The whole balance of forces was radically altered by these events. The power rivalry between Yeltsin, the President of Russia, and Gorbachev, the President of the Soviet Union, was over. Hitherto, Gorbachev had managed to maintain himself by balancing precariously between the opposing factions of the bureaucracy. When Gorbachev returned to Moscow on 22 August after the collapse of the coup, his power had gone.
Gorbachev was ignominiously forced to resign as General Secretary of the CPSU. Then the Central Committee voluntarily dissolved. Within a few days, he was forced to outlaw (‘suspend’) the ‘Communist’ Party. Its property, publications and assets were confiscated by Yeltsin’s Republic, which issued a decree banning the CPSU. The Komsomol ‘voluntarily’ disbanded itself. The Communist Party offered no resistance to any of this.
A ferocious ideological offensive was then unleashed against the October Revolution and the planned economy. Within a month, Yeltsin had banned all political activity within workplaces, a measure aimed deliberately at the Communist Party. The Yeltsinites raided the CP headquarters, seized its documents and incriminated the Party in the attempted coup. Pravda was suspended and its staff replaced. Once the coup had failed, the KGB issued a statement: “Members of the KGB had nothing to do with the illegal acts of that group of adventurers.” This subservient act failed to save it. The feared organ of repression was taken over by Yeltsin and purged. The Supreme Soviet rubber stamped Gorbachev’s dismissal of the entire government.
Every evening on Russian television a telephone number was displayed for anyone wishing to inform on neighbours or workmates who supported the coup. The official TV and radio was taken out of the hands of the CP. Pravda eventually reappeared, but it was no longer the organ of the (disbanded) Central Committee. This unleashed a deluge of propaganda against the Stalinists.
The imperialists piled on the pressure for the breakup of the USSR and the move towards capitalism. Seizing the opportunity, one republic after another declared their independence. The Baltics, Armenia and Georgia had already done so, but they were joined before the end of August by the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, then Uzbekistan and Kirghizia. The disintegration of the Union left Gorbachev with little say or power. He had opened the door to capitalist restoration and was now brushed aside by the powers he had conjured up. Given the collapse of the coup, the initiative fell to Yeltsin and those in favour of a rapid move to capitalist restoration.
The Supreme Soviet soon granted Yeltsin extraordinary powers to rule by decree. It appeared that the road to capitalism was now wide open. The following month, the Supreme Soviet ratified the decision to change the name of Leningrad to its pre-revolutionary name of St Petersburg. Sverdlovsk became Yekaterinburg, its original name. In December, at the Kremlin, the Soviet flag was symbolically replaced by the old Russian flag. The mayor of Moscow, Popov, collected all the Communist statues into Gorky Park and declared them all historic relics.
These moves were undertaken to eradicate the heritage of October. So far had the pendulum of history swung back that the old barbarism of the tsarist regime was now being presented in the most favourable light. The counter-revolution manifested itself in the reappearance of tsarist insignia, the proliferation of fascist groups, the idea of ‘Mother Russia’, and the restoration of the Orthodox Church, the official religion of the tsarist state.
The disintegration of the USSR created new problems for the ‘independent’ states. What relationship would they now have? Before they could answer, Yeltsin announced that those Republics that bordered Russia could be subjected to redrawn borders, as there were large Russian populations within these Republics that had to be protected by the Russian state. He now turned against the idea of independence because of the economic implications and the restive minorities within the borders of Russia. In December 1991, under Yeltsin’s initiative, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus formed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and by the end of the month eight more Republics had joined.
Gorbachev was left with nothing. He resigned as president. Silently, ignominiously, this accidental element left the stage of history by the back door, having played out his role as the stalking horse of capitalist restoration. In the presidential elections that were held four years later, the people of Russia passed a crushing and well-merited verdict on this individual. Of vastly greater import was the fact that after seven decades of the most titanic exertions and the most remarkable transformation in history, the USSR had disappeared.