Here are a few of my reading highlights from the Foreign Policy article Meltdown, by Gennady Burbulis and Michele A. Berdy, an exciting account of the August coup in Russia, and the fall of the former Soviet Union in 1991.
We began to work together on a new union treaty that would transform the Soviet Union into a confederation of sovereign states with a limited central government. Yeltsin planned to sign the controversial pact on Aug. 20. As we miled about Yeltsin’s living room on the morning of Aug. 19, it was instantly clear to us that the coup was an eleventh-hour attempt to prevent the treaty from being signed the next day. But that was the only thing that was clear. Americans watching the events unfold live on CNN knew more about what was going on in Russia than we Russians did; the news anchors in Moscow simply read a formal statement issued by the coup plotters’ hastily appointed “Emergency Committee.” Information arrived at the dacha in bits and pieces, by phone from friends and colleagues in Moscow and around Russia.
[…]
The simple fact of our continued freedom was inexplicable. Successful coups don’t happen in stages; a more practiced group of plotters would have had all of us under lock and key the moment tanks and troops entered the capital city. We realized how vulnerable we were. The only lever we had was the office of the presidency and our legitimacy as the elected government of Russia.
[…]
The White House was now ground zero of the resistance to the putschists. I short order we dispatched Andrei Kozyrev, the newly appointed Russian foreign minister, to various Western capitals with a personal letter from Yeltsin. Outside, people came from train stations and airports, from distant towns and cities, and joined Muscovites by the walls of the White House, where they began building barricades. At first they were rudimentary things, piled up out of whatever materials were at hand. But by evening our supporters were constructing more formidable emplacements out of trolley buses, cars, and construction materials, blocking off all approaches to the building. On the afternoon of the first day, we were in Yeltsin’s office discussing our plans when an aide rushed in and told us that some of the soldiers had gotten out of their tanks in front of the building to talk to people. Yeltsin jumped up and said, “I’m going out there.” I objected. “You can’t do it,” I told him. “It’s an enormous risk. We have no idea what the putschists might be doing. It’s too dangerous.” Yeltsin didn’t listen to me. He told someone to grab him a copy of the appeal and headed out of the office. We all ran after him. Outside, to the horror of his security guards, he clambered onto a tank in front of the White House to read the appeal. Not sure what else to do, we all jumped up after him. The crowd had grown to about 30,000 people by then, and they filled the square with cheering. Out in the throng, camera shutters snapped. We had not yet won the war, but as the picture of Yeltsin on the tank swept across the world’s front pages, we had at least won the battle of symbols.
[…]
The failure of the August coup was both ironic and tragic. In taking the extraordinary measures they believed were necessary to hold the union together, the putschists ensured its destruction. Without the coup, the union would likely have endured, albeit in a form that might have eventually resembled the European Union more than the old Soviet Union. But the three-day standoff in Moscow exploded that possibility.
(via Meltdown – By Gennady Burbulis and Michele A. Berdy | Foreign Policy)