Attempted Soviet Coup of 1991

This paper will discuss the events which took place during the attempted Soviet coup of August, 1991. During the coup, Communist party hard-liners tried to take control of the Soviet Union and thereby restore the monopolistic power of their party. They were concerned with the democratic reforms which had been set in motion by the General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. In addition, they were concerned with the rising popularity of Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic. Yeltsin was seen as a threat to the power of the Communist party because he was an advocate of even more radical reforms than those of Gorbachev.

Prior to the coup attempt, the Communist party had been the single ruling party of the Soviet Union for more than seventy years. The party first came to power under the leadership of Nikolai Lenin during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Later, the monopoly of the Communist party was strengthened under the reign of Joseph Stalin. In the late 1930's, a series of purges gave Stalin and his party complete control over the Soviet Union. Then, following the Second World War, Stalin turned the Soviet Union into an empire by forcibly taking over the Eastern European countries that had been held by the Nazis during the war. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union became a totalitarian state, in which the centralized government was willing to use terror tactics to maintain strict control over its people (Kirkpatrick, 1990, p. 2).

After Stalin's death in 1953, there

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bs (p. 33). Once the coup leaders had decided on a date for their attempt, another warning sign was offered to Gorbachev when the Minister of Defense, Dmitri Yazov, ordered several of the head officers of the Defense Ministry to take their vacations in August (Mathews, 1991, p. 36). Despite this and the other warnings, however, Gorbachev seemed totally unprepared when the rebellion broke out. It seems that Gorbachev ignored the warnings because the conspirators were all men that he had hand-picked and whom he trusted. The primary leaders of the coup attempt were known as the "Gang of Eight." In addition to Dmitri Yazov (Defense Minister), this gang included Gennadi Yanayev (Vice President), Vladimir Kryuchkov (head of KGB), Valentin Pavlov (Prime Minister), Boris Pugo (Interior Minister), Oleg Baklanov (member of the Soviet Defense Council), Vasily Starodubtsev (Chairman of the Soviet Peasants Union), and Alexander Tizyakov (President of the Association of State Enterprises). In addition to these eight men, the coup leaders included two close friends of Gorbachev: Antoly Lukyanov (head of the Supreme Soviet) and Valeri Boldin (Chief of Staff). The coup began on Sunday, August 18. On that afternoon, several conspirators bur

Category: Foreign - A