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 were three decades of Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. These two superpowers found themselves engaged in a build-up of nuclear arms which was intended to deter the other from making an unprovoked attack. This long period of international tension was finally relieved somewhat when Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen in 1985 to succeed President Konstantin Chernenko as leader of the Soviet Union. As General Secretary of the Communist party, G...