The August Coup - Robert Service

'Lively and insightful' – The Times‘Superb . . . A work of quite exceptional scholarship and narrative verve’ – Literary Review‘A must-read for those fascinated by the decline and fall of the USSR’ – Mark Galeotti'Immensely well-researched and compellingly written . . . grips the reader from page one' – Andrew RobertsFrom the acclaimed author of Kremlin Winter and Blood on the Snow, a dramatic and expertly researched account of an extraordinary moment in Russia’s recent history: the August Coup. In the summer of 1991, a group of eight plotters came together to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachëv, then the president of the USSR. These ruthless conspirators, who occupied positions of high office, declared a state of emergency to restore stability through authoritarian rule. The reality turned out to be a shambolic failure which hastened the fall of the USSR and a pivotal shift from communism to capitalism. Beginning with a minute-by-minute re-enactment of Gorbachëv’s capture in his holiday home in Crimea, Robert Service follows the plot from its inception to its humiliating collapse. The troubling side effects of Gorbachëv’s well-meant reforms in the Soviet Union – business fraud, government corruption, organized crime and interethnic conflict – increased exponentially, and a New Russia was born. Fathered by Boris Yeltsin, it brought lamentably less benefit to the Russian economy or it
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