30 years after the failed coup that condemned the USSR, the event still divides the Russians

There is today 30 years A board of directors called the State Emergency Committee (GKChP, acronym in Russian) announced to the world that the President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, had fallen ill and, therefore, was taking power. to deal with the serious situation that afflicted the country. .

The official statement did not fool anyone: a real coup d’etat had been launched, with the imposition of censorship and the shutdown of independent media that had emerged during the period of reform promoted by Gorbachev known as “perestroika”.

UNEXPECTED RESISTANCE

What the putschists did not have was the Determined resistance presented by the President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Borís Yeltsin, who barricaded himself in the seat of the Russian government, the “White House”, and called on the population to defend the constitutional order.

In a move which, according to various analysts, sealed the failure of the coup, the GKChP ordered the entry of troops into Moscow, but never gave the order to act against Yeltsin and his supporters.

With tanks already in the streets of the capital, some military units joined in the defense of the White House and the plans of the coup plotters, who hoped to seize power without bloodshed, began to crumble like a castle of sand.

The riot was kills three, product of puzzling incidents, not an attack on the “White House”.

GORBACHOV’S LONELINESS: VICTIM OR ACCOMPLICATE

Gorbachev, according to his own testimony, had been isolated and in secret at his residence in Foros, on the Black Sea, and returned to Moscow on August 21 in a plane with Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, who went looking for him.

But for him, nothing would be the same: the Soviet president had remained in the shadow of Yeltsin, a former ally who had become one of his biggest detractors of the slowness of reforms.

To this day, in Russia, they discuss Gorbachev’s role in the coup: victim or accomplice by omission.

Later, the putschists changed their “version” of events more than once. They first admitted their guilt, but then did what one of the conspirators advised them: “Blame Gorbachev for everything,” the former Soviet president said in a statement on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Rebellion.

THE CONSERVATION OF THE USSR, THE JUSTIFICATION OF THE GRAVES

The nonagenarian statesman indicated that the organizers of the coup “tried to justify themselves by declaring that they were motivated by the concern to preserve the country, but the consequences of their actions were catastrophic”, since four months later the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

“Everything about the GKChP has become a sham thanks to one of its organizers: Mikhail Gorbachev,” Konstantín Zatulin, deputy chairman of the Duma committee for Commonwealth of Independent States affairs, told the RIA Nóvosti official agency.

According to the legislator, the Soviet president acted “like Pontius Pilate and washed his hands” in what was a “clumsy attempt to save the USSR”.

AN EPISODE OF THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER

Thirty years later, the coup attempt against Gorbachev, which precipitated the disintegration of the USSR, was for many Russians a new episode in the struggle for power within the ruling leadership in the country. .

This is how he thinks 47% participants in a survey by the Center for Public Opinion Studies (VTsIOM, for its acronym in Russian).

For him 31% among those interviewed, the events of August 1991 were tragic and had negative consequences for the country, while for 7% they represented the triumph of a democratic revolution that ended the power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

And only one in five of the survey participants was able to correctly decipher the acronym GKChP.

TOURS OF HISTORY

One of the emblematic images of the failed coup attempt was the removal of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinki, the founder of the KGB, from the square in front of the headquarters of the current FSB, the Federal Service of security, including the current Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is today the most powerful organization in the country.

“No matter which party we find, we always get a CPSU,” former Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin said at the time.

But already in 2011, Gorbachev claimed that the ruling United Russia party, led by Putin at the time, reminded him of “a bad copy of the CPSU”.

(with information from the EFE)

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