Insight
The Moscow coup(s) of 1991: Who won and why does it still matter? by Ian Bond, 17 August 2021
Thirty years after the coup that triggered the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia is ruled by the heirs of the plotters, not their democratic opponents. Why? The August 1991 coup by hard-line conservatives against the reformist Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, ended in failure after three days. But three decades later, modern Russia’s political system owes more to the putschists than to the Russian democrats who defeated them. What can the West learn from what went wrong? Gorbachev had become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1985, at the end of ‘the epoch of stagnation’ – the period after the overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, marked by political repression and a lack of reform, under an increasingly aged and decrepit Soviet leadership. Gorbachev’s goal was to make the Soviet system work better, not to dismantle it. His economic reforms (perestroika, or ‘restructuring’) aimed to force state-owned enterprises to take some account of the laws of supply and demand, rather than just the targets in the central plan. For the first time since the 1920s, co-operative businesses were permitted, in an effort to provide the goods and services that the state sector did not. These reforms, however, did little to improve Soviet economic performance. Among other things, Gorbachev had to cope with oil prices plummeting from $70 when he came to power to $26 a year later. Shortages of foodstuffs and consumer goods, always a feature of the Soviet planned economy, were becoming intolerable by 1991. Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s political and human rights reforms (glasnost’, or ‘openness’) were designed to expose inefficient or corrupt officials, seen as the obstacles to successful reform, but also gave people the confidence to criticise the fundamental tenets of the totalitarian system. Importantly, in the 15 republics making up the Soviet Union glasnost’ gave nationalists – previously subject to brutal repression – the freedom to agitate for independence. Though Gorbachev occasionally used force in response to secessionist activities, he also – in the face of conservative opposition – gave the republics more autonomy in an effort to placate the nationalists. There were in effect two coups in August 1991. The first began on August 18th when Gorbachev was placed under house arrest in his holiday home in Crimea. The heads of the KGB, interior ministry CER INSIGHT: The Moscow coup(s) of 1991: Who won and why does it still matter? 17 August 2021
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