Lessons from the U.S.S.R. coup attempt

By Mikhail Gorbachev,
WashPost
Published: August 19 | Updated: Saturday, August 20, 6:58 PM

Twenty years ago this weekend, a group of Communist Party Politburo members and Soviet government officials attempted a coup d’état. They created an unconstitutional “committee on the state of emergency,” isolated the Soviet president and removed him from power.

The events of that August were the result of fierce political struggle during the final stretch in our efforts to reform the Soviet Union.

During the years of perestroika, major changes transformed our country. The people supported glasnost; free, contested elections; and the beginning of the transition to market economics. But the bureaucracies of the Communist Party and the government eventually saw in those changes threats to their position.

Changes on such a scale in a country that is so vast, multi-ethnic, militarized and totalitarian were not easy. Admittedly, we leaders of perestroika made our share of mistakes. We acted too late to reform the Communist Party, which became a brake on perestroika instead of being its engine; its bodies launched an attack on me as its general secretary that reached its peak at the party’s central committee meeting in April 1991. The attack became so vicious that I announced my resignation.

(More here.)