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During the August Coup of 1991, anti-reform hardliners attempted to seize control of the country while Gorbachev was away in the Crimea. They opposed Gorbachev's reforms, and the recent treaty that had decentralized a lot of the central government's power to the republics.

#history #military history #cold war #august coup #ussr #russia #mikhail gorbachev #communism

One of the stranger ironies in absent metaphors for 1/6 is the August Coup of 1991:

This is especially jarring given both the parallels and that it was the final end of the USSR and marked its decay to a point that it went in less than a year from 'We want a USSR in name only but not one ruled by the Communist Party' to 'End this damned thing and end it now.'

For those who've never really studied it, the story of the August Coup is intimately intertwined with the late stage of the Gorbachev era and the career of the last dictator of the Soviet Union. This is a longer tale of which this is but the capstone, so I intend to loop back to this and do a fuller series detailing the Brezhnev era (as prelude to Gorbachev and detailing WHY the USSR reacted to a period where its outward manifestations were projecting power around the world in random out of the way places like the Ogaden and winning solidly and smacking the USA's satellites bloody with promoting a newbie reformer).

But here, the first look at what happened in August and why.

The simplest version here is that Gorbachev's reforms unleashed three main types of opponents. Unreconstructed Stalinists who hid behind the Nina Andreyevna letter (aka the precursors of the Parenti school of 'resisting authoritarianism by being more shameless reciters of Soviet myths than the people who invented it'), Russian nationalists ala Putin, and Russian generals fearful that the collapse of the empire would take the superpower army with it (which it did).

These people formed a league that combined to have Gorbachev deposed, and thus in what is a mystery that will need the fuller series to provide that context, he was supposedly under arrest by a cabal without any communication with the outside world. This is a story that has some major holes in it that were never questioned then or later, because the coup failed.

The architects were the police and military authorities of the Soviet Union, the kind of people who are despised in the USA for better reasons (former) and for the reasons that if US soldiers breathe it's a war crime to the online left where if Russians bomb a hospital and piss on the bloodsoaked bricks it's revolutionary praxis. Their coup failed, and failed abysmally.

In the end the military and the KGB were not willing to bring back the methods of Ivan IV in the Russia of 1991 and Yeltsin, among others, led a resistance alone and unaided that made his reputation, though Yeltsin proved the worst enemy to Yeltsin in the end. And it was their failure, undermined by their inability to close off the means of power and the iconic imagery on the tanks that was the end of the USSR.

In spite of the lessons of that, and of the dangers of never holding the architects of a failed coup accountable, the USA has made some of the same decisions and some of the same elements unfolded on 1/6. The parallelisms are not amusing to anyone who studied Soviet history and the end of the USSR.

#august coup #end of the soviet union #1/6 putsch #the strange omission of the soviet union in recent history #seriously when the usa and the terminal stage ussr have overlaps this is a bad thing

A new video has been produced by the Latvian Saeima charting the events of August 21, 1991, when Soviet power made one last, desperate bid to re-assert itself by staging a coup in Moscow.

(..) A new video has been produced by the Latvian Saeima charting the events of August 21, 1991, when Soviet power made one last, desperate bid to re-assert itself by staging a coup in Moscow. Titled "What happened on August 21, 1991?" the video comes with English-language subtitles and provides an overview of how the Moscow putsch had very direct consequences on the streets in Rīga and the Saeima building itself, where important - if hurried - decisions were taken.

#Latvia #independence movement #restoration of independence #August coup #collapse of the soviet union #European history #Baltic States

On the night of August 18, 1991, a coup or putsch was attempted in Moscow. Latvian Television has produced a documentary, now complete with English subtitles, unraveling the events of the days surrounding the event in Moscow and in Latvia.

The attempted coup in Moscow thirty years ago threatened to return the Baltic States to the dark times of the occupation by the Soviet Union. What happened in Latvia in the meantime? The documentary 'Witnesses of the Hour X. August Coup 1991' premiered on LTV August 19 and as of August 23 is also available for the English-speaking audience.

You can watch the documentary above this story or at this link.

#Latvia #August coup #collapse of the soviet union #national independence movement #1990s #European history #Baltic States #combat footage #helicopter #troops #good journalism

Rallies held in support of Gorbachev, and against the high-level Soviet officials who orchestrated a coup against him in August 1990. This photo was taken in Leningrad.

#history #military history #cold war #august coup #ussr #leningrad #st. petersburg #mikhail gorbachev