Abstract
In the first fortnight of August 1991, two documents released to the press reflected Gorbachev’s revived determination to press ahead with perestroika. The first was the draft party programme already discussed at the central committee plenum in July. The programme, ‘Socialism, Democracy and Progress’, called for ‘a mixed economy’ including ‘state, collective, private, joint-stock and cooperative forms of property’, and confirmed party support for a multi-party system.’ The party seemed firmly set on the road towards social democracy. The second document was a draft Treaty which proposed to replace the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by a looser federation, the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics — ‘Socialist’ had been dropped, but the Russian-language abbreviation, SSSR, remained the same.2 The draft Treaty had already received the support of Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and most of the other republics seemed likely to join.
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Notes
B. El’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (1994), p. 67; the preface is dated October 1993.
See E. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London, 1994 ).
Korolenko’s letter to Lunacharsky, an old friend, cited by I. Dedkov in Kommunist, no. 1, 1991, p. 8. The letter, written on 4 August 1920, may be found in V. G. Korolenko v gody revolyutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny: biograficheskaya khronika ( Benson, Vermont, 1985 ), pp. 395–404.
S. V. Kuleshov, Velikii Oktyabr’ i torzhestvo leninskoi natsional’noi programmy partii (1987).
S. Selivestrov in Nezavisimaya gazera, 17 November 1991.
J. Steele, Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage of Democracy (1994), p. xiii. For a Russian criticism of the film, see A. Nemzer in Nezavisimaya gazera, 27 June 1992.
See, for example, R. Hingley, Stalin: Man and Legend (London, 1974), p. 304; A. Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (1965 edn), p. 602.
See V. Tolz, ‘The Katyn Documents and the CPSU Hearings’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report, vol. 1, no. 44, 6 November 1992, pp. 27–33.
V. I. Boldin, Krushenie p’edestala: shtrikhi k portretu M. S. Gorbacheva (1995), pp. 257–8.
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© 1997 R. W. Davies
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Davies, R.W. (1997). The Drive against Communism, 1991–2: The Aftermath of the August 1991 Coup. In: Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25420-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25420-0_4
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