The Russian Republic's Parliament building, nicknamed the White House, became the centre of resistance. Fearing an attack, a human chain of protesters surrounded the building. They gambled on the fact that the troops would not open fire on their own people.

Tension boiled over on the night of 20 August. There were rumours of an assault on the White House. Planned inside the KGB, Operation Thunder involved clearing the building of protesters and disarming many who now carried rifles and handguns. But following a recce trip by the Head of the KGB's elite Alpha unit, General Karpukhin, the plan was abandoned. It was clear that the assault would result 'in many deaths and a sea of blood'. Karpukhin felt that 'it would have been inhuman of us to act in that way'.

Yeltsin's challenge

The next morning, the Soviet Union's Defence Minister, Marshall Yazov, gave the order for the troops and tanks to withdraw. Within 24 hours Gorbachev was back in Moscow and the Emergency Committee members and many other senior government and army officials had been arrested. But more significantly, the political balance of power in the Soviet Union had changed. Most of the rebels were Gorbachev's appointees; the Communist Party hierarchy had also tacitly approved of the committee's actions. With them and the party discredited, Yeltsin - widely perceived to be the hero of the hour, who had stood up to the old guard - was in the ascendancy and he wasted no time in showing Gorbachev the new political reality.

Two days after his return to Moscow, Gorbachev went to the Russian Republic's Parliament for a joint session with Yeltsin. Expecting a sympathetic hearing about how he was held hostage, Gorbachev instead stood like a defendant in the dock with Yeltsin, the prosecutor, on the attack. Television cameras and MPs watched every move. Yeltsin's carefully calculated plan to humiliate Gorbachev was seen by the world. But the session went beyond personal politics. Unbeknown to Gorbachev, Yeltsin had prepared a decree banning the activities of the Communist Party on Russian soil and seizing all its assets. As his coup de grace, he announced and signed it; Gorbachev could only stammer his opposition.

It was a direct challenge to Gorbachev as head of the Communist Party; a party that Gorbachev still believed could be reformed. However, by banning the Communist Party in Russia, Yeltsin had made it powerless across the Union overnight. Yeltsin's message was clear - power had moved from Gorbachev to him, from the Soviet Union to Russia; and communism wasn't wanted any more.

Final decision

Gorbachev now faced a momentous decision. He either had to fight for communism or to resign as head of the party that he had supported since he was an adolescent, and which had steered the Soviet Union since its inception. Within 24 hours he bowed to the pressure and resigned, also recommending that the party disband itself. Communist control was over.

It was a historic moment, like the voluntary winding up of a religion, an abdication of something with which people had grown old, for all of their lives. Gorbachev had hoped to reform communism, to rescue the system and drag it into the modern world. Now the dream lay in ruins, the empire in the process of dissolution. The very thing that the Emergency Committee had tried to prevent had happened. In just seven days, 74 years of communist power had crumbled.

Within months most of the Soviet republics would declare their independence. A new confederation would be formed, with Russia and Yeltsin at its centre. Gorbachev, like the Soviet Union itself, was being consigned to history. On Christmas day, the red flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time and Gorbachev said his goodbyes to the world. An era had ended.

Find out more

Books

Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin by Michael McFaul (Cornell University Press, 2001)

The Gorbachev Factor by Archie Brown (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War by Robert D English (Columbia University Press, 2000)

Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the August 1991 Coup edited by Victoria E Bonnell, Ann Cooper and Gregory Freidin (ME Sharpe, 1994)

The Struggle for Russia: Power and Change in the Democratic Revolution by Ruslan Khasbulatov, edited by Richard Sakwa (Routledge, 1993)

About the author

Malcolm Brinkworth is the producer and director of 'The Soviet Union's Last Stand', a BBC documentary examining the events which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has made many acclaimed and award-winning programmes, ranging from the observational to the investigative, and is managing director of Touch Productions, an independent production company.