Soviet 1991 coup attempt (1991): Yeltsin elected RSFSR president

The failed coup did not restore the Soviet order it claimed to save. It destroyed the centre's remaining legitimacy. Ukraine's independence referendum, the Belovezha accords, and the USSR's formal end on 26 December 1991 followed. English memory is Yeltsin-on-a-tank and CNN. Intensity was low; political impact in this atlas is among the highest. This is not a guide to seizing a capital.

A committee, a tank, and a union that ended August 1991 was a failed emergency that became an accelerant -- the opposite of Chile 1973's successful seizure. The Novo-Ogaryovo union treaty would have shifted power to republics. Hardliners in the KGB, army and cabinet chose a decree night rather than lose the centre on paper.

Gorbachev's half-reforms had already hollowed the party's monopoly without building a new union consent. Yanayev's shaking hands on television became an icon of weakness. The plotters issued bans and then hesitated to storm the White House -- a political-military failure of nerve, recorded as fact, not as a lesson in "how to."