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Gorbachev at his Crimean dacha and issued directives to arrest Yeltsin and the Moscow city
leadership.
But the ill-conceived coup quickly went awry and confusion ensued. Yeltsin, Popov and
Luzhkov made it to the Russian parliament building, the so-called White House, to rally op-
position. Crowds gathered at the White House, persuaded some of the tank crews to switch
sides and started to build barricades. Yeltsin climbed on a tank to declare the coup illegal
and call for a general strike. He dared the snipers to shoot him, and when they didn't, the
coup was over.
The following day, huge crowds opposed to the coup gathered in Moscow. Coup leaders
lost their nerve, one committed suicide, some fell ill and the others simply got drunk. On 21
August, the tanks withdrew; the coup was foiled. Gorbachev flew back to Moscow to re-
sume command, but his time was up as well. On 23 August, Yeltsin banned the Communist
Party in Russia.
Gorbachev embarked on a last-ditch bid to save the Soviet Union with proposals for a
looser union of independent states. Yeltsin, however, was steadily transferring control over
everything that mattered from Soviet hands into Russian ones. On 8 December, Yeltsin and
the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus, after several rounds of vodka toasts, announced that the
USSR no longer existed. They proclaimed a new Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS), a vague alliance of fully independent states with no central authority. Gorbachev, a
president without a country or authority, formally resigned on 25 December, the day the
white, blue and red Russian flag replaced the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin.
In the 1970s, Moscow's most devastating social problem was alcoholism, cited as the ma-
jor factor behind the high rate of absenteeism, abuse and truancy. Alcoholism was so
rampant that Gorbachev tried to limit consumption to two bottles of vodka per week per
family, which was not a popular policy initiative.
It is well known that Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1990, for his efforts
to end the Cold War. It is less known that he also won a Grammy Award in 2004, for his
spoken word album for children Peter and the Wolf,Wolf Tracks.
Rebirth of Russian Politics
Buoyed by his success over Gorbachev and the coup plotters, Yeltsin (now Russia's presid-
ent) was granted extraordinary powers by the parliament to find a way out of the Soviet
wreckage. Yeltsin used these powers to launch radical economic reforms and rapprochement
