Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Estimates of Unofficial Economies

Percentage Share of GDP

1989

1995

Azerbaijan

32.8%

69.9%

Belarus

28.6

34.5

Estonia

22.1

21.9

Georgia

32.8

71.4

Kazakhstan

32.8

49.8

Latvia

22.1

40.9

Lithuania

22.1

30.6

Moldova

28.6

47.8

Russia

18.0

45.6

Ukraine

25.3

56.5

Uzbekistan

32.8

28.5

In 1989-91, over most of the country, embryonic Soviet capitalism was growing by leaps and bounds. The new co-ops permitted by law were private businesses. Top Soviet government ministers, including Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, ordered the formation of some co-ops. Roy Medvedev wrote that private businessmen as well as government enterprises and organizations formed “tens of thousands of co-ops” — in trade, production, and construction. The co-operatives made it possible to “transform billions of rubles worth of non-liquid assets into cash.” The ending of the previous government monopoly on foreign trade made it possible “to swing commercial deals on large scale through the co-operatives.”541

Later, the new Russian business oligarchs claimed it had been easier to make a fortune under Gorbachev than Yeltsin. Gorbachev’s economic officials turned the Communist youth organization Komsomol, 15 million strong, into a training ground for young entrepreneurs. Using Komsomol resources, youthful Soviet capitalists set up the country’s first commercial banks and stock exchanges. Komsomol’s aspiring millionaires also profited from such ventures as show business, video rentals, tourism, gambling, and international trade.542

Emerging into daylight with Gorbachev’s blessing, the shadow economy contained a huge criminal component. According to Stephen Handelman, an authority on Russian organized crime, in the Gorbachev era, “60 percent of the co-operatives were run by former or active criminals.”543 By late 1991, after the legalization of much private enterprise, the black market still accounted for “15 percent of the Russian volume of goods and services.”544

The more the CPSU and the plan died, the more the market became inevitable. In 1987, the decision to go for radical political reform entailed the assumption that the “command-administrative system”—the Party and the central government—was the chief problem. Such an assumption pushed the revisionists and their economists inescapably to the idea of an economy solely dependent on spontaneous market mechanisms, private ownership, and profits. With central ministries in Moscow unraveling and with a diminished Party to guide a transition, market advocates showed an interest in “shock therapy,” a free market regime imposed, from above, all at once, with few or no safeguards.

Even Nikolai Ryzhkov, the prime minister and chief USSR economic official, opposed the blind leap to free market capitalism. Ryzhkov wrote that, unlike the Chinese reformers, Gorbachev was weakening the Party and the state when they would be most needed:

At first, I thought that Gorbachev simply did not understand the essence of the question, but further conversations and particularly Politburo sessions in which these problems were discussed showed he was consciously pursuing his line. The ultra-radicals demanded that the idea of the plan be totally rejected, asserting that the producers themselves would quickly understand everything and establish smooth, mutually profitable relations between each other, and nationwide tasks would be solved by themselves. Yakovlev, Medvedev and Shevardnadze insisted on this point of view, and Gorbachev supported them.545

Other factors hastened the turn to the market. Gorbachev’s change of his political base from the Party to state institutions and his accession to the presidency in March 1990 gave him greater freedom of action. The July 1989 coal miners’ strike, both reflecting and causing economic decline, panicked many leaders in Moscow, and made the unthinkable thinkable.

Ideologically, the distorted glorification of NEP prepared public opinion for the new pro-capitalist direction. Gorbachev sympathizers Anthony Jones and William Moskoff illustrated the revisionist use of NEP to make a case against central planning. They asserted that there are “parallels”—in reverse—to the industrialization debate between Bukharin and the CPSU majority led by Stalin in the USSR sixty years earlier. Then, the Soviets chose the plan, not the market, as the best way to catch up with the capitalist nations of the West. “But the contemporary debate has focused on whether, how, and at what speed the nation might find its way back to a market system.”546

Not least of all, international pressure kept up. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker came to Moscow offering advice on price reform. The West began dangling loans.547 There were accelerated contacts between Western and Soviet economists, joint conferences touting free market nostrums, seminars in Moscow featuring free market economists, and lucrative U.S. speaking tours for select Soviet economists. Through most of 1989, U.S. billionaire George Soros, whose wealth came from currency speculation, had a secret advisory team in Moscow with access to the highest circles, where they advocated the creation of an Open Sector, a kind of beachhead for capitalism until a full, countrywide restoration of capitalism occurred.

In 1990-91, Gorbachev found it difficult to steer a transition to a market economy because, with his own popularity slumping, he feared that shock therapy would make his opponents more popular. A circus parade of marketization proposals dominated the last two years of the Gorbachev era. This further discredited Gorbachev.548 The Russian republican government under Yeltsin was moving faster than the USSR government toward “shock therapy,” and its proposals pushed the more reluctant USSR authorities. In November 1989, Ryzhkov’s economist, Leonid Abalkin, put forth a six-year plan involving privatization and price increases. In mid-February 1990, Abalkin and the head of Gosplan put forward a revised plan, to take effect in mid-1990 or January 1991, involving rapid steps to a market economy. Ryzhkov and the government officials and economists working for him resisted the Russian Republic’s ideas for a lightning transition to a market economy. While Ryzhkov insisted on caution, Boris Yeltsin’s power was on the rise. In July 1990, Gorbachev decided to dump Ryzhkov and make a deal on the economy with Yeltsin, recently elected head of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. Together, Gorbachev and Yeltsin picked Stanislav Shatalin to prepare an “agreed upon conception of a program of transition to a market economy as a basis of the economic section of the Union Treaty.”549

Shatalin’s Five Hundred Day Plan was intimately bound up with the struggle between Gorbachev and Yeltsin over the Union Treaty. Calling for total privatization and monetary stabilization in the first one hundred days, the plan was a “laughable” departure from economic realism.550 The plan involved major price increases for necessities. Crucially, the Five Hundred Day Plan gave all taxing powers to the republics, which would then decide how much to give back to the USSR and asserted the priority of republican laws over Soviet laws. The advocates of the Shatalin plan clearly wanted to abolish the USSR. Gorbachev rejected Shatalin’s scheme. In November 1990, Gorbachev assigned his old adviser, Abel Aganbegyan, to work with Shatalin, Abalkin, and Petrakov, on another economic plan. This was vintage Gorbachev positioning himself as a centrist. The resulting presidential plan, like the Ryzhkov-Abalkin plan, involved price increases. Yeltsin’s Russian Republic passed a law blocking price increases. That action put the demagogy of Yeltsin clearly on exhibit. He was willing to destroy the Soviet Union in order to race toward capitalism, but he would also damage Gorbachev by denouncing his acceptance of price increases, which were inevitable with the free market, of which Yeltsin was the staunchest advocate. This was trying to have one’s cake and eat it too. By 1990, if not before, Yeltsin and his closest advisers understood that their drive to a full free-market economy meant the breakup of the Union state. Such an understanding was implicit in the Shatalin Five Hundred Day Plan. To restore capitalism in Russia, the USSR and Gorbachev had to go. Gorbachev’s advisers also understood that point. When he rejected the Five Hundred Day plan, Gorbachev rejected a strong pro-capitalist orientation and the dissolution of the USSR, which would have meant the disappearance of his own position and power. His inner circle, however, Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, Medvedev, Shakhnazarov, and Chernyaev supported the Five Hundred Day Plan. Gorbachev then turned to opponents of the market to fill such key positions as minister for justice, director of TASS, and minister and first deputy minister of internal affairs. As a consequence, Yakovlev deserted Gorbachev. Soon after, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze resigned. In 1992 he returned to Georgia to lead his native republic. 551

Gorbachev never implemented any comprehensive economic reform. No presidential plan ever became a reality. Yeltsin nullified all his plans. The continued economic deterioration in the Soviet Union stemmed mainly from the withdrawal of the Party from the economy, that is, the destruction of the centrally planned economy, as well as the disruption stemming from republics going their separate ways, and the impact of breaking economic links with Eastern Europe. After January 1992, with full power in Russia, Yeltsin and his economists imposed shock therapy with catastrophic results. By 1994, industrial production in post-Soviet Russia would fall to half of its already disastrous 1991 level.

The end of the Soviet Union as a multi-national federal state came in 1989-91. In these three years, Gorbachev stopped ignoring the national question. In September 1989, in an effort to deal with growing separatism, the CC held a Plenum on the national question, but things had unraveled too far to stop. Anatoly Chernyaev called the CC Plenum “stillborn, a platform that was outdated even before it was written.”552 On specific occasions in these years Gorbachev tried to repress the separatists. After February 1991, he switched strategies and tried to accommodate the separatists with a renegotiated Union Treaty.

Everything failed. Nationalist separatism triumphed in the outlying republics. Yeltsin took Russia out of the USSR to press ahead with his economic program. Years later Gorbachev admitted how late he came to appreciate the complexity of the national question.553 From the Baku riots in December 1986 to Yeltsin’s removal of the Kremlin’s red flag in December 1991, separatist feeling and national strife grew all over the USSR.

Eastern Europe’s 1989 upheavals worsened national relations in the USSR. National feeling against the Soviet Union and Russians contributed to the downfall of many Communist governments in 1989. In turn, these upheavals encouraged separatists in the smaller republics in the USSR. In August 1989, a non-Communist government formed in Poland. In October 1989, the regime in Hungary collapsed. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. In November 1989 in Czechoslovakia, a “velvet revolution” was victorious. In December 1989 in Rumania, anti-Ceaucescu elements forcibly overthrew and executed him and his wife.

The weakening of the CPSU in all areas of Soviet life weakened the one institution proven capable of holding a disparate people together. Ligachev remarked, “By April 1989, the Secretariat’s sessions, at which we could and should have discussed such a question [Georgian nationalist secessionism], had long since ceased. …I suddenly realized how strangely weak government authority in the country was becoming.”554

Russia was the linchpin of the whole USSR, and Russian separatism posed the greatest threat of all. Jerry Hough said that, ultimately, Russia ended the USSR by seceding from it.555 Lenin and Stalin had supported affirmative action, a Russian subsidy to bring the development of non-Russian peoples up to Russian levels. This policy enormously speeded up the economic and cultural progress of downtrodden peoples. Nevertheless, shortcomings remained. The Russians seemed blind to certain problems. For example, they ignored the threat to nationality and language involved when huge numbers of Russian workers emigrated to small republics, tipping the language and ethnic balance. In Estonia and Latvia, for example, this tipping created a festering sore. As elsewhere, when not skillfully handled, affirmative action caused a backlash. Some Russians resented the ongoing subsidy of outlying republics. Such resentment fueled Russian nationalism.

Russian nationalism grew for other reasons too. In the Brezhnev era, Soviet leaders had tolerated Russian nationalism. The dominant elements in the Brezhnev Politburo reasoned that Russian nationalism was a salutary counterweight to the Western influences penetrating Russian society because of detente.

Western influence on the national question in the USSR went far beyond the subtle, long-term effects of détente. Over the whole Soviet era—unobstructed in the final years—Western radio voices worked to aggravate national strife in the USSR. Radio Liberty, filled with rabid right-wing nationalists recruited from non-Russian Soviet republics, beamed a steady stream of broadcasts in non-Russian languages aimed at stirring separatist rage.556

Through the Interregional Group in the USSR Congress and the glasnost media, the dissident, Andrei Sakharov, popularized the concept of “sovereignization.” This was the idea that Russia too was deprived of equality with other republics by the Stalin-era constitution and that a new constitution should give Russia its own republican institutions.557 The “democrats” adopted Sakharov’s sovereignization idea and, when elected chair of the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1990, Boris Yeltsin put it into effect.

Sakharov framed the sovereignization demand as a negation of the Stalin policy on nationalities. That appealed both to Yeltsin’s “democrats” and to Gorbachev’s reformers. In 1988 with Gorbachev’s and Yakovlev’s tacit support, Sakharov visited the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave to make an on-the-spot analysis, surely a case of the blind leading the blind. In 1988-89, Sakharov aired his views in the media. His radical sovereignization view was:

All republics both union and autonomous, autonomous oblasts [regions] and national okrugs [territories] must be granted equal rights, with the preservation of the present territorial borders. They must all receive the maximum degree of independence. Their sovereignty must be minimally limited in such areas as defense, foreign policy, communications, and transportation. …Russian autonomous regions such as Yakutiya, Chuvashiya, Bashkiriya, and Tatariya must receive the same rights as Ukraine and Estonia. There must be no distinction between republics and autonomous oblasts. All must be turned into republics and all must have the right to secede from the Union.558

What was the appeal of sovereignization? Sounding democratic, sovereignization departed from the traditional affirmative action policy. Sovereignization required no struggle against national inequality, certainly not on the part of the Russians, historically the dominant and privileged nation. Sakharov was explicit on this point, saying the Stalinist system “oppressed the large peoples as well as the small ones, particularly the Russian people, one of its main victims.”559 Sovereignization also required no struggle for multinational unity. The concept abandoned the Communist class-based approach to the national question, which affirmed the democratic right of nations to self determination, including the right of secession, and spelled out the conditions under which secession of a small nation from a larger state was justified as a last resort.560 Sovereignization appealed to the separatists because it blessed their departure. It appealed to the pro-capitalist “democrats” because it was a classless and Party-less formula, and it was consistent with their “anti-Stalinism” program on other issues. Sakharov’s doctrine dovetailed with Yeltsin’s desire to pull Russia out of the USSR. The sovereignization notion placed Sakharov firmly in the Bukharin–Khrushchev tradition of blundering opportunism on the national question.

Unresolved national problems differed in various regions of the Soviet Union. Nationalism had strong appeal in the Baltic states, which had become part of the USSR in 1939 after twenty years of state independence. In the Transcaucasus, nationalism was fueled by a longstanding territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the Islamic areas of Soviet Central Asia, nationalism was stimulated by resurgent Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The Tatars and Chechens, who had been uprooted by Stalin in the war years, nurtured unredressed grievances. Russia, the keystone of the USSR, had its own feelings of grievance too.

In 1989-1991, the epicenter of the nationalist earthquake shifted from region to region. In October 1988, the three Baltic states gave birth to national fronts that soon became channels of separatist feeling. Gorbachev’s acquisition of emergency powers in early 1990 prompted Vytautas Landsbergis, head of the Sajudis nationalist movement in Lithuania, to proclaim independence on March 11, 1990. Historian Geoffrey Hosking said, “With these moves the Baltic republics became the focus of the struggle between those who wanted to preserve the Union and those who wished to emancipate themselves from it.”561

Nationalism triumphed in the Lithuanian CP before it triumphed in Lithuania as a whole. During Gorbachev’s three-day visit to Lithuania in January 1989, Algirdas-Mykolas Brazauskas, head of the Lithuanian CP, flatly told him that nationalist sentiment was so strong only an independent Lithuanian Communist Party could hold popular support. In elections on March 25, 1989, the Sajudis movement trounced the Lithuanian CP. In December 1989, the Lithuanian CP seceded from the CPSU.562 By then, ethnic crises were breaking out simultaneously in far-flung regions. Gorbachev had his hands full. In January and February 1990, near Baku, Azerbaijan, Azeri pogroms against Armenians left twenty-six Armenians and six Azeris dead.

As a first response to the Lithuanian proclamation of national independence, Gorbachev imposed an economic blockade.563 The USSR passed a Law on Secession in April 1990, spelling out the details of a legal separation process for republics and raising the political and economic cost of secession by allowing subnational units to secede from the seceding nation. The new Soviet law also provided for a five-year transition to independence for any seceding state, and made USSR approval of secession necessary. Events, however, overtook the law. On January 12-13, 1991, the Soviet Army shot at nationalist demonstrators in Vilnius, Lithuania, killing fourteen and wounding many more. A week later in Moscow, 100,000 marchers protested this repression. A short time later, new violence in Riga, Latvia, exacerbated the Baltic crisis. In late spring 1991, Gorbachev abandoned repression. Thereafter, he focused on re-negotiating the Union Treaty.564

In the struggle against Gorbachev’s version of perestroika, both Ligachev and Yeltsin tried to harness Russian nationalist sentiment to their respective aims. A Communist-nationalist alliance was natural insofar as Russian nationalism resented the “Westernizing” aspects of Gorbachev’s reforms, its slavish devotion to the Western capitalist market, its borrowed social democratic ideas, its sycophantic deference to the West as “the civilized world,” and its downplaying of Russia’s unique history. For many decades, a fault line in Russian politics had “Westernizers” on one side and “Slavophiles” on the other. That fault line persisted through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Yeltsin first thought of himself as a Soviet, not a Russian patriot, but as his devotion to market reforms grew, he saw the potential benefits of playing the Russia card. In 1990 he said, “I soon understood that there would be no radical reforms at an all-Union level…and so I thought to myself: If the reforms cannot be carried out at that level, why not try in Russia?”565

As Yeltsin began appointing young pro-market whiz kids to top posts in Russia, they began to realize, in Hough’s words, that “decentralization of power to the republic level would give them personal control over privatization.”566

In 1989, many republics of the USSR had declared sovereignty, but this did not yet mean full and formal secession from the USSR. In the last twenty-one months of the USSR’s existence, real declarations of independence came in waves. Lithuania declared independence on March 11, 1990, Latvia on May 4, 1990, and Georgia, on April 9, 1991. The second wave occurred in August 1991: Estonia declared independence on August 20, 1991, the Ukraine on August 24, Belarus and Moldova on August 27, Azerbaijan on August 30, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan on August 31, Tajikistan on September 9, Armenia on September 23, Turkmenistan on October 27, and Kazahkstan on December 16. The Russian Federation never officially declared independence. The secession of other republics simply left it independent, willy-nilly.567

When given a chance to express a view, the overwhelming majority of the Soviet people wished to keep the Union. On March 17, 1991 in a non-binding referendum in all republics except the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldava, 76.4 percent of the voters approved the preservation of the Union.568 In Russia, 71.4 percent approved, in the Ukraine, 70.3 percent, in Belarus, 82.7 percent, and in Azerbaijan and in each of the Central Asian republics, over 90 percent.569 These huge majorities mattered little to Yeltsin’s “democrats.”

The abandonment of multinational unity at home had a parallel in the abandonment of international solidarity abroad. Betrayal after betrayal of liberation movements and newer socialist states occurred in Gorbachev’s last years. On the eve of Secretary of State James Baker’s visit to Moscow in May 1989, Gorbachev told President George Bush of his decision to stop arms shipments to Nicaragua, even though the country remained terrorized by the attacks of U.S.-backed contras.570 Beginning in 1986, Gorbachev’s sympathy and solidarity with Cuba began to wane. In December 1988, he was thankful571 when an earthquake in Soviet Armenia required him to cancel an oft-postponed trip to Havana. In April 1989, the visit finally occurred. Gorbachev told the Cuban National Assembly that he opposed “any theories or doctrines that justify the export of revolution.”572 In reality, the policy that Gorbachev was discarding was not the export of revolution but international solidarity in the defense of existing revolutions. Despite an outwardly warm public reception in Havana, the gulf widened between Cuba and the Gorbachev leadership. Not inclined to abandon principle, socialist Cuba did not budge. The next year Gorbachev cut off about $5 billion in yearly aid, including deliveries of oil and other necessities. Between 1990 and 1993, together, the collapse of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), a tightening of the U.S. blockade, and the Soviet betrayal caused Cuba’s GDP to plummet by 50 percent.

Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s team boasted that their foreign policy based on “new thinking” was succeeding. This made sense if one measured success only in terms of increased “peacefulness” and “stability” of US-Soviet relations. Unde-niably, unilateral Soviet disarmament lowered the odds of a U.S.-USSR thermonuclear exchange. Even so, the disintegration of the Soviet Union increased the odds of a disaster arising from the erosion of security over nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.

Unilateral Soviet concessions and surrender did reduce other areas of Soviet conflict with the U.S. Of course, the Gorbachev men did not see their policy as surrender. Top foreign policy adviser Chernyaev believed that the betrayal of South Africa and Nicaragua was of little consequence compared with the consolidation of the U.S.-USSR relationship. Chernyaev also saw victory in each cherished moment when leaders of the West bestowed acclaim on Gorbachev. He faithfully noted when “Mikhail” established a first-name basis with “George”[Bush, the elder], “Margaret”[Thatcher], and “Helmut”[Schmidt]. Gorbachev and Chernyaev believed the new U.S.-USSR alliance marked a “most critical” change in world politics, “a new path toward civilization.”573 The gloss that Gorbachev applied to the abandonment of international solidarity was nowhere more frankly and succinctly stated than in Gorbachev’s notes for his Revolution Day message for November 7, 1990:

Re-iterate what perestroika has given to us… it brought freedom and emancipation…we opened up to the world … having stood in opposition to the world, we denied ourselves the opportunity of participating in civilization’s progress at its most critical turning point. We suffered terrible [losses], perhaps our greatest losses, thanks to this.574

The end of the USSR’s “standing in opposition to the world” carried a high price for many. Eastern European socialism disappeared, replaced by new conservative governments cravenly seeking EU and/or NATO membership, leaving a still independent Yugoslavia alone to be hammered by NATO. By 1993-94 the abandoned but heroic Cubans were farming with wooden plows and oxen. In Africa, the continent most wronged by imperialism, the end of Soviet aid meant the extinction of thirty years of hope and struggle for independent development. Debt owed to Western banks soon throttled new states struggling since formal de-colonization in 1960, while AIDS and other diseases and collapsing social safety nets threatened to wipe out whole peoples. With “Don’t displease the Americans” as the new be-all and end-all of Soviet foreign policy, the USSR even spurned such national liberation leaders as Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat. After the 1989 Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, the progressive Najibullah held power until 1992. He then sought refuge in the UN compound. In 1996 when the Taliban seized Kabul its first act was to break into the UN compound and shoot Najibullah, mutilate his body, and hang it for public viewing in the streets of Kabul.

As the Gulf War neared, James Baker, President Bush’s deputy, asked the Soviets to join in a strike on the Iraqi army. Gorbachev replied: “I want to emphasize that we would like to be by your side in any situation.”575 Thus, step-by-step, his concept of an “integrated, interdependent world” and “universal human values” transformed Soviet foreign policy into an outright alliance with imperialism. Gorbachev’s sycophancy reached remarkable depths. In a letter to President George H. W. Bush, Gorbachev even implied that the future direction of the Soviet Union depended on America:

At the same time I get the impression that my friend, the president of the United States, hasn’t come to a final answer on the main question: what kind of Soviet Union does the United States want to see? And until this question is answered we’ll keep stumbling on one or another particular aspect of our relations.576

By August 1991, the deterioration of economic conditions and the unraveling of the Soviet Union had become so advanced and Gorbachev was so lacking in a plan to deal with the crisis that a group of Soviet leaders took a radical step to gain control of events. They formed the State Committee for the State of Emergency (SCSE), known also by its Russian initials GKChP. The state officials who made up the SCSE had exhausted other options aimed at limiting Gorbachev’s power and stopping the erosion of the Soviet state’s authority. As far back as 1988, Ligachev had lost his struggle against Gorbachev in the Politburo. In September and December 1990, the group that comprised the SCSE had criticized Gorbachev. In April 1991, it tried to remove him in a CC vote. In June 1991, it tried to outwit him in parliament.577 In August 1991, Yeltsin’s attempt to re-draft the details of the Union Treaty in order to deny the All-Union institutions revenue-raising powers propelled these men to take matters in their own hands. The SCSE leaders were infuriated by what they believed was Gorbachev’s capitulation to Yeltsin’s re-draft of the treaty.578 Moreover, Yeltsin had also just prohibited the CPSU in the army and had denied the USSR exchequer access to any revenues from the Russian oilfields.579 Gorbachev had even agreed to abolish the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, his own creation. Though the members of the SCSE were ostensibly Gorbachev men, they sprang into action because Yeltsin was winning every struggle with Gorbachev.580

The formation of the SCSE initiated a strange sequence of events. On August 18, in the late afternoon, five high officials: first deputy chairman of the USSR Defense Council Oleg Baklanov, president of the Association of USSR State Industries Alexander Tizyakov, Politburo member Oleg Shenin, commanding general of the ground forces of the Soviet Army Valentin Varennikov, Gorbachev’s chief of staff Valery Boldin, and chief of the presidential personal security guard Yuri Plekhanov confronted Gorbachev in his summer home at Foros on the Black Sea. They proposed that he turn over power to USSR Vice President Gennadii Yanaev who would proclaim martial law and—with state disintegration looming—introduce order. Baklanov said to Gorbachev: “Nothing is required of you. We will do all the dirty work for you.” According to historian Jerry Hough, “Some of the group thought Gorbachev would agree, but he reacted hostilely and aggressively.”581

The single most important SCSE leader was KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov. Besides the previously named, the SCSE’s members were: USSR Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, USSR Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov, USSR Minister of Internal Affairs Boris Pugo, and Chairman of the USSR Union of Peasants Vasilii Starodubtsev. Other key members were: chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet Anatolii Lukyanov (a Gorbachev ally for years), two first deputy chairmen of the KGB Viktor Grushko and Genii Ageev, and KGB General Vyacheslav Generalov.

At six the next morning on August 19, 1991 the SCSE announced on Soviet television that it had temporarily assumed power because Gorbachev was ill and that Vice President Yanaev would exercise the powers of the president until he returned. The SCSE sent troops and tanks to Moscow, but in every other way the SCSE leaders acted very indecisively. Its statement, the “Appeal to the Soviet People,” published by TASS on August 19, stressed patriotism and the restoration of order. It began, “There have emerged extremist forces which have adopted a course toward liquidation of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the state and the seizure of power at any price.” The document denounced the economic reforms of “adventurers” that resulted in “a sharp drop in the living standards of the overwhelming majority of the population and the flowering of speculation and the shadow economy.” It declared that the prestige of the USSR had been undermined. It vowed to “clean the streets of criminals,” as well as end “the plundering of the people’s wealth.” Labor discipline and law and order would be reestablished. The “Appeal” promised to carry out “a countrywide discussion on a new Union Treaty.”582

On the evening of August 19 the SCSE leaders held a press conference for foreign and Russian journalists. Observers claimed that they seemed nervous, inept, and indecisive. They certainly were indecisive. During the three days in question, SCSE allowed Western news agencies, from CNN to Radio Liberty, to broadcast freely their own interpretation of developments, and even to promote Yeltsin. Top military officers were allowed to telephone and visit politicians in the Russian White House, i.e., the Russian Republic’s parliament building. Meanwhile, Yeltsin and the “democrat” leaders continued to speak to the world and Soviet media, worked to win over the military, and built barricades around the Russian parliament building. SCSE took no action against them all day on August 20. It amazed Western analysts that top military leaders did not participate in any SCSE-directed assault on the Russian parliament at night on August 19 or August 20.583

The pivotal moment of the August events came on the night of August 20-21. The SCSE developed and then abandoned a plan to storm the Russian parliament. Then, on August 21 SCSE leaders Kryuchkov, Yazov, Baklanov, Tizyakov, and Lukyanov flew to Foros to persuade Gorbachev to join them in counteracting Yeltsin and the Russian government. They sought to convince him that the SCSE’s actions so far had shown how little effort would be needed to restore order. Gorbachev would not meet them.584 At 2:30 a.m. on August 22nd Gorbachev returned to Moscow on the presidential plane along with the Russian Republic’s Vice President Rutskoi (Yeltsin’s ally, who had arrived in Foros on another plane), and Kryuchkov. Kryuchkov had agreed to join Gorbachev on the presidential plane, on the basis of a promise he would speak as an equal with Gorbachev.585 On landing, however, Kryuchkov was arrested by Soviet authorities.586 Back in Moscow, Gorbachev resumed formal power, though his real power was fast slipping into the hands of Yeltsin. At 9 a.m. on August 22 the Soviet Ministry of Defense decided to withdraw its troops from Moscow, and the bizarre drama came to an end.

The meaning of what happened in August 1991 remains somewhat cloudy, though recent accounts have done much to clarify early misunderstanding. What is now established is that the “coup leaders” thought Gorbachev was on their side, gave assurances of this to Yeltsin, and when Gorbachev pulled the rug from under them, essentially panicked, since they had absolutely no plan for a seizure of power. They were not prepared to arrest Yeltsin and his key supporters, suppress the “democrats,” or seize anything. Without either a plan or the will, the entire effort collapsed.

In the confusion of those days, many democrats—no quotation marks this time—condemned the events of August 19-21, 1991, particularly the declaration of martial law. Western governments and media promoted an understanding of these events as an attempted coup. Perched on a tank outside the Russian parliament, bellowing with a bullhorn, Yeltsin was portrayed by the media as successfully rallying the masses against the unjust usurpers. The coup mythology served to blame the Soviet collapse on the “diehards” in the KGB and CPSU, instead of Gorbachev, and to bolster Boris Yeltsin’s image as a hero of democracy.

The research of the last ten years by U.S. historians casts grave doubts on such a History Channel version of August 1991.587 A coup is the unlawful, forcible overthrow of a constitutionally legitimate government, but the SCSE did not try to overthrow the USSR government. The SCSE was the government.

Western media characterized SCSE leaders as cowardly bunglers. Though many blunders occurred in August 1991, the SCSE leaders did not have any prior reputation as weaklings and fools. SCSE leaders had authorized deadly force and used force effectively on several previous occasions. Dunlop called them “serious…men with ruthless intentions”588 In 1956, Kryuchkov, the foremost SCSE leader, had served in the Soviet Embassy in Hungary with Andropov putting down the counterrevolution.589 Moreover, though the SCSE had essentially declared martial law, this was not a bolt out of the blue; Gorbachev had authorized planning for martial law several times in the year before the August events.590

John Dunlop, considered the leading U.S. expert on the “coup,”591 asserted support for the SCSE was substantial. Yeltsin’s own team believed that 70 percent of all local officials in the Russian republic, Communist and non-Communist, did not support Yeltsin.592 Two-thirds of regional Communist Party committees openly expressed support for SCSE, while one-third took a “wait and see” attitude.593 In the outer republics only Moldava, Kyrgystan, and the Baltic states showed big opposition to the SCSE. Polls conducted in the weeks before August 19 by the USSR Academy of Social Science at the Party Central Committee, admittedly a source with an anti-Yeltsin bias, showed huge majorities in favor of the integrity of the USSR and the preservation of state controls over enterprises.594

Gorbachev’s version—that he had no complicity in the August 1991 events—lacks credibility. Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly Lukyanov said that Gorbachev had agreed to the action program of the SCSE provided the Supreme Soviet sanctioned it. Historian Anthony D’Agostino concluded that Lukyanov’s assertion “cannot be so easily dismissed.” Similarly, William Odom said “Gorbachev’s complicity cannot be entirely discounted.”595 John Dunlop found “too many flaws in Gorbachev’s account to absolve him.” Those who have studied the August events most exhaustively have affirmed the likelihood of Gorbachev’s involvement the most strenuously. Amy Knight, a U.S. researcher and expert on the KGB associated with the Congressional Research Service and John Hopkins University, concluded that Gorbachev was trying to make the KGB his scapegoat. She said Gorbachev reasoned that, if the SCSE succeeded in assuming control and stopping the disintegration of the Soviet Union, he could feign getting well and take charge. If it did not succeed, he could come to Moscow and arrest everyone. In either case he would have clean hands.596 Jerry Hough asserted “the possibility cannot be totally dismissed” that Gorbachev created the impression that he desired a coup.”597 According to Hough, the SCSE leaders “thought that Gorbachev would eventually legitimate what they had done and they did not want casualties that would complicate the process of reconciliation.”598 Moreover, Gorbachev had powerful motives for choreographing this odd, arm’s length complicity. His democratic, peace-loving reputation among his Western allies would suffer if he were seen as the initiator of martial law.

After the August crisis, Gorbachev tried to provoke the military to intervene on his behalf against Yeltsin. Soviet Air Marshal Shaposhnikov said that in early November 1991 Gorbachev suggested to him that a military coup was “the best of all possible variants.”599 In December 1991, Gorbachev made an open but futile appeal to the military for support against Yeltsin.600 Such behavior suggested that he was fully capable of complicity in the August events.

Far from being a coup, the SCSE was a declaration of emergency by the existing Soviet government, albeit one with only the implicit approval of the Soviet President. Why did Gorbachev lead the SCSE to believe that he favored a declaration of a state of emergency and then reverse himself? In the end, Gorbachev’s opposition undermined the SCSE’s state of emergency. The evidence suggests his fear of the impact on his relationships with the West made him turn against the SCSE.601 By August 1991, only the West solidly supported Gorbachev. In the USSR his popular support was hovering near single digits. When governments in the West refused to recognize the SCSE, Gorbachev got cold feet and reversed himself.

Could the SCSE have succeeded in establishing its legitimacy and reversing the state’s disintegration? In the short run, it almost did succeed in legitimating itself. William Odom, a military analyst, declared: “I am inclined to the view the outcome of the coup was a close call.”602 Could the SCSE have reversed the collapse? Were matters too hopeless by August 1991? The main leaders of SCSE were Communists who wanted to turn the clock of perestroika back to 1985-87.603 Gorbachev’s political beliefs by 1991 were fundamentally different from theirs. Even if he had joined the SCSE, soon they would have parted ways. No success against the collapse of socialism and the breakup of the Union state was imaginable unless Communists reasserted control of the runaway media, ousted Yeltsin and the “democrats,” and reversed Gorbachev’s economic policies. By August 1991, at least in some regions of the USSR, such actions would have required force and risked civil war—a course few had the stomach for. Stopping the secession of the Baltics, the one region where separatism arguably had majority support, would have required force. Such actions would have set ablaze separatist feelings for generations to come. That would likely have been too high a price to pay for anyone committed to the right of nations to self-determination. Had the SCSE acted decisively and had it called upon the army and the workers for support, a peaceful restoration of authority might have occurred. The SCSE might then have permitted the secession of the Baltics but renegotiated a new Union Treaty with the other republics that preserved the all-Union state. Also the SCSE might have launched an anti-crisis economic program that restored central planning and remedied the hardships of Soviet workers and consumers.

Counterfactual speculation aside, the August crisis enabled Boris Yeltsin to seize full power in Russia, eliminate the moribund CPSU and do away with the USSR. That was the real coup. Historian William Odom stated that the SCSE leaders ”occupied the most powerful posts in the regime when the crisis began.” When the August crisis was over, an official with no formal position in the central government had amassed enough power to begin the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “Yeltsin was the coup maker, a successful one.”604

On November 6, 1991, Yeltsin banned the CPSU and CPRF from operating on Russian soil and ordered their dissolution. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned. On the same day control over USSR nuclear weapons passed from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. Yeltsin simply took over the Soviet army and security services, renaming them Russian state institutions, and retaining most of their personnel. On December 31, 1991 the USSR formally went out of existence. Nikolai Ryzhkov called the dissolution “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.”605