The party of Order proved… that it knew neither how to rule nor to serve; neither how to live nor how to die; neither how to suffer the republic nor how to overthrow it; neither how to uphold the Constitution nor how to throw it overboard; neither how to co-operate with the President nor how to deal with him.
– Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
The outcome of revolution and counter-revolution is never a foregone conclusion. In both cases the result is decided by a struggle of living forces in which the subjective factor – the quality of leadership – plays an important and frequently decisive role. The failure of the coup was by no means a foregone conclusion. The passivity of the great majority of the working class would have been sufficient to ensure the success of the coup if it had been carried out with sufficient decision. This was admitted in an article by Francis Fukuyama, a prominent strategist of capital, and consultant of the Rand Corporation in Washington, in The Independent on Sunday (25/8/91):
Despite divided loyalties in the army and police, the coup plotters could have succeeded in the short term had they been more competent and determined, as was the Deng regime in Tiananmen Square. They had sufficient numbers of loyal KGB and interior troops to arrest or kill Yeltsin, shut down the press and enforce a curfew. But the plotters were afflicted with a lack of belief in themselves and their cause.
The coup in Moscow was defeated because of the lack of decisiveness on the part of the coup leaders. The failure to arrest Yeltsin left a focal point for the opposition and exposed the plot in the eyes of key sections of the army, police and KGB chiefs as a botched operation. From an initial position of waiting on the side-lines, these sections finally decided to distance themselves from the coup leaders. These leaders, in turn, found themselves suspended in mid-air.
The coup collapsed simply from its own internal contradictions and weaknesses. This was understood by western observers: “So why did it not succeed?” asked Martin McCauley. “Astonishingly, it was poorly planned and executed.” (M. McCauley, The Soviet Union 1917-1991, p. 368.)
This opinion was shared by all the serious strategists of capital.
Preliminary assessments by intelligence analysts in Britain and America suggested the coup was hastily organised by a small group of people who fatally misjudged the mood of the organisations they controlled. There is no evidence of any pre-coup rehearsals by any security forces. (The Sunday Times, 25/8/91.)
The Sunday Times stated:
In the early part of last week there were no signs of any significant mobilisation. “This was not a revolution that failed because of people power” said one Western intelligence source. “There were fewer people on the streets than the plotters might have expected. It failed because they did not put enough troops on the ground or use them effectively”.
The panicky reaction by top bureaucrats to the Union Treaty displayed their complete lack of ability for decisive action. The leader of Gorbachev’s group in the Kremlin, Valentin Karayev, later described how they began to react, once they realised that the coup leaders were failing to act: “By the 20th it was clear to all that nothing had happened. There were no arrests, nothing.” (The Wall Street Journal, 29/8/91.)
The paper made the following observation:
But details now emerging indicate that the collapse of the putsch actually owes much to the putschists themselves, some of whom got cold feet early on.
One, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, started backsliding within hours of the Monday morning announcement of the takeover. A second, defence minister Yazov, had early doubts which he later acted upon. Mr Yanayev himself admitted the seizure of power was illegal within hours of deposing Mr Gorbachev… The coup destroyed itself. (The Wall Street Journal, 29/8/91.)
However, the strange lack of decisiveness on the part of the coup leaders explains nothing, since it has itself to be explained. The bureaucrats who led it had no perspective or programme other than the maintenance of the status quo, that is to say the maintenance of a discredited system that had lost the support of the masses and in which they themselves had ceased to believe. In the moment of truth, like the Tsar in February 1917, they found themselves moving phantom armies. Their power, which seemed to be undefeatable, collapsed like a house of cards.