Welcome to Russian History Retold.

Episode number 198, the 1991 Soviet coup d'etat attempt.

Yes, I know, I promised you that my next episode was going to be about the last two Ruric Dynasty

Zars of Russia, Field of the third, and Ivan the terrible. But I came across this topic and knew I had to cover it.

I promised to get to the two of them soon enough as I have another topic I want to cover next time that really intrigued me as well. We'll

get into that later. While the Western world glorifies Mikhail Gorbachev, people in Russia and many of the other Soviet states view him as a pariah and the leading cause of the collapse of the USSR.

In hindsight, we see how some of his policies, like Peristroika and Glaiznostost sped up the dissolution of his country.

But we also have to be fair and admit that there were severe problems, especially financial,

that will also cause the downfall.

Those are not the issues I'll be dealing with today.

I'm going to concentrate more on the actual coup d'etat that occurred

beginning on August 19, 1991, and ended three days later on the 22nd,

what I will talk about some of the reasons

why the men who would try this attempt of a coup

did what they did.

Known as the August coup d'etat or the August puch,

the attempt to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev

kept the world on edge as well as all of the Soviet Union.

Since coming to power in 1985, Gorbachev installed two concepts in his attempt to reform the

USSR.

Pard of Stryka, which is the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic

system, and glaznost, meaning openness. Both of these ideas were deeply disturbing to the stuck in the mud, stuck in the past

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