The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons

Nothing will ever convince me that Mikhail Gorbachev is not one of the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. While he was in power, he was held in high regard in the west as a new type of communist. However, when the Soviet Union collapsed so suddenly, the mood in the west changed to one of praising Ronald Reagan as the "winner of the cold war." The role of Gorbachev was largely forgotten. As a consequence of the dramatic drop in living standards and the rise of lawlessness in the Soviet Union after the collapse, Gorbachev is reviled in the Russian successor to the Soviet Union. Even though Gorbachev performed well in the attempted coup, not giving in to the demands of the plotters, the primary consequence was the dramatic rise of Boris Yeltsin and the fall of Gorbachev. This book is Gorbachev's account of the course he was trying to set for the Soviet Union and what happened during the time that he was held incommunicado by the plotters. While some of his statements are naturally self-serving, he is basically honest in his tales. He was not naïve about the potential for a coup, the fact that it failed so miserably indicates that he had very little to fear from a coup. We in the west fail to appreciate the history of government in the Soviet Union and how much the Stalinist legacy restricted what Gorbachev could do as he tried to institute reforms. In the final analysis, there was an amazing lack of bloodshed when the Soviet Empire collapsed. In the 1980's if anyone would have suggested that such a thing could possibly occur, they would have been ridiculed. Much of the credit for the smoothness of the transition should go to Gorbachev, who tried to reform the unreformable. This is his description of the last real days of the Soviet Union and it is a story well worth reading. From it, you realize that he is fundamentally a decent man, who really wanted to make his country better.