THE LAST DAY OF THE AUGUST 1991 SOVIET COUP

THE RUSSIA DELEGATION 

BRINGS MIKHAIL GORBACHEV 

HOME TO MOSCOW 

THE SOVIET DELEGATION 

IS ACED OUT 

Russia Vice-President ALEKSANDR RUTSKOI 
(center left, with dark hair and moustache) and 
 Russian Prime Minister IVAN SILAYEV 
(center right, with white hair) 
at the Congress of People's Deputies of 
the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic 
July 1991 

On Wednesday, August 21, 1991, a delegation of Russian leaders including Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi and Prime Minister Ivan Silayev flew to Foros in the Crimea, where Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was said to have been held against his will since Sunday, August 18th.  A delegation of Soviet leaders flew in a separate plane.  Gorbachev rejected them as implicated in the coup against him, and flew back to Moscow with the Russian delegation instead.  His arrival in the early hours of August 22nd definitively ended the coup, but Gorbachev was soon to find he had stepped back into a very different political world. 

More to come in  RUSSIA REDUX 

BORIS YELTSIN BECOMES HEAD OF THE RUSSIAN PARLIAMENT, MAY 29, 1990

BORIS YELTSIN 

ELECTED CHAIR OF 

THE RUSSIAN CONGRESS 

OF PEOPLE'S DEPUTIES 

May 29, 1990 

BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH YELTSIN 

CHAIRING THE 

RUSSIAN CONGRESS OF 

PEOPLE'S DEPUTIES 

Elected President of Russia 

the following year 

"Mikhail Gorbachev was literally up in the air at the moment of the election, on a ten-hour flight to Canada for a first-ever visit by a top Soviet leader.  Back in Moscow, '[w]hen the final count was announced...to the tense and excited gathering at the Grand Kremlin Palace, deputies got to their feet to give [Yeltsin] a standing ovation.'  Or rather, half of them did.  Outside hundreds of his supporters were waiting, 'waving red-white-and-blue prerevolutionary Russian flags and carrying pictures' of Yeltsin."  -- from Chapter Six of SIC TRANSIT, by Gwendolyn Stewart 

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV b. March 2, 1931

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

b. March 2, 1931

Privolnoye (Russia), USSR

GORBACHEV (second from left)

PRESIDING OVER THE

28th (& LAST)

CONGRESS

OF

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF

THE SOVIET UNION

1990

There he [Gorbachev] sat, bang in the center of the ruling dais. A mammoth multistory red head and shoulders of Lenin painted on gray accordion-fold drapes hovered behind him. His almost-peers, men who were comrades from the Politburo or leaders of the communist parties of the Soviet republics, spread out to his right and left on the dais. Behind them sat the supporting row of staff, and on the third of the three tiers, a daring if small array of telecommunications and computer equipment on a stray table. Gorbachev was used to the Palace of Congresses, and used to presiding in it. When he had invented the Congress of People's Deputies, the new super-parliament, it too, like the Party Congresses, was allotted these very same premises for its sessions. Mikhail Gorbachev conjured up these new gatherings, and Mikhail Gorbachev presided over them.

There he sat, lord of the realm twice over: President and General Secretary, General Secretary and President. And there, directly in front of him, at the wide podium, with his back to his President and his General Secretary, Boris Yeltsin revealed that he was jumping ship....

-- from RUSSIA REDUX