Yeltsin stands on a tank, and the Soviet Union does not survive the year
What happened
In August 1991, hardline Communist officials attempted a coup against Gorbachev while he was on vacation in Crimea, placing him briefly under house arrest. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament building in Moscow to denounce the coup publicly, and the plot collapsed within three days. The coup fatally weakened Gorbachev's authority while making Yeltsin the country's real center of power; days later, Ukraine and Belarus declared independence. In December, Yeltsin met the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus at Brest to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, effectively declaring the Soviet Union finished. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president, and the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, replaced the next day by the Russian tricolor.
Why it matters
The peaceful dissolution of a nuclear superpower into fifteen separate states, without the civil war many analysts had feared, ended the Cold War's underlying bipolar structure entirely, though securing the former Soviet nuclear arsenal, spread now across multiple newly independent countries, became an urgent new priority for both Washington and Moscow in the years immediately after.
How we know
The August coup and Yeltsin's public defiance of it were filmed and broadcast internationally, and the Belavezha Accords creating the Commonwealth of Independent States survive as a signed founding document, dated and witnessed by the three republics' leaders.
Sources
- Office of the Historian, US Department of State. The Collapse of the Soviet Union · Reputable sourcehistory.state.gov · The domain "history.state.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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