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Rebirth of Civil Society
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The
1990 local elections demonstrated how politics could begin to escape
the control of the bureaucracy. In August 1991 the central
party-state bureaucracy attempted to reassert its political control.
The conservatives in the Soviet leadership decided to stage a coup
and approached Gorbachev to lead it. Gorbachev refused and was put
under house arrest at his residence in the Crimea. The plotters, who
included the Soviet prime minister and the heads of the KGB,
Interior Ministry, and Ministry of Defense—eight men in all—formed
the State Emergency Committee. On 19 August the plotters took all
power in their hands, reintroduced censorship, and banned all
newspapers, with the exception of the Communist organs. |
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The
conservative putsch was the final attempt to reinstate centralist
controls. Its leaders, however, had underestimated the strength of
the new political forces that emerged under
perestroika and that rallied behind the popularly elected
president of Russia, the biggest of the Soviet Union republics. |
Boris Yeltsin’s
determination to resist the unlawful coup made him the symbol of
popular resistance. The Muscovites built barricades in the center of
Moscow, engaging in a tense three-day standoff with troops sent by
the coup leaders to suppress resistance. Yeltsin and his supporters
unnerved the plotters, transforming the abortive coup into a
victorious popular revolution that led to the final collapse of the
Soviet Communist Party.
Taking advantage of the ensuing chaos, the republics, one after
another, hastened to proclaim their complete sovereignty and
cessation from the union. On 1 December 1991 a referendum was held
in the Ukraine at which the majority of the Ukrainians, the second
biggest population after Russians in the Soviet Union, voted in
favor of their country’s independence. This sealed the fate of the
Soviet Union.
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Soviet Russia |
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