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Thus, with the draft Union Treaty due to be signed on 20 August 1991, and with Gorbachev preparing to fly back to Moscow from his holiday home in Foros on the Crimean coast, the final blow to the Union was struck by people whose main aim was to preserve it. Gorbachev, his wife and family and one or two close colleagues (including Cherniaev) were put under house arrest on 18 August and a state of emergency was declared in Moscow early in the morning of 19 August. A self-appointed State Committee for the State of Emergency was set up in which the Soviet vice-president, Gennadii Ianaev, had been persuaded to play the most public role. In order to provide a fig leaf of legality, the plan had been to persuade Gorbachev to hand over his powers (temporarily, he was told) to the vice-president.

From the moment that Gorbachev denounced the delegation which had been sent to cajole or intimidate him into acquiescing with their action (which had begun with cutting off all his telephones) the putschists were in trou- ble.[56] The key figures in this attempt to turn the clock back (which, if it had succeeded, would logically have resulted in severe repression in the most dis­affected republics and a return to a highly authoritarian regime in the Soviet Union as a whole) were, unsurprisingly, the chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Kriuchkov, the powerful head of the military-industrial complex of the Soviet Union, Oleg Baklanov, and the minister of defence, Dmitrii Iazov. Many senior Communist Party officials sympathised with them and one Politburo member, Oleg Shenin, was intimately involved in the coup attempt. Because, however, the CPSU had by this time lost whatever prestige it once enjoyed, the emphasis of the plotters was on patriotism and preserving the Soviet state. There was no reference to restoring the monopoly of power of the Communist Party or to Marxism-Leninism. Many people demonstrated in Moscow against the coup, but throughout the country as a whole most citizens waited to see who would come out on top. Many republican and most regional party leaders assumed that those who had taken such drastic action would prevail and hastened to acknowledge the 'new leadership'.

It emerged, however, that even the most conservative section of the Soviet party and state establishment had been affected by the changes in Soviet society and the new norms that had come to prevail over the previous six and a half years. Yeltsin, in the Russian White House (the home at that time of the Russian government), became the symbol of resistance to the coup. He received strong support from Western leaders, although a few had initially been prepared to accept the coup as a fait accompli, among them President Mitterrand of France. The tens of thousands of Muscovites (several hundred thousand over several days when account is taken of comings and goings) who surrounded the White House raised the political cost of its storming, but would not have prevented the building and its occupants being seized, if the army, Ministry of Interior and KGB troops had acted with the kind of ruthlessness they displayed in pre-perestroika times. Yet, faced with political resistance, the forces of coercion themselves became divided. Since the coup leaders were people who had for several years been denouncing Gorbachev - at first, in private, and of late in public - for 'indecisiveness', it is ironic that their own indecision made certain the failure of the coup. They lacked the resolution to carry it to its logical conclusion and gave up the attempt as early as 21 August.

The putsch was, however, a mortal blow both for the Union and for the leadership of Gorbachev. Having seen how close they had been to being fully reincorporated in a Soviet state which wouldhave been a throwbacktothepast, the Baltic states instantly declared their independence. This was recognised by the Soviet Union on 6 September. Four days later Armenia followed suit, while Georgia and Moldova already considered themselves to be independent. While Gorbachev had been isolated on the Crimean coast, Yeltsin had been the public face of resistance to the coup, and Gorbachev's position became weaker and Yeltsin's stronger in its aftermath. Taking full advantage of this further shift in the balance of power, Yeltsin was no longer content with the draft Union Treaty that was to have been signed in August. New negotiations saw further concessions from Gorbachev which would have moved what remained of a Union into something akin to a loose confederation. Ultimately, this did not satisfy the leaders of the three Slavic republics - Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus. At a meeting on 8 December 1991 they announced that the Soviet Union was ceasing to exist and that they were going to create in its place a Commonwealth of Independent States (see Map 12.1). Not the least of the attractions of this outcome for Yeltsin was that with no Union there would be no Gorbachev in the Kremlin. In the months following the coup he had been sharing that historic headquarters of Russian leaders with Gorbachev, but, given their rivalry, such a 'dual tenancy', like 'dual power' in 1917, could not last.

In a televised 'Address to Soviet Citizens' on 25 December 1991, just as the Soviet state itself was coming to an end, Gorbachev announced that he was ceasing to be president of the USSR. He said that, although he had favoured sovereignty ofthe republics, he could not accept the complete dismemberment of the Soviet Union and held that decisions of such magnitude should have been accepted only if ratified by popular will. Looking back on his years in power, he observed that all the changes had been carried through in sharp struggle with 'the old, obsolete and reactionary forces' and had come up against 'our intolerance, low level of political culture and fear of change'. Yet, he could justly claim that the society 'had been freed politically and spiritually', with the establishment of free elections, freedom of the press and freedom of

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56

On the coup, see Mikhail Gorbachev, The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons (London: HarperCollins, 1991); Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. and ed. Robert English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), esp. Afterword to the U.S. Edition', pp. 401-23; and V Stepankov and E. Lisov Kremlevskii zagovor: Versiia sledstviia (Moscow: Ogonek, 1992).