7. The Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the KGB, and the USSR Ministry of Defense are to organize efficient coordination of the organs of law and order with the Armed Forces in their effort to establish public order and maintain the security of the state, society, and citizens in accordance with the USSR law “On the Legal Regime of the State of Emergency” and the resolutions of the USSR State Committee for the State of Emergency.
Public rallies, marches, and demonstrations as well as strikes are prohibited.
When necessary, a curfew is to be introduced as well as patrols, inspections, and a strengthening of measures to enforce the border and customs regime.
To assume control of, and when necessary to defend, the most important state and economic organizations as well as essential life-supporting facilities.
To curb decisively the spread of all destabilizing rumors, actions provoking the violation of law and order and contributing to interethnic strife, and insubordination in dealing with the official persons responsible for the maintenance of the state of emergency regime.
8. To establish control over the mass media, this control function to be assumed by a special arm of the USSR State Committee for the State of Emergency which is being set up for this purpose.
9. Organs of power and administration and the heads of institutions and enterprises must undertake measures to increase coordination, order, and discipline in all spheres of our society. They must secure conditions for the normal functioning of enterprises in all branches of the economy; strict observance of the measures directed at strengthening horizontal and vertical links among all economic subjects throughout the entire territory of the USSR; and unflagging fulfillment of designated quotas in production and deliveries of raw materials, products, and spare parts.
To establish a regime of strict economy of technical, material, and hard currency resources, to design and carry out concrete measures against squandering of people’s wealth.
To struggle decisively with the shadow economy, to prosecute assiduously instances of corruption, theft, speculation, hoarding, squandering, and other violations in the economic sphere.
To create favorable conditions for the expansion of the contribution to the country’s economy and the vital needs of its citizens made by all types of private enterprise operating within the laws of the USSR.
10. To make holding a full-time government post incompatible with private enterprise activity.
11. The USSR Council of Ministers is to carry out in a period of seven days a complete inventory of all available foodstuffs and basic consumer goods; report to the people what the country has at its disposal; and assume the strictest control over the storage and distribution of these resources.
To remove all obstacles to the movement throughout the territory of the USSR of foodstuffs, consumer goods, and material necessary for their manufacture; to assume strict control over this sphere.
Special attention must be paid and first priority assigned to supplying preschool children’s establishments, orphanages, schools, intermediary-, specialized-intermediary, and higher-educational institutions, and hospitals as well as pensioners and the disabled.
In the period of one week to prepare proposals for stabilizing, freezing, and lowering prices for certain types of industrial and food products, first and foremost those that are meant for children, consumer services, and public food services, and for increasing salaries, pensions, subsidies, and compensations for various categories of citizens.
Within two weeks to design measures for streamlining the salary structure for the top-management personnel at all levels of state, public, cooperative, and other establishments, organizations, and enterprises.
12. Taking into account the critical situation with the harvest and the threat of hunger, to take extraordinary measures to organize supply, storage, and processing of agricultural products. To help the rural toilers as much as possible by providing them with equipment, spare parts, lubricating materials, fuels, etc. To organize without delay the dispatching, in requisite numbers, of blue- and white-collar workers, students, and servicemen to rural areas [to help with the harvest],
13. Within one week, the Council of Ministers is to prepare a resolution making it possible to provide in the course of 1991–1992 all willing city dwellers with gardening plots of 0.15 hectare.
14. Within two weeks, the USSR Council of Ministers is to complete plans for solving the crisis in the country’s energy industry and preparing for the winter.
15. Within one month, it is to prepare concrete measures for radically improving the housing situation in the country and report to the people about them.
In the course of six months, to develop a concrete program for accelerated development of state, cooperative, and individual housing construction for a five-year period.
16. To make it a duty of the organs of power in the center and in localities to give first priority to the basic needs of the population. To locate additional resources for improving free medical care and free education.
Document 4: Resolution of the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the Convening of an Extraordinary Session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR
In connection with the petition directed to the USSR Supreme Soviet to confirm the decision to introduce a state of emergency in certain localities in the USSR, it is resolved to convene an extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the city of Moscow on August 26, 1991.
2
The Press Conference of the State Committee for the State of Emergency, August 19, 1991
On the evening of Monday, August 19, five of the eight plotters (Yanaev, Baklanov, Pugo, Starodubtsev, and Tiziakov) held their first and only press conference at the Foreign Ministry’s press center in central Moscow. Millions of people gathered by their televisions and radios to learn more about the fate of their country. With visibly trembling hands and evident confusion, Gennadii Yanaev came forward as spokesman for the Emergency State Committee and Acting President. Below is a slightly abridged translation of the transcript of the press conference.
Yanaev: Ladies and gentlemen, friends and comrades: As you already know from media reports, because Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev is unable, owing to the state of his health, to discharge the duties of President of the USSR, the USSR Vice President has temporarily taken over the performance of the duties of the President on the basis of Article 127(7) of the USSR Constitution.
I address you today, ladies and gentlemen, at a moment that is crucial for the destinies of the Soviet Union and the international situation throughout the world.
Having embarked on the path of profound reforms and having gone a considerable way in this direction, the Soviet Union has now reached a point at which it finds itself faced with a deep crisis, the further development of which could both place in question the course of reforms itself and lead to serious cataclysms in international life.
It is of course no secret to you that a sharp drop in the country’s output, which has so far not been compensated for by the activity of the alternative industrial and agricultural structures, is creating a real threat to the further existence and development of the peoples of the Soviet Union. A situation of ungovernability and multiple authority has arisen in the country. All of this cannot fail to arouse extensive dissatisfaction among the people. A real threat to the country’s integrity has also arisen, with a consequent collapse of the unified economic space, the unified space for civil rights, a unified defense, and a unified foreign policy.