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So I've been thinking about the 18 August 1991 coup attempt in the Soviet Union- the hardliners' ploy to get Gorbachev out of the way, which wound up backfiring and becoming the proximate trigger of the fall of communism in Russia.

Yeltsin's role in countering the coup is of course well established, a matter of public record. But I really must admit I don't know that much Soviet history. So what I find myself wondering is: how large a role was it, really? How critical was his personal leadership? Did the coup have enough momentum to have a credible chance of at least short term success? A good chance? Was it something that might be called 'nearly a sure thing?'

If I might put it as a counterfactual, suppose Yeltsin had been out of the picture for some reason. Say, he'd been arrested with the rest, or been disgraced out of politics years earlier, or (heh) died of liver failure years earlier. Was the coup likely to succeed without his interference, unlikely to succeed, somewhere in between so that it's impossible to guess?

The coup was so ill-staged that the troops sent to the Russian parliament didn't even know that they were supposed to topple it. Even without Yeltsin there's a very real sense that the Russian Army was not about to back the coup. So I kind of doubt that the coup would have succeeded at all.

Didn't people come out into the streets to oppose the coup before Yeltsin even did anything? As long as crowds were in the streets it is very hard to believe a coup could have succeeded because the army and KGB were not willing to slaughter them to install new rulers. Even if they did, the new government doesn't seem like it would have had any real stability given its lack of legitimacy and the violent instability that already existed in several Soviet republics.

Well, what I'm really interested in is the proximate effects. The sort of communist USSR the hardliners would try to run would predictably start falling apart at the seams within a few years at most- that's not the question. What I'm wondering is whether the coup even had a good chance of winning during the short term of a few weeks...

Simon_Jester wrote:Well, what I'm really interested in is the proximate effects. The sort of communist USSR the hardliners would try to run would predictably start falling apart at the seams within a few years at most- that's not the question. What I'm wondering is whether the coup even had a good chance of winning during the short term of a few weeks...

As Sea Skimmer pointed out, there were crowds through Moscow opposing the coup.It would not have lasted long. There were scenes I remember of people pushing back T-72 tanks (trying to) and whatnot in Moscow from documentary i saw

I'm not familiar enough with the coup to comment on the presence of protestors early on, but Yeltsin was the epicenter of opposition to the GKChP, and went a long way toward thoroughly discrediting them, though they managed to do a lot of that on their own.

The whole range of miscalculations and blunders they committed is enormous, really. They seemed to believe a sufficient display of military hardware coupled with what amounted to "Gorbachev is sick, we're in charge now" was all they needed to succeed. Hell, for awhile they thought Yeltsin might be an ally to them. They not only failed to arrest him or the rest of the Russian government, they didn't even cut the power or phone lines to the White House.

That said, Yeltsin was probably just a symbol the Russian people could easily rally around. Without the active involvement of the people of Moscow, Yeltsin would have just been some loudmouth the GKChP could ignore and cart off to prison at their leisure.