Nine years ago, on August 24, 2011, as Ukraine celebrated its 20th anniversary of independence from the Soviet Union, the Eurasia Daily Monitor analyzed the failed putsch of August 1991 that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 2011, there was a lack of knowledge about the failed putsch among many Russians. Moscow News (Moskovskie Novosti) reported that 8 percent of those surveyed did not know anything about the coup, 27 percent said that they had heard something, while 64 percent remember and know something about those events.
Eleven percent in the survey described the attempted coup as a “seizure of power,” 10 percent said it was “the collapse of the Soviet Union,” and 5 percent called it a “re-division of power.”
Former Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov said the August coup was “one of the greatest events of the end of the 20th century.” Mr. Popov questioned the accepted narrative that the putsch was in response to the threat of a new union treaty as a unifying myth that conceals a more complex political process: “The country was pregnant with crises.”
The analysis by Jacob W. Kipp of the Eurasia Daily Monitor noted that the crisis did not begin in the Soviet Union, but in Eastern Europe, where the international and domestic ramifications of the Velvet Revolutions had transformed the continent.
The failed reform policies under President Mikhail Gorbachev resulted in a fractured Communist Party that set off a power struggle, which brought national self-determination into Soviet politics. The military and the KGB attempted to “restore order” in Vilnius and Riga in January 1991, but Mr. Gorbachev’s refusal to sanction extreme measures and Boris Yeltsin’s embrace of peaceful self-determination led the independence movements to gain the momentum needed among the republics of the Soviet Union.
An attempt was made by the Soviet hardliners to compel Mr. Gorbachev to resign and, when that failed, the putsch was mobilized on August 19 to seize power by force.
Mr. Kipp noted that Mr. Yeltsin emerged from the failed putsch as the immediate winner, as he was on the ground in Moscow, while Mr. Gorbachev was in Crimea, as former Soviet republics declared independence. The power centers of the Soviet state, he said, effectively collapsed because their leaders had been compromised as incompetent adventurists. Mr. Yeltsin’s moves to break up the KGB and the military, as well as his use of troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to maintain order within Russia, were policies that he used later in his presidency.
To underscore the need for analysis of the failed putsch, Mr. Kipp cited Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis in 1857 of the French Revolution. “The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.”
Mr. Kipp summarized the failed putsch: The Communist Party lost its monopoly on power, Marxism-Leninism as an ideology collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, the Soviet Union itself disappeared, and the planned economy collapsed. However, Russia in 2011 was once again a centralized state, using the moniker “managed democracy,” and the ranking members of the security services (FSB and GRU) had become the “new nobility.”
What transpired more than 20 years ago throughout the Soviet Union is happening now in Belarus on a smaller scale: the people are attempting to dismantle an authoritarian regime and have a government that represents the will of the people. The protests in Belarus are less nationalistic in nature than during Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Russian intervention for the time being is seen as limited as compared to Moscow sending “little green men” to Crimea and eastern Donbas.
However, the Belarusian people deserve free and fair elections and the international community needs to send clear messages to Moscow that there are costs if it chooses to interfere.
Source: “Reflections on the putsch that failed: 20 years on,” by Jacob W. Kipp (Eurasia Daily Monitor), The Ukrainian Weekly, August 28, 2011.