The Moscow coup of August 1991 was a natural development, the “last spasm” of a group of Communist Party hardliners (GKChP) who resisted the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union, stated the political pundit Igor Boțan during an IPN debate dedicated to the August 1991 events.
“The end of this GKChP thing and of the Soviet Union altogether was even more natural. Because when we talk about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we have to understand the atmosphere we were living in. The Soviet Union was, in a sense, under sanctions for invading Afghanistan. With the invasion of Afghanistan, economic relations broke down. A mighty power, which claimed to influence the destinies of the world, had to introduce a food rationing program: store shelves were empty! These were the most important reasons that led to the declaration of perestroika. When perestroika was declared, a whole new world opened up for us – The Gulag Archipelago and the likes of Vasily Grossman. All that flow of information that had been kept top secret from us. We used to think that we lived in a developed, mighty country, and suddenly, we were told that, in fact, the truth had been hidden from us that the Great Socialist Revolution of October had been, in fact, a putsch, a coup d'état”, said Igor Boțan.
In his opinion, the first Moldovan Parliament assembled, also known as the Parliament of Independence, was the legislature with the highest overall IQ score. “It was really the elite of Moldovan society: there were writers, intellectuals, academicians, people with solid training, who, in those hostile conditions, showed a lot of courage. They did not allow the March 17 referendum to be held in Moldova and did not participate in the Novo-Ogaryovo process. (…) The first Parliament’s greatest achievement was the adoption of the Declaration of Sovereignty and subsequently the Declaration of Independence. They were people who had the courage to negotiate those difficult developments”, said Igor Boțan.
The expert believes that if the August Coup had not failed, it would have failed later anyway, because of that crushing atmosphere in the Soviet Union. “All the leaders of the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin and before Stalin were declared enemies of the people. Deportations, famine, the Afghanistan war, poverty… so, that empire was no longer destined to win. The most important thing was legitimacy, which the Moldovan Parliament had, and which empowered a government in exile. But the most important thing is that Yeltsin put up resistance (against the coup). Those who organized the coup had probably made their calculations, but they understood that public opinion was not on their side. Yeltsin understood that there was massive popular support behind him, people wanted change. 400 tanks in Moscow, 4,000 troops, yet Yeltsin appealed for support to the world and the world responded, and it was absolutely clear that this coup d'état was doomed, but it served as a catalyst for the end of the Soviet Union. The Belovezhskaya Pushcha meeting followed and on December 25 the Commonwealth of Independent States was created as a result, with Gorbachev resigning”, Igor Boțan recalled the events of August 1991.
The debate was the 259th instalment of IPN’s Political Culture Series, run with the support of the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
