Nearly 35 years ago, the world gasped as a strange, gripping morality play unfolded in Russia. At its centre was Mikhail Gorbachev, a man who since taking power in 1985 had offered new hope for humanity, with his reason, affability and concern for peace.
Suddenly, one Monday in August 1991, Gorbachev and his project seemed in deadly peril. He and his family were isolated in their summer residence in Crimea, while in Moscow old-timers seized control and vowed to reverse the train of social and economic reforms in the Soviet Union. In response, brave people crowded around the white Moscow building that symbolised a nascent democracy. The putschists could not prevail without ordering a massacre similar to the one carried out in Beijing in 1989. That looked all too possible.
The story seemed to end with mysterious rapidity. By Wednesday, the putschists were in disarray and Gorbachev flew back to Moscow to resume his role as president. And yet neither his return nor its aftermath could be described as moments of vindication. His grip on real power diminished by the day until, four months later, Gorbachev fell from power and the state he led vanished from history.
Robert Service, an eminent scholar of Soviet history, tries to unravel the mystery of that August. Given that what precisely happened in those sultry days remains obscure and consequential, he has done something of huge value simply by laying out the facts and pondering them in the light of his knowledge. As a Kremlinologist, he is a master of old-time prosopography – of collating elusive details about leading personalities, and interpreting their interactions. Firstly, Service reminds us that the putsch was not just a contest between Gorbachev the reformer and those who resisted change. There was a broader struggle for power – both political and over the resources of the north Eurasian landmass. In this fight, Gorbachev and his captors were in a certain sense on the same side as representatives of the central Soviet authorities. Ranged in opposition to the “centre” were the leaders of the 15 Soviet republics that constituted the Soviet Union, each of which wanted sovereignty to different degrees. Innocent as he seemed, Gorbachev’s travails discredited the whole “centre” – including himself – and hence boosted the republics. Much the biggest republic was the Russian Federation, led by Gorbachev’s bitter rival, Boris Yeltsin. Although both were broadly associated with reform, the hatred between them – rooted in Yeltsin’s expulsion from the Politburo four years earlier – was a factor in what happened during the Soviet twilight.
Another strange feature of the midsummer drama is that, although it amazed the world, it was also predictable – for anyone who had been watching closely. Gorbachev had announced the signing on 20 August of a treaty that would remake the Soviet Union as a much looser confederation. A statesmanlike compromise, it seemed. But as shrewd observers knew, this document was unlikely ever to be signed. For Gorbachev’s hard-line colleagues, the treaty gave away far too much power, while for the restive republics, it did not go far enough. It therefore seemed logical that one or both sides would take pre-emptive action, though nobody could be sure what form it would take.
Gorbachev found this out on the afternoon of Sunday 18 August, when four unpleasant visitors arrived in Crimea and informed him of the plan to declare a national emergency the following day. What exactly transpired between those visitors – who were senior figures in the Soviet power structure – and Gorbachev is a matter of dispute. Service carefully lays out the competing accounts. It seems clear that Gorbachev rejected the plan, and refused to endorse the state of emergency. Yet the meeting ended with handshakes, not fisticuffs. Gorbachev’s parting words have been contested. According to one visitor, the president said something like: “Damn you, but go ahead if you must.” Gorbachev insisted that his last words in that meeting were an instruction for the four to tell their bosses of his firm opposition to their conspiracy. However, one visitor claimed that Gorbachev showed a flicker of positive interest when they told him Yeltsin would be arrested.
The events of the following day electrified the world. A “committee on the state of emergency” announced that Gorbachev was incapacitated and his duties would be transferred to the vice-president, Gennady Yanayev. Plans to arrest Yeltsin misfired, and he took moral charge of the democratic opponents of the coup. Where Yeltsin and his people were brave and sure-footed, the putschists themselves were a clumsy shambles, with varying levels of enthusiasm and sobriety. As Service explains, the heavy-handed mastermind was Vladimir Kryuchkov, a KGB chief who loathed the West and could not see – as younger KGB officers could – that the country was in advanced decay and needed to draw on some Western techniques, including capitalism, to have any hope of recovering.
One of the queasiest putschists was the defence minister, Dmitry Yazov. On Wednesday 21 August, he was among the first to accept the coup had failed and there was no choice for its leaders but to fly to Crimea and throw themselves on the mercy of none other than Gorbachev, still formally their boss. Meanwhile, Yeltsin and his supporters, increasingly in control, decided that they must bring Gorbachev back to Moscow, and there was a farcical race by air to the presidential dacha. Yeltsin’s people brought the presidential party to the capital. But this was no exuberant comeback: Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, was visibly unwell after a stroke, and the president himself a diminished figure. As he sheepishly admitted – indeed, as Yeltsin made him admit – Gorbachev could not avoid some responsibility for letting the coup happen. Some of its perpetrators had been his appointees. From then on it was downhill for him.
It might reasonably be asked why anyone should care about what exactly happened in that August drama, or even in the cascade towards dissolution that followed. There are two interrelated reasons. First, in a spirit of learning, Western governments can ponder how they used their influence during that fateful period. Second, Russia is now led by a person who links a certain view of history with the strategic decisions of today. Vladimir Putin rests the legitimacy of his invasion of Ukraine on the contention that the Soviet break-up was not only a “geopolitical tragedy” – his memorable words – but an act of gratuitous malice by the West. So it is worth studying the events of 1991 to see whether there is a grain of truth of Putin’s arguments, and refute them if not.
To the question of whether the USSR toppled under Western pressure, there are two possible approaches and Service’s meticulous, personality-based account is relevant to only one. The first involves studying the long-term factors – economic, demographic, cultural – that sent the colossus into a nose-dive: for example, tumbling oil revenues and the failure of communist ideology. Another is to ask whether, given those factors, a different outcome was conceivable, and whether the Soviet Union might have evolved into a more benign political association; indeed, whether the West could have given that evolution a friendly nudge. Service is not at his strongest when he describes the broad economic forces that operated before and after the Soviet disintegration. He tends to overestimate the ability of this or that politician or economist to manipulate a state of affairs that was virtually out of control. But he does help the reader consider whether different outcomes could have been encouraged.
One strong impression from his book is that pace Putin, the West was more concerned with shoring up some version of the Soviet Union than with causing its total disintegration. George Bush and John Major were especially worried about “loose nukes” and terrorists. So in the stand-off between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Western politicians showed a slight preference for Gorbachev’s confederal vision, even though they understood that Yeltsin’s star was rising. It is worth studying a memorable phone call, made by Yeltsin to Bush on 8 December 1991, immediately after agreeing with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to dissolve the Soviet Union. Yeltsin telephoned the US president before he informed Gorbachev of the devastating historic news. As it emerges from the transcript, Yeltsin anticipates that Bush will be nervous about the agreement, and about Gorbachev’s exclusion. The Russian leader tries to assure him that the new geopolitical arrangement will still involve some coordination over military and economic matters; the post-Soviet space will not be totally unregulated.
Bush wrote afterwards that the call gave him pause for thought; he had built up trust with Gorbachev and was uncomfortable about his old partner, and his confederal project, being sidelined. But like everybody else, Bush had to adjust to Yeltsin’s triumph. Broadly, it could be said that when faced with the spectre of an uncontrollable Soviet collapse, the West tried to cushion the fall – but unsuccessfully. In other words, the truth is rather different from what Putin claims.
Bruce Clark’s books include An Empire’s New Clothes: The End of Russia’s Liberal Dream (Vintage)
The August Coup: The Destruction of the Soviet Union and the Making of New Russia 1985-1991
Robert Service
Picador, 432pp, £30
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[Further reading: The shadow of the apocalypse]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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