THE 1991 AUGUST COUP. A RECORD OF EVENTS OF AUGUST 18 – 21, 1991

THE 1991 AUGUST COUP. A RECORD OF EVENTS OF AUGUST 18 – 21, 1991

On August 19, 1991 an abortive coup was staged in the USSR. This event went down in history as the "August coup". The nation was faced with the threat of a new dictatorship. The coup-makers were crushed in three days. This victory was an evidence of our people’s determination to safeguard democracy and to make the gains of Perestroika irreversible.

Reminiscences of by the coup’s actors and witnesses were published within a few years after the failure of the coup. After some time numerous memoirs came out of print. Even court investigation materials were published (in fragments) as well as the court indictment. Video recordings of court interrogations of the main defendants in the criminal case of the State Committee of the State Emergency (the GKChP trial) were shown on TV. This means that no citizen living in Russia now suffers from the lack of information. However, the number of "case stories" and versions of events is increasing every year. Actually, it has been growing exponentially, particularly when we are approaching anniversaries.

It is obvious that reliance on the original sources is by far more trustworthy than all kinds of conspiracy theories and inferences. This is the reason why the archive documents were used as the project’s main source materials, - including the messages by media agencies that were not published before as well as the testimonies by the events’ witnesses and participants revealed to public in the past twenty years.

The Web site of the Gorbachev Foundation carries the chronologic record of the events of August 18-22, 1991. http://www.gorby.ru/putsch_main/

The project is drafted and compiled by: Alexei Litvin, historian in charge of the archive and museum of the Gorbachev Foundation, and Eduard Glezin, historian, journalist