The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

48 DECEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Gorbachev, for his part, planned to address the crisis in the party by moving toward a new “Union Treaty” defining the legal relationships between the 15 constituent republics of the USSR. Fearing a loosening of the legal bonds that the founding treaty had created in 1922, the plotters intended to preempt any such moves. They seized Gorbachev and his family at their vacation home on Aug. 18, placed them under house arrest, announced that the president could not speak to the public because he was ill, and proclaimed themselves an emergency committee empowered to deal with the crisis in the Soviet Union. By Aug. 21, the coup attempt had failed, thanks to the leadership of Yeltsin and the active opposition of hundreds of thousands of others who had their own good reasons for not wanting to turn back the clock. The episode was, however, the straw that broke the camel’s back. By virtually forcing Yeltsin to redouble his efforts to create a counterweight to the power structures of the USSR, the disruptive actions of the Gang of Eight only accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And so, on Dec. 8, 1991, the sovereign states of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the heartland of the Slavic world, agreed to form the Commonwealth of Independent States. Other republics were not far behind. The USSR was finished. On Dec. 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and only president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, accepted the reality that there was no longer a viable legal entity called the Soviet Union, and he resigned as president, acknowledging that the position, in fact, no longer existed. The flag of the Soviet Union that had been hoisted that morning over the Kremlin’s walls was lowered for the last time that evening, and the old flag of Russia was raised in its place. The next day, Dec. 26, 1991, the Upper House of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union also acknowledged that the Soviet Union no longer existed. These formalities brought the de jure situation into con- formity with the de facto situation: a revolution had taken place within the borders of what had been the USSR. Seeds of Collapse Mikhail Gorbachev, of course, is blamed, or credited, by practically every observer for losing an empire. But nearly every historian and economist also accepts that the seeds of the Soviet Union’s downfall were planted when successive Communist Party General Secretaries refused to make basic reforms in the Soviet economic structure that had been set in place grosso modo under Stalin’s rule. Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin in 1953, ended the most repressive features of Stalin’s governance but did not essentially change the economic system. On May 4, 1991, President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev (front, seated) watches Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR Boris Yeltsin deliver a speech on television. With him, from right, are Director of Soviet Central Television Kaleriya Kislova, Head of the USSR State Committee for TV and Radio Broadcasting (Gosteleradio) Leonid Kravchenko, TASS General Director Vitaly Ignatenko, Soviet President adviser Georgy Shakhnazarov (seated behind Ignatenko), three Soviet Central Television staff members and Head of the Ninth Directorate of the KGB Yuri Plekhanov (at left). ITAR-TASSNEWSAGENCY/ALAMY