THE END. OF THE PARTY. TWENTY YEARS AGO. AND THE ROLE OF BORIS YELTSIN.

THE SUPREME SOVIET 

OF THE USSR 

SUSPENDS ALL ACTIVITIES OF 

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF 

THE SOVIET UNION (CPSU) 

August 29, 1991 

BORIS YELTSIN IN HIS SEAT AT 

THE 28TH (AND LAST) CONGRESS OF 

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION 

(CPSU), MOSCOW, JULY 1990 

YELTSIN WALKING OUT OF THE PARTY, here 

Twenty years ago today, the USSR Supreme Soviet, then the highest government authority in the then Soviet Union, voted to suspend the activities of the previously ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union "pending an investigation of its role" in the August coup. 

As the New York Times report on the subject noted, "The fate of the party was already sealed before Parliament's vote. Individual republics had closed its offices and seized its vast properties and funds and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had quit as its General Secretary and had called on the leadership to step down." 

"Individual republics" -- yes, but, the individual republic that mattered was that of the RSFSR, or Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, whose duly elected president was Boris Yeltsin.

On July 20, 1991, Yeltsin had signed a "departization" decree "aimed against Party activity (officially, all parties' activities) in government organizations and state enterprises on Russian soil" (to quote myself in SIC TRANSIT, Chapter 8, "Endgame").

On July 30, 1991, after his meeting with American president George Bush in the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin was happy to interpret his actions and intentions to those of us waiting to listen. [See here and here.] 

To continue quoting "Endgame," "Gorbachev, facing another hostile Central Committee meeting shortly, should thank him [Yeltsin] for opening a second front and providing a diversionary action, he gloated. The decree, due to come into effect on August 4th, had stirred up a storm of protest and condemnation from CPSU and Russian Communist Party bodies.  Its timing may have been chosen, as Yeltsin alleged, to draw conservative ire away from Gorbachev at a crucial juncture, but its main thrust continued the battle to break the Party's power from within. ... However weakened the Party might have been already, through Gorbachev's initiatives and subsequent internal hemorrhaging, it still had a grip on the Soviet polity and economy that enabled it to stifle real reform.  Yeltsin's decree was intended to cut off its tentacles in the government offices and workplaces of the Russian Republic, his domain, more than a month before Gorbachev was finally moved to take action against its head -- after the coup." 

BORIS YELTSIN & THE AUGUST 1991 COUP, TWENTY YEARS ON

THE (SOVIET) UNION- 

BUSTING COUP 

August 18-21, 1991

BORIS YELTSIN 

 making a presidential inspection tour 

of Tyumen' province, 

ten days before the coup 

The web is awash with stories marking the twentieth anniversary of the failed August coup in the USSR, many full of buyer's remorse.  New angles are sought; one has Boris Yeltsin climbing up the tank in front of the White House knowing that no one would shoot at him, so big deal. 

I have long thought that there was more to Yeltsin than this iconic moment; and put it on the record:  "It is his [Yeltsin's] mounting of the tank outside the White House in August of 1991 that remains in most people's minds, but it is his actions on behalf of Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia in January of 1991 that are perhaps the more remarkable." [SIC TRANSIT, Ch. 8, "Endgame"] 

I think there is still a story to be told about what Yeltsin was actually doing in that fateful 1991 summer of his election to the presidency of Russia, a country within a country.  That is coming in RUSSIA REDUX.