"In the following months, the strain started to show as ethnic turmoil and bloodshed intensified in the Caucasus and Soviet security forces seemed to be out of control, killing protesters in Lithuania. The Politburo and security service, the KGB, plotted to overthrow Gorbachev: in August 1991, a committee of incompetent drunken communist leaders and Chekists arrested Gorbachev on his Black Sea holiday and sent tanks into Moscow, but crowds defended the White House offices of Yeltsin. Yeltsin bravely climbed onto a tank outside to defiantly address the crowds. The coup fell apart, but its real victim was Gorbachev, who had lost his prestige. When Gorbachev tried to regain the momentum, Yeltsin ended the monopoly of the Communist Party and then conspired with the elected presidents of the other Soviet republics to end the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day 1991, thus ending the Soviet Union, which broke up into its independent republics. Gorbachev realised that communist oligarchy was wrong, and after his fall he sincerely embraced liberal democracy but it was too late."
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Political leadersPresidents of RussiaPoliticians from RussiaPoliticians from the Soviet UnionNationalists
Original Language: English
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Sources
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Titans of History: The Giants Who Made Our World (2012)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin
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Boris Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin [Бори́с Никола́евич Е́льцин] (1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) was a Russian and former Soviet politician who served as the first President of Russia from 1991 to 1999. A member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990, he later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism and Russian nationalism.
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