Soviet 1991 coup attempt (1991): Union treaty scheduled

Boris Yeltsin, president of the RSFSR, climbed on a tank outside the White House (the Russian parliament) and framed the committee as a junta. Military units hesitated; some crews fraternised with crowds. Three civilians died in a tunnel incident on the 21st. The committee collapsed. Pugo died by suicide; others were arrested.

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. 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."