Inside view of the 1991 Soviet coup

Nearly twenty years ago, a lot of us were nervously wondering if the U.S.S.R. was going to turn back the clock to the bad old days of the Cold War.

Boris Yeltsin's then-secretary of state, Gennady Burbulis, has written a first-person account of his observations the day Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was removed from power by a coup.

Burbulis believes the coup essentially was responsible for the mess that the former U.S.S.R. is today.

The failure of the August coup was both ironic and tragic. In taking the extraordinary measures they believed were necessary to hold the union together, the putschists ensured its destruction. Without the coup, the union would likely have endured, albeit in a form that might have eventually resembled the European Union more than the old Soviet Union. But the three-day standoff in Moscow exploded that possibility.

A gradual transformation of the Soviet Union would have been manageable; the instant collapse caused by the coup was disastrous. The coup was the political Chernobyl of the Soviet totalitarian empire.

Burbulis thinks the coup allowed the old Communist apparatchiks to worm their way into the infant union's polity and economy, poisoning and corrupting both. I think he's overly optimistic about the path not taken (Russia had a culture of corruption long before Lenin), but we'll never know.

I enjoyed Burbulis' tale a lot, but that might be because I didn't follow it too closely at the time so the details are all new to me. (I was nervous about the possibility of the U.S.S.R.'s resurgence as the Evil Empire, but I also was preoccupied with a career change.)

(Thanks to LongReads for the link.)