Failed Soviet Coup: 20 Years

From Russia Today:

"Twenty years after the Soviet coup, Russia takes a hard look in the mirror"

On August 19, 1991, Muscovites awoke to the jarring sight of tank treads on the streets and ballet slippers on the television as a counter-perestroika coup had begun. Today, as Russians pause to remember those three days that shook the Soviet Union to its very foundation, a surprising diversity of views about the event and its aftermath are surfacing. Shortly after the failed putsch, which had been carried out with the intention of halting Gorbachev’s perestroika (“restructuring”), many Russians spoke with nostalgia on those exhilarating days; when they stared into the jaws of the Soviet military machine and walked away unscathed. In fact, protesters were shown playing guitars on top of the tanks and sharing cigarettes with the tank crews. Eventually, however, such high-spirited assessments of those daring days of August were dashed by a more realistic reading of the situation. Although many Russians willingly risked their lives for the sake of Mikhail Gorbachev's tentative democratic reforms, few could have predicted that the immediate impact of the coup would be the collapse of the Soviet Union four months later. Although it may seem like a contradiction, Muscovites did not take to the streets with the intention of destroying the Soviet Union. Their goal was to simply support the idea of a more open and free system. But the collapse of the entire Soviet Union is what they got. And this was just the start of an avalanche that would go on to obliterate everything in its path. When the Soviet Union gave up the ghost, it had disintegrated into 15 separate entities; a loose mass of chaos across some of the most sensitive geopolitical real estate on the planet. And as Georgia's act of aggression in 2008 against Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia proved, chaos in Russia's "near abroad" will not go away anytime soon. Here is one description of the bleak situation that confronted the Russian Federation and the former Soviet republics just two years after the Soviet Union suddenly convulsed and died: “The break in economic and cultural ties between the former Soviet republics has been accompanied by wars, terrorism, increased crime, hunger, unemployment, hyperinflation, primitive nationalism, chauvinism, extremism and separatism – and this is only the beginning. In Russia, Ukraine and some Central Asian states, the mortality rate now surpasses the birth rate,” BAS reported. This seems to be what Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had in mind when he described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” With nationalism, extremism and terrorism on the rise, and the national birth rate in the basement, it should be no surprise that an increasing number of Russians are starting to come around to the same opinion.

^ This article is from a Russian media outlet that is financed by the Russian Government so their is complete bias. I included it because it does show what some former Soviets (mostly Russians) feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has been 20 years since the attempted Communist coup and while those of us in the West see the anniversary as a good thing for Democracy many in Russia see it has the worst thing to ever happen (especially considering that those who fought against the Coup did not want the USSR to disappear.) The main reason more Russians, over all the former Soviets, feel disdain about loosing the USSR is not only the free health care, better education and being a world super power, but also because within the Soviet Union the Russians were considered Gods - which is ironic because as Communists they didn't weren't supposed to believe in religion. If you had the word "Russian" as your nationality on your internal Soviet Passport then you could expect only great things in life - unless you spoke out against the government that is. Russians got all the top jobs throughout the USSR and were considered more educated than the other Soviet people. All of that ended when first the August Coup and then the USSR collapsed. Russians went from being on the top to being just ordinary people. They lost their super power status, lost the Cold War, lost their country and lost their prestige around the world. The August Coup seems to fit exactly with all the other coups held in all the "banana republics" around the world - where the extreme military dictatorships try desperately to hold onto power. When the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 the country stood at the verge of great change. It was now open to the West, it's citizens could travel the world, not worry about Gulags and international money and aid was pouring in. Rather than embrace the change straight-on the powers-that-be resisted change at every step and so now 20 years later many Russians see their lives as worse off than during Soviet times - which has led to a call to bring back the USSR and all the prestige and power associated with it. While I do not think the Soviet Union as it existed from 1917-1991 will ever come back I do see a scaled-down version with more power than the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) currently has. ^

http://rt.com/politics/soviet-coup-august-gorbachev-yeltsin/