Moscow, 1991. Flickr/Ron Knight. Some rights reserved.The death of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a reality, despite rumours that it didn't happen at all. But it was a strange death, reflecting the strange life of the beast itself. A state that had survived the onslaught of Nazi armies and avoided overthrow by popular revolution ended as a result of the failure of the “State Committee for the State of Emergency” (GKChP in its Russian acronym), better known as "the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991". A quarter of a century later, the aftershocks are still being felt, and by all of us.
It was a pathetic end for the former superpower. The coup was orchestrated by its top officials, the entire cast in power with one exception: the USSR's first (and last) president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was taking his summer vacation in Crimea. The “gang of eight” included Gennady Yanayev, the Soviet Union's vice-president; Valentin Pavlov, its prime minister; Dmitri Yazov, defence minister; Boris Pugo, interior minister; Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB.
In the early morning of 19 August 1991, as a declaration of the new order was being announced on television – and as Gorbachev was being detained in his southern dacha – tanks and elite paratroopers started rolling into the centre of Moscow. But they were soon blocked by thousands of citizens who had poured onto the streets. The plotters also failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, who put himself at the head of the public resistance to the coup.
