The World

On 17 January 1991, Bush launched the first bombardments of Desert Storm, encouraging Iraqis to rebel against Saddam. Saddam fired Scud missiles at Israel before invading Arabia, temporarily taking the town of Khafji. In the first video war, watched live on the new twenty-four-hour news channel CNN, Bush’s grand army of 956,600 troops used overwhelming air and land power to rout the Iraqis, incinerating entire divisions of tanks and trucks while Kurds, Shiites and Marsh Arabs all rebelled. But once Kuwait had been liberated, Bush, wary of entanglement, halted the invasion, leaving Saddam in power in central Iraq with all destructive weapons banned. Saddam had grossly miscalculated but, after two decades of terror, his camarilla remained loyal, even more concentrated on his family. His negotiators won American permission for Iraqi forces to fly helicopters, which they then used to slaughter the rebels. Just 292 coalition troops had been killed compared to 85,000 Iraqis. American apogee coincided with Soviet perigee.

At 4.30 p.m. on 18 August 1991, Gorbachev, on holiday at his Foros dacha in Crimea, was interrupted by his bodyguard: a mysterious delegation had arrived. Gorbachev found his phone lines had been cut. ‘Something bad has happened,’ he told Raisa. ‘Perhaps terrible.’ It was a coup: the State Committee on Emergency Rule, led by the KGB boss and defence minister, had seized power to stop the rolling disintegration of the USSR. In December 1990, Shevardnadze had resigned, warning of a coup. Lithuania had been the first to declare independence, followed by Estonia and Latvia, but Gorbachev himself had lost control since 13 January when his Spetsnaz commandos had shot civilians at a TV station in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, a crime that only consolidated its defiance. In March, Gorbachev had won a referendum to create his new Union of Sovereign States. Nazarbayev agreed to be its first premier. But the same month, Georgia embraced freedom. On 10 July, Yeltsin was democratically elected president of Russia, a legitimacy that the unelected Gorbachev could not equal. Then Ukraine delayed agreeing to the new Union. On 1 August, President Bush tried to save the USSR, visiting Kyiv to warn Ukraine against ‘suicidal nationalism’.^*

Gorbachev, himself half Ukrainian, desperately tried to keep Ukraine within his new Union, warning that Ukraine would be too unstable to survive as a state and telling Bush it existed as a republic only because Ukrainian Bolsheviks had crafted it to increase their own power and ‘added Kharkiv and Donbas’. Stalin had organized the actual borders. Crimea was added by Khrushchev. Those Russian regions, Gorbachev explained, would undermine any independent Ukraine.^*

Now at his villa, Gorbachev asked the group who had sent them.

‘The Committee.’

‘What committee?’

When they started to explain the Committee’s aims, Gorbachev shouted, ‘Shut up, you asshole. Scumbag!’ KGB forces had surrounded the mansion; ships on the Black Sea trained their guns. Raisa Gorbachev suffered a minor stroke. Unbeknown to the Gorbachevs, the Committee had made a series of unforced errors in Moscow. First they had planned to arrest Yeltsin and had surrounded his dacha, but he escaped to the Russian Supreme Soviet – nicknamed the White House – where he was joined by several military units. Then the conspirators held a farcical press conference at which at least two of them were drunk. The White House was defended by crowds of people and Yeltsin’s units. Yeltsin then appeared and climbed defiantly on to a tank. The conspirators rushed to Crimea to beg forgiveness, while Yeltsin sent his own units to rescue Gorbachev. After arresting the conspirators, Gorbachev phoned Yeltsin. ‘So you’re alive,’ boomed Yeltsin. ‘We’ve been ready to fight for you!’ Two conspirators killed themselves. When Gorbachev arrived back in Moscow, his power had haemorrhaged and he resigned as general secretary on 24 August. At the Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin launched his own coup, humiliating Gorbachev at the rostrum and forcing him to admit that his own ministers had backed the coup.

On 1 December, Ukraine voted for independence. Yeltsin tried to make it stay inside his new version of the Union but failed; Ukraine’s secession was decisive. On the 8th, at a Belarusian Belavezha hunting lodge, beloved of tsars and general secretaries, Yeltsin secretly met the Ukrainian and Belarusian leaders and pulled off their own coup to end the USSR. Nazarbayev and the Central Asians joined them in a new Commonwealth of Independent States.

‘Who gave you the authority?’ shouted Gorbachev. ‘Why didn’t you warn me? … And once Bush finds out, what then?’ But Yeltsin had already called Bush. On 9 December, Gorbachev received Yeltsin and the Kazakh president Nazarbayev.

‘OK, sit down,’ Gorbachev told them. ‘What are you going to say to the people tomorrow?’

‘I’m going to say,’ replied Yeltsin, ‘I’m going to take your place.’