Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become. In the period that followed, Russia tried parliamentary democracy and unalloyed capitalism, then sank back into autocracy. Now it’s struggling under a wholly unnecessary war against its neighbour and former possession, Ukraine.
Why did the system of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev vanish so fast, without a fight? Because that’s how regimes fall in Russia: look at tsarism in 1917. (It almost happened again in June 2023, when the warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s men marched on Moscow largely unopposed; Vladimir Putin might have gone the way of Nicholas II had he not made some pretty wholesale promises to Prigozhin, then allegedly blown him up two months later.)
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 with the intention of saving the USSR. Instead, he oversaw its death. He was a charming, decent man but no visionary, and the two medicines he brought to the patient’s bedside, perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), proved to be wholly ineffective. The brief coup of August 1991 against him, headed by Vladimir Kryuchkov, the boss of the KGB, was the kneejerk response of a bureaucracy that knew things were going wrong but had absolutely no idea what to do about it. It failed quickly, and Gorbachev was back at his desk within days, but the coup had damaged him fatally. Four months later, at the end of 1991, he was bundled out of power by the tough, brutal, boozy muzhik, Boris Yeltsin.
Robert Service, author of The August Coup, is the English-speaking world’s foremost historian of 20th-century Russia and Bolshevism. His biographies of the three major Soviet leaders, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, are outstanding, even in that crowded field. In writing about the death of the system that these prodigies and monsters helped to create, Service has displayed a remarkable grasp of the vast sources, and a delightfully clear writing style which makes even the complexities of Soviet bureaucracy easy to understand. Compared with his earlier subjects, the story of the coup against Gorbachev and the collapse of the USSR is moderately simple; but Service guides the reader through the chaos of the collapsing system and the machinations of the coup leaders with ease and grace.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the loss of the various Soviet satrapies in eastern and central Europe, the USSR was falling apart, and Gorbachev, as its president, was shedding power and influence. No one knew how many Soviet republics would break away, and Gorbachev’s plan for running the rump of the union was bitterly contested. Yeltsin was the president of the Russian Republic, the largest, richest and most effective part of the old USSR. The two men were in angry contention. The coup leaders didn’t support either of them: they wanted to go back to a system which would restore as much Soviet power as possible. The assumption at the time was that the KGB had led the coup to protect its own interests, but Service demonstrates that Kryuchkov, the KGB boss, was much more concerned about the overall collapse of the Soviet system. And anyway, many KGB officers refused to join the coup.
I was lucky enough to be in Moscow during those extraordinary days. Service captures the ludicrousness of it all beautifully. The coup leaders lost their faith in what they were doing almost immediately, and many of them didn’t have much to begin with. They argued, betrayed each other, or were paralysed by fear or torpor. Most of the people involved left some account of what happened, so the records available to Service were particularly rich. He provides us with a graphic description of the fatal press conference that the plotters gave at 5pm on the first day of the coup. The acting president, Gennady Yanayev, was supposedly in charge, but he had been drinking solidly for an entire day and his hands were visibly shaking. The press conference was broadcast live on state television, so everyone could see the condition he was in. After that, failure was certain.
The basic reason it collapsed, though, was that the plotters didn’t manage to get hold of Yeltsin. It was easy enough to imprison Gorbachev at his palatial residence, Zarya, on the Crimean coast, where he was holidaying with his wife Raisa and their daughter; but Yeltsin remained free, and had use of the Russian republic’s Moscow headquarters, known as the White House. You might expect communist plotters to be good at cutting communications and taking over the media, but no one stopped Yeltsin from phoning allies and friends around Russia and across the world. Nor did they try to prevent him making his famous speech from a tank in front of the White House, condemning the coup and pledging to support democracy. It was a good speech, and the television coverage of it was seen worldwide. Again, no one pulled the plugs. Journalists like me were able to broadcast live throughout the coup. Yeltsin stayed inside the White House, mostly protected by a small crowd of unarmed demonstrators whose numbers dropped as the first night wore on and the rain came down.
Yet Yeltsin suffered from the same weaknesses as many of the plotters. In the lobby of the White House I begged to be allowed to go up to his office and interview him, but was told he was too busy speaking to world leaders and organising the opposition. Later, the former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze arrived to see him. When he came out of the building an hour afterwards, he announced that Yeltsin had told him he would defend Russia’s freedom to the last drop of blood in his body. Stirring stuff. Three years later I reminisced with Shevardnadze about it all. He laughed. “When I got into Yeltsin’s office, he was lying unconscious on the floor with a couple of empty vodka bottles beside him.” But what about him fighting to his last drop of blood? “What do you think would have happened if I’d come out and told you I couldn’t speak to Yeltsin because he was dead drunk?”
Such was the chaos and absurdity surrounding the death of the Soviet Union. In the days that followed no one had any idea where authority lay. The famously brave and entrepreneurial cameraman Rory Peck and I marched into KGB headquarters, the Lubyanka, and filmed in Kryuchkov’s own office. After that we even filmed among the ultra-secret KGB files. The next day Rory offered to buy the contents of the Central Museum of the Revolution for a million dollars. Only the fact that the official in charge couldn’t find a bank prepared to accept that much cash stopped the deal going through. We tend to forget the details of this pivotal episode. Perhaps Russia’s troubled history since 1991 has wiped them from our memories. Now Service has brought his magnificent grasp of Soviet history to the task of chronicling the ludicrous way it ended: not with a bang, but with the clink of vodka bottles.
• John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. His programme, Unspun World, returns to BBC Two in September. The August Coup: The Destruction of the Soviet Union and the Making of New Russia 1985-1991 by Robert Service is published by Picador (£30). To support the Guardian order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
