The August Coup by Robert Service review – the drink-soaked collapse of the Soviet Union
This brilliant account of attempts by the old guard to take back control captures the ludicrousness of it all beautifully Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted
This brilliant account of attempts by the old guard to take back control captures the ludicrousness of it all beautifully Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become.
In the period that followed, Russia tried parliamentary democracy and unalloyed capitalism, then sank back into autocracy. Now it’s struggling under a wholly unnecessary war against its neighbour and former possession, Ukraine. Why did the system of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev vanish so fast, without a fight?
Because that’s how regimes fall in Russia: look at tsarism in 1917. (It almost happened again in June 2023, when the warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s men marched on Moscow largely unopposed;
Vladimir Putin might have gone the way of Nicholas II had he not made some pretty wholesale promises to Prigozhin, then allegedly blown him up two months later.) Continue reading...
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