Gorbachev/Yeltsin

Wow, no information eh?

Re: Gorbachev/Yeltsin

Gorbachev was in charge of the Soviet Union; but the Soviet Union was made up of 15 different republics (the Soviet Union's full name was the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics).

Those republics had all the bearings of proper states - their own parliament, government, flag etc - but under communism, all of them did exactly what the leader of the Soviet Union wanted them to.

Under Gorbachev, however, these republics had started to demand ever more power for themselves. Many of them - the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) were the first - eventually started to demand national sovereignty or even independence.

The Russian Federation (then called in full something like Russian Federative Socialist Republic, you'll have to look up the exact name in a history book or encyclopedia) was by far the largest of these republics. Boris Yeltsin was in charge of this Russian Federation. And he had one big advantage over Gorbachev: he was democratically elected. Gorbachev never stood for election, he had been appointed by his peers.

In the last few years of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin used his position to style himself the leader of the democratic opposition, which had come to believe that Gorbachev was going far too slow with further democratic reforms, or had even seemed to be sliding backward into communist conservatism. As Yeltsin's government of the Russian republic took over more and more power from Gorbachev's Soviet government, a sort of dual power structure came into being, without it always still being clear who had the authority over what.

It is this situation that existed when the August 1991 coup d'etat took place. Conservative communists within the Soviet Union's leadership believed that the whole Perestrojka and Glasnost that Gorbachev had unleashed and that had seen the Soviet Union lose control over Eastern Europe and in increasing measure over its own constituent republics, wanted to turn back the clock. They locked Gorbachev away in some distant refuge, and declared martial law (or something like it).

This was ironic because these were partly people whom Gorbachev had himself appointed in the couple of years before, when he had started getting second thoughts about all this democracy. The role of Gorbachev himself in the coup has always remained a bit contentious; he did, in any case, seem to go rather meekly.

Yeltsin did not. He declared open resistance to the coup and himself led the demonstrations against it, standing on a tank, rallying people to defend the Russian parliament. So when the coup was defeated after a few (five?) days, he was the hero. Gorbachev and his whole Soviet government, parts of which had taken part in the coup, had instantly become irrelevant. Basically, the central Soviet Union government went limp, and the republics started governing themselves entirely.

This new situation was formalised by the end of the year. Yeltsin met up with the leaders of the most important other republics in the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Belarus), and they basically agreed to disband the Soviet Union altogether and each go on as independent states. The Baltic republics and the Transcaucasian ones (Georgia, Azerbajjan and Armenia) were all for this as well - they had been the first to push for their own independence. The Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan etc) were just kind of thrust into their own independence without really ever having wanted it.

To ease the transition and retain some kind of common structure, most of all of these republics (all of them except the Balts, I think) joined the newly created Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). This however remained a bit of a toothless tiger, and never developed any substantial institutions of its own.