Coup de Grace: The End of the Soviet Union

Michael Mandelbaum

From Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1991/92

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Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University, and director of the project on East-West relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.

On August 24, 1991, three days after the collapse of an attempted coup by a group of high Soviet officials in Moscow, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev killed himself in his Kremlin office. Mikhail Gorbachev?s special adviser on military affairs left a suicide note: "Everything I have worked for is being destroyed."

Akhromeyev had devoted his life to three institutions: the Soviet army, in whose service he had been wounded at Leningrad in 1941 and through whose ranks he had risen to the position of chief of the General Staff (1984-88); the Communist Party, which he had joined at 20 and on whose Central Committee he had served since 1983; and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself, officially founded a year before his birth in 1923. In the wake of the failed coup all three were disintegrating.

The armed forces were divided and disgraced. Entire units had refused to take part in the coup. A number of the troops sent to beseige the Russian parliament building?where a crowd that ultimately numbered 100,000 had gathered to defend the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and his government?defected to Yeltsin?s side. After the coup had failed Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov and his deputy, Valentin Varennikov, were arrested. Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, the newly appointed minister, announced that 80 percent of the army?s officers would be replaced because they were politically suspect.

The Communist Party was shattered. As jubilant crowds cheered, statues of communist heroes were pulled down all over Moscow. Gorbachev, shortly after his return from his ordeal in the Crimea, resigned as leader of the party, dissolved the Central Committee, ordered an end to party activity in the military, the security apparatus and the government, and told local party organizations that they would have to fend for themselves.

The union of 15 republics was itself dissolving. In Moscow people began to wave the blue, white and red flag of prerevolutionary Russia. The republics scrambled to declare their independence, the Ukrainian parliament voting for full independence by 321 to 1. For 75 years the vast stretch of Eurasia that was the Soviet Union had been tightly, often brutally controlled from Moscow, which had come to be known as "the center." The president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian, declared that "the center has committed suicide."

II

The coup might have been expected to succeed. The ranks of the eight-man junta that on August 19 announced it was assuming power, proclaiming a state of emergency, banning demonstrations, closing newspapers and outlawing political parties, included the leaders of the most powerful institutions of the Soviet Union: the government, the security apparatus and the military-industrial complex. Yet they failed completely. Two minor episodes during the three dramatic days of August 19-21 exemplify the reasons for their failure.

On August 20 Yeltsin dispatched his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, to Paris to prepare a government-in-exile should that become necessary. The junta learned of the trip and sent word to Moscow?s Sheremetyevo Airport to detain Kozyrev. He succeeded in leaving, however, because ...

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