August 1991 Coup Attempt Kept USSR Alive Four More Months, Baburin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 8 – Many write off the August 1991 coup as a complete failure, Sergey Baburin says; but they are wrong to do so. If the effort had not been made, the Soviet Union would have dissolved on August 20. Because of the coup attempt, the country was kept together for another four months.

            That reality makes it even more wrong to suggest that the coup delivered the coup de grace to the USSR, the conservative Russian nationalist politician says. In fact, Mikhail Gorbachev did that. The coup leaders sought to block him and managed to hold things off until December 1991 (realtribune.ru/sergej-baburin-sovetskij-sojuz-razvalivali-iznutri-s-1986-goda).

            Baburin goes even further. He argues that Gorbachev and his team organized secessionist and nationalist movements in the union republics to weaken his opponents in Moscow and did so with the support of the West. And that is why the events of December 1991, in his view, were “the completion of our greatest Russian tragedy.”

            And there is no doubt that it was a Russian tragedy “because we all lived in one civilization and we were forcibly divided from one another.” According to Baburin, “the Soviet Union was throughout the entire 20^th century a socially attractive alternative, but tody, capitalism has destroyed it and there is as it were no alternative left.”