Citation Needed - The August Coup

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

The 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, also known as the August Coup,[a] was a failed attempt by hardliners of the Soviet Union's Communist Party to forcibly seize control of the country from Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet President and General Secretary of the Communist Party at the time. The coup leaders consisted of top military and civilian officials, including Vice President Gennady Yanayev, who together formed the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP). They opposed Gorbachev's reform program, were angry at the loss of control over Eastern European states and fearful of the USSR's New Union Treaty which was on the verge of being signed. The treaty was to decentralize much of the central Soviet government's power and distribute it among its fifteen republics.

So he's a wizard that got turned into a cat. I, it depends on who you ask. And does he know the flying dog? He's a pug of pegacorn. See, so it's not hard. Also, no, you're thinking of the world asher missile. That's, that's the one that doesn't like you. Yeah.

Doesn't like Heath, right? Yeah. You guys can just say no, right? You know that? Not, not really. You read a blue in the head. Mark, Mark. Okay, Tom, Eli, I will bite. Why are you guys in a big ass cage? And what is that smell? Right? Well, Noah, Heath, since you must know, Tom and I were engaging in pre-show shenanigans,

even though your episode is late. Okay, Cecil, I know we pre-record, but this is ridiculous. Late. What are you guys talking about? The August coup. It's going to be like mid-October when this one comes out, guys. So no, guys, not coup, coup. It is about a coup in Russian history. Yeah, now I feel silly.

That's just like the article. It's right there at the top of the notes. I am, I'm not going to do that. Clicking things is boring. Well, so boring. You guys shit all over the floor in here? I mean, someone did. Was it you or you the someone?

Yeah, it was, it was me. Yeah, it was, it was me. Yeah, it was you. Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and I'll be hosting this White Russian Party, and I'm joined by a panel of expert Caucasians. First up, we have the V vodka and the Kluah, Tom and Cecil.

You know, as a white male, no one asked me how I'm doing. It's well actually. It's a green, green, so I reckon I am gonna flinch when he tells us where the cream comes from. That's all I'm saying. Yes. Speaking of which, Cecil, we also have the rocks and the non-berry creamer and Noah and

Eli. Yeah, look, I said I'd quit smoking cigarettes and I did. Rock was never on the table, okay? Honestly, it's just nice to be a mudslide without it being a metaphor for my IBS. Thank you. Thank you. That's different. There's a blended ice cream.

Anyway, Noah, what person placed thing concept phenomenon or event? Are we going to be talking about today? The August coup. And what made you pick the August coup? Well, as many people might have noticed from my essays on Vladimir Putin, Yuri Gagarin and Tetris, I'm kind of fascinated by contemporary Russian history. Sure. And I feel like maybe the most interesting historical event of my lifetime was the fall of the Soviet Union. Of course, that's too big and too diffuse to cover in one citation

needed episode. But the failed coup of August 19 to 22nd in 1991 offers a manageable window into that larger story, I think. All right. So what was the August coup? It was the last gasp of the Soviet Union. It was a failed effort by communist hardliners to seize control of the levers of state and deposed then general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, in hopes of holding back the tide of reforms that his policies had swept in. The leaders of the coup were a mix of military and civilian officials, and it included some damn high-placed people, like for example, Genady Yonayev, who was the vice president at the time.

Collectively, the co-leaders were known as the state committee on the state of emergency. That's terrible. It's, and I probably a little less redundant in Russian, which is shortened because of the Cyrillic alphabet to the GKCHP. Okay. Based on that alone, it's entirely possible the Soviet Union failed for lack of just better code names. That's terrible.

So I've tried to write out what KGB stood for, but there's no fucking way I could pronounce it, so I didn't bother. So our story really starts with Gorbachev's ascension to power. He became General Secretary of the Communist Party and thus had a state in 1985 at the end of a two decade period known by Russian historians as the era of stagnation. Now in Brezhnev's defense, I should point out that it was actually Gorbachev who named it the era of stagnation. And he had every reason to give it a shitty name. That being said, it's generally considered the worst financial crisis to ever hit the Soviet Union. Not like any financial crisis, there are a lot of reasons for it.

Following energy prices increased corruption, the so-called Nixon shock. But the real issue at the heart of things was that they were still trying to run a Stalinist state without the inhuman willingness to just murder the fuck out of people at random in large numbers. And it turns out that doesn't really work. Yeah, same goes for iPhone factories. Exactly. Yeah, same goes for iPhone factories. Exactly. Yeah.

All right. Well, it looks like Russia eventually fixed that particular problem of murder and kindness. I mean, if communism and no murder is not working, you do capitalism and murder, right? Yeah, and no one's gonna tell us how they got there. What's next? Okay, so when Gorbachev takes over, he embarks on an ambitious set of reforms based on the

principles of perestroika or reconstruction and glass notes, which is loosely translated as openness or transparency, depending on who you ask. He could see that the root of many of the nation's problems was this huge opaque bureaucracy that insulated all the decision makers. So Gorbachev's goal was to institute just enough reforms to allow for genuine accountability. Now, the problem with that, of course, is that the whole fucking country was built on a house of cars that was threatened by literally any transparency. Like just for one example, many of the states that were absorbed into the Soviet Union got

there through like traditional military conquests, but then their citizens were always sold to history where they joined by choice. Yeah, right. And also, what was Kazakhstan wearing at the time? Yeah, a lot of that. A lot of that. But any kind of genuine glass knows how to admit that, but then like once you admit that how the fuck are you going to keep those states in your union?

Yeah, you just say it's about heritage, not hate. That's how that works. Or you have a media that constantly sells the narrative that people are good despite their differences in opposition to the very real fact that 40% of the electorate are ghouls who deserve a wall. Okay, yeah, okay. Yeah.

So, and now see, one of the biggest problems for Gorbachev is that like every other single person in all of the Soviet Union at the time, he didn't know how bad the history really was. His reforms were based on how bad could it really be mentality, but it was fucking Stalin. It was one of the most evil and ruthless humans to ever exist. One of the first reforms that Gorbachev instituted was to lift the restrictions on historians and let them do actual, yeah,

like whatever the verb form of, of, of historians, because while he knew that they were going to turn up some shit that would make the state look bad, he wasn't expecting nine million citizens killed through forced labor, manufactured famine and straight up mass murder. Sure. Yeah. You know what there's a lot of money. A lot more. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.

There is a capitalism. Yes. And a lot of more is upon for a lot of more. Yep. Yeah. I think that somewhere at the office was like, okay, 9 million did obviously not great. But did you guys find any, I don't know, fun holidays or anything? Just, no, mostly just the murder's okay.

Okay. I don't mean to sound obtuse genuinely, but how did nine million people starving surprise anyone? Like I get it wasn't in the history books, but wouldn't someone have just noticed it? Yes. Yeah. But regionally, right?

These were isolated. So yeah, they knew about it in the regions where it happened. Brushes of people were a really big fucking country. Yeah. So now, so Gorbachev wasn't alone in this, though. He had the party's tentative approval because they also recognized that huge changes were needed. And that's partly because most of them were suffering from the same, like how bad could it be delusion as him, but also even the ones who had a sense of what was

hiding in their historical closets kind of figured that the records were destroyed and sufficiently altered enough that historians would never really figure it out. But like historians have all kinds of ways of figuring out when massive numbers of people die, other than looking for the weak, killed ex-number of people today invoices. They're going to catch the eye somehow somewhere. Yeah, right. So pretty quickly, it became clear that a, the actual history was every bit as bad as the USS R's detractors in the West said it was. And b, that was going to come out in full if they kept up with Gorbachev's reform plans.

This is a bunch of really lumpy rugs all over Russia with one corpse arm. Yeah, okay. Cool, cool, cool. We're allowed to do history again. Also anyone else noticed there's been a lot more elbow room lately. We were really stretched out now. Oh, yeah, no.

Whatever, let's play some Tetris. So much easier to get a reservation. So another part of the reforms that really wrangled the party bosses was the fact that it allowed Soviet citizens to protest. So the point of the reforms, as much as anything else, was to convince the people that they were free without actually making that true. Now, which to be clear is the same as the US government school, right? Okay. That is an outrageous comparison, Noah.

Also, side note, tomorrow's protest is that the Austin city limits free speech zones. So bring your own bottle. Right. They will arrest you. Yeah. It'll take that. But so it's really hard to convince people that they have any real freedom if they don't have the ability to protest when shit pisses them off. So the idea here is you let them protest, but you keep the protesters in check with indirect means.

Like, for example, you make permits scarce or you make them go to those free speech zone or you set up in stage a counter protest full of loyal communist that this is exact same place and time when they're protesting. Right. Are you push the narrative that protests are more destructive than they are? You publicly equip vigilantes who murder peaceful protesters. You don't cattle large crowds and divilites. Sorry,

you were talking about Russia. I was, but yeah, no, six or one. So, so the problem for the communist party though is that Russians are really good at protesting, like historically, we named them Molotov cocktail after these motherfuckers, right? So, sorry, I know this is a bit of a diversion from the main story, or from the backstory that I'm preempting the main story with, but it's too little detail that's here. At one point in St. Petersburg during these reforms, a bunch of journalists wanted to protest the lack of press freedom in the city, and the KGB gets a hold of when and where beforehand. Now pre-parastroika, they just arrest everybody involved, but now they've got their like restrained by laws and stuff. So they got it dissuade the

protest with a hint of legality. So they scheduled a brass band to play at that exact spot on that exact day with the instructions to get louder and louder whenever anybody at the protest tries to deliver a speech. Okay. So I feel like the KGB are the bad guys in that or whatever the version of that was, but nailed it. Did anyone watch the video of the national hero in the US who stood really close to Steve Bannon during a press conference this summer and just blew that referee whistle under his hundred last. Ten. Straight minutes.

He almost passed that every other second. Whoo. Banner would try to say something. Whoo. It was the fucking greatest. Or did you guys see the video of the guy who followed the

white supremacists around playing still at the second. Don't don't don't don't so good. All right, but so but in this instance, one of the organizers of the protest,

that's a little research, tells everybody to come back the same day, same spot, same time and ask them all to bring a lemon. So they get their lemons in hand, ensuring off the brass band is back to dry on other speeches, but as soon as they start playing, everybody at the protest whips out their lemon and takes a big fucking bite out of it, or at least pretends to. Now, watching someone bite a lemon forces a physiological reaction. Your mouth starts producing a bunch of saliva. This is genius.

Right. And as I'm sure resident Trumpeter, a Heathead right could tell you, you can't exactly play a brass instrument when your mouth mouth is manufactured on a spit. You're like, they were right. It just call out the string orchestra as like the archers, but there you go. And these guys were so successful at this type of protest that they went on to form a political movement in the Soviet Union, just Google lemon party and you'll find out about it. Check that out.

I should not laugh. I should keep a straight face through that. Otherwise, they won't do it. So anyway, anyway, so this kind of shit is happening all over the country. I'd not the lemon thing specifically, but protesters winning the day. What's more, Gorbachev's reforms while winning in tentative praise in the West aren't fixing the stagnation problem. Productivity is still falling. Inflation was rising at some 300% a year, and energy reserves were consistently short of the need, which is no small thing

through a fucking Russian winner. What's more, several of the Soviet Union's less enthusiastic partner states were starting to break away and declare their independence. Right, in 1990, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Armenia had all declared independence and Lithuania and Latvia had even resisted a violent Soviet effort to revoke that independence. Hell, in June of 1990, Russia declared independence from the Soviet Union. What? Yeah. And for a while, there was a set of dueling policies, both governing the same region on

the same level and often passing contradictory laws just to fuck with each other. Stop splitting yourself. Stop splitting yourself. Yeah, right. Yeah. And of course, through all of this, you have these uber nationalist party loilist hardliners in the KGB and their tear and their fucking hair out, right? The country that they've effectively controlled for a half a century is literally falling

apart around them. Right. And they want to roll back all these reforms and Gorbachev is insisting that there's no way to put the genie back in the bottle short of Stalinist tactics. Right. I mean, honestly, given the resources it is disposal of time, he might not have been able to do that even if he'd gone full gulag. But the nationalists weren't about to let unfortunate realities stand in the way of

their ultimate goals. So when Gorbachev refused to save the USSR, they decided to push him out of the way. Yeah. And they never considered the real victims of this American kids in geography class in the early 90s. It was. It was. But before we learn about that horrific ordeal, we're going to take quick break for some

op-rop-up of nothing. There he is at last, our head historian, Comrade Gorbachev. I cannot tell you how much we've been looking forward to your report, Comrade. The people of Russia need to know more of its glorious history to unite around. Right. Comrade Gorbachev, I don't think this history will be... I know, I know, you're worried that it will be boring ski, you know, snoozing time, but

the people will love it. Trust me. No, I'm not worried they will be bored. Yeah. The data is confusion that you worry about. Do not. The people will slow it slowly, but I don't think it's going to be very confusing either. Well, then you bring me nothing but good news. And so what is the title of your first finding? nothing but good news. So what is the title of your first finding? The mass graves of Krakz Kskowski.

And what about the second one? The mass graves of Horminia. Right, right, right, look, come right into the story. I'm not here to tell you how to do your job, but maybe we open on one with it is not about mess graves. Do you have one of those? Of course I do.

Yeah, let's do that one. Very well. The open graves of Anna Katatavov. Oh, okay. And we're back. When we left off, Russia was having an economic meltdown and the KGB was planning a very seamless, super smooth murder coup, if Tetris music playing in the background, jauntily. So, how'd that go? They never got the fucking long piece is what happened.

I did just well the ending. But the, okay, so the planning for this coup started in September of 1990 and it started with the chairman of the KGB Vladimir Kriuchkov. And apparently he wasn't super duper subtle about it. Within months, Gorbachev was getting a steady stream of warnings that a coup attempt was coming and that Kriuchkov would be leading it. And for reasons that seemed not incomprehensible to me, Gorbachev tried to appease Khrushkav by giving him more power. Yeah, when you're famous, they just let you do it. So it was a boob, by the way, so colossally stupid and foreboding that it caused foreign secretary Edward Chevronodzi to quit in protest

and warn that quote, a dictator ship is coming. End quote. Now, this is significant because Chevron-Nazi was committed to Gorbachev's reforms, and he was about to become vice president of the country. But when he resigned, Gorbachev had to appoint the next guy in line who was an active participant in the budding coup. Now, of course, with your Soviet citizen, you make enemies out of the KGB. You can bet that they know every fucking thing about you.

And that was the case with Kruegekov and Gorbachev. He had Gorbachev under constant surveillance throughout this whole ordeal, but he didn't pay as much attention to the leader of that other overlapping polity, Boris Yeltsin. See, after the planning started, but about six weeks before the coup, Boris Yeltsin was elevated from the office of first secretary of the Supreme Soviet Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republics. Boy, your theories make it a lot more. Stay safe, stay safe. Tom's theories make a lot more sense.

He's drowning someone out as he wrote that title. So he went from that title though to the much more business card friendly position of president of Russia. And clearly, Kriya Chkov underestimated how powerful that position was and how much loyalty Yelsen could command from it. Yeah, underestimating how much damage a president appointed by a Russian could do. It's kind of a theme of the 21st century. Oh, sure. Oh, sure is. In fairness, that mine shaft gap isn't that big with the US. So now this coup had been planned and it was in Khrushka's holster for several months,

but for a long time, he was pretty sure he was going to be able to convince Gorbachev to lead it. Right. Basically, the plans were all contingent on the leader declaring a state of emergency, which would kick in all these extraordinary powers for the KGB, which they would then use to put out all the rebellions and qualt, all the protests and reabsorble all of these fractions provinces. Gorbachev had refused repeatedly to do it, but Kriushkov figured that as things got worse and worse, eventually he would warm to the idea. But then, along came

the new Union treaty, a draft treaty that would have cemented those secession and also it would have stripped enough power away from the coup ladders that he wouldn't be able to enact their plans after it was signed. The text of the treaty was published on the 15th of August 1991 and Gorbachev was planning to sign it into law on the 20th, so it was a now or never five day period for Kriyevich Kovyn as allies. In Soviet Russia, leader calls you. I should have seen that coming. Now in a move that seems crazy in hindsight, having been repeatedly warned about a coup attempt

and on the verge of dissolving the Soviet Union effectively, Gorbachev heads to his summer home. You get a couple of weasel, Aron, Aron, and it was there at 4.32 p.m. on August 18th that the GKCHP struck. They cut all communication from Gorbachev's vacation house and several of the plotters broke in and demanded he either declared state of emergency or resign and named Yanayev, acting president, so that he could do it. And while there are conflicting reports of what happened, then the most common story is that Gorbachev told them to go get fucked.

Right? He insulted the hell out of the main KGB guy there by pretending to forget his name over and over again and responded to another guy with a simple quote, shut up. You prick and go out. Nice. Okay. Um, not the reaction we expected. Will you at least change out of your jammies? So with Gorbachev refusing to play along and the GKCHP not quite emboldened enough to kill him, they just called an additional KGB agents to block the gate so he couldn't leave. It's the political coup equivalent of I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. Really is.

No touching really is. So meanwhile, all the plotters back in Moscow spend the evening, theoriously drafting ad hoc documents and trying to figure out where to go from there. That night, Yanaya signs a decree and trusting himself with presidential powers, but that's hard to take seriously, right? He declared himself president. But to keep anybody from pointing out how silly that was, his first act as self-appointed president was to shut down all the newspapers that weren't party controlled.

And his second act was to cite a popular declaration stating that quote, the honor and dignity of the Soviet man must be restored. End quote. In other words, he promised to make the Soviet Union great again. Okay, so here's how it works. All the other guys powers really come from a series of machines made by a company called Dominion. And this is when the Hugo Chavez gets in butt. Guys, guys, where's everybody going?

Now, so believe it or not, deposing the head of state declaring himself president wasn't the coup. Yeah, at first you have to get the vice president to certify it. And that's, but so that all happened on the 18th, but the beginning of the coup is usually dated as the 19th because the Yanaev didn't get around to signing the declaration of emergency until 1 a.m. Now that declaration prohibited rallies, demonstrations and strikes and suspended the activities of political parties and public organizations of any kind. The public was informed of all this through state radio and television starting at 6 a.m.

And they also issued a list of arrest warrants that included President Boris Yelson, his allies, and all the members of his party. Lock him up, lock him up. Yeah. Weird how they all have the same chance. Man, at least your vision was alive when that would have been. Yeah.

Made a little sense. Right. So okay, so needless to say, the Russian people weren't thrilled about this turn of events, but to make sure that they knew that the GKCHP meant business, they rolled a massive military convoy into Moscow, including 4,000 soldiers, 350 tanks, 300 armored personnel here and 420 trucks. Yeah, I fucking massive military envoy. But for reasons that aren't exactly clear, the plotters failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin. So pretty much the minute that they announced their coup, he started organizing opposition at the White House, but not that one. Russia's parliament building is also called the White House. And yes, we had the name first.

They're copying off of us to some double agent thinking, did I send it to the right one? And there's a bag over my head. I'm getting thrown in a van. Okay, did not send it. Guys, no, I'm a, it's a double bluff. I'm a double agent double. I'm done. Obviously, we're chicken. No, I don't know. I'm saying. So now this was a pretty smart move on Yelson's part, right? Because it

basically forced the coupplatters to surround the parliament building with tanks, right? That makes for really shitty optics. And while the independent news in Russia was largely shut down, Glasnos had brought in a host of foreign reporters and they were covering this whole thing in real time. So like when you're on the side that's pointing guns at the parliament building that has the elected president inside, it's kind of hard to argue that you're the one defending the rightful government. The coup plotters just throwing a plate of borscht at the wall. Gump down. coup platters is throwing a plate of borscht at the wall. God damn it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha And by and large, they didn't. News agencies that were ordered to close, they just started broadcasting again. Some military units that were ordered to go to Moscow just didn't go.

Some local governments refused to implement their orders or even answer their fucking calls. And of course, like some groups did follow along with the coup as well. But most people to the extent that they could just state as neutral as possible and waited to see how this was all going to shake out. Everyone agrees to just do like half salutes all week in case they're not those things anymore of a party. I love that the fascist spy coup is getting foiled by quiet quitting. Why is that? Yes.

And so many ways. So now officially the GKCHP was saying that Gorbachev was incapacitated by illness. And though he couldn't communicate with the outside world, he did have a certain amount of freedom of movement. So he started taking these really long walks around his property every day so that any reporters overhead and helicopters or staked out in the woods or any foreign governments with satellites overhead could see good and down well that he was perfectly fine and healthy. So acting on those reports, Yelsen's primary demand was that they let the coupplotters

let Gorbachev address the people and obviously the GKCHP couldn't do that. Just, just MacKale Gorbachev doing burpees and waving at the sky, popping up, turning over wave sky. Back down. Look, if you're a Russian leader that wants to show all healthy is you hold a fixed Sambo tournament like I'm going to. Okay, Merbys. Now I score eight goals in hockey game. I have sex with lady right now. Peak before she is. Look, the cool does not count. Why would I be sure it was on this horse of the cook

added. So as the day wore on, more and more groups started to side with Yelson. Moscow residents started showing up at the White House and erecting barricades around it, which meant that if the GKCHP was going to root out the opposition, they were going to have to massacre a bunch of unarmed people along the way. Yeah. Okay. But did they have any plans to dissuade the Soviets? That's it.

That's it. Warren cameras pointed at that. Actually, yeah. So, but this encouraged more and more soldiers to defect, refuse orders, and take Yelson up on the promise of amnesty for any military personnel who opposed the coup. The GKCHB tried to stave off more military defecions by confining soldiers to their barracks, but like one way or the other, those are soldiers that can't carry out your coup.

Yeah. So you're saying go to your room, wasn't a viable way to stop a military revolution. No, I'm taking notes. So okay. So the next day, the GKCHB starts plotting an assault on the White House. The military commandant of Moscow declared a curfew, which gave them a pretense to attack any civilians that were still surrounding the building that night. And they plan to attack at 2 a.m. on the morning of August 21st.

Now, several of the people intimately involved with those plans really didn't want them to be implemented because clearly they were going to have to kill a bunch of people to make this happen. So one of the higher ups tipped off the head of the impromptu defense force, told them how they were going to do it, when they were going to do it. And that's what caused the whole thing to fizzle before it got started, right? They go in for the like some of their preliminary plans, three people get killed in the aborted attack. And those would end up being the only casualties of the coup, unless you count all the members of the GKCHP that

that killed themselves when the coup fell apart. Oh man, only all failed coups work like that. Man, man, it's so much less dramatic to fall in your fire extinguisher in disgrace. This is a full, you could be a martyr still if you want. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it.

Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do ribs by doing that. Run it up down the bike rack like a zile of heart. Killing yourself in that briar patch. I'm just saying, I don't find it over. So okay, so at that point, it was, it was clear to pretty much everybody that the coup had failed. By 8 a.m. on the 21st, soldiers just started streaming out of Moscow.

Everybody who could still claim non-involvement quickly started to do so. And by that evening, Yanaya officially reversed his declaration of emergency and at the state of emergency and started a desperate but ultimately doomed effort to patch things up with Gorbachev, right? And for his part, Gorbachev refused to even meet with the delegation that the GKCHP sent to negotiate. By midnight, he was back in Moscow and by 6 a.m. on the 22nd, Yanayev and Kriushkov were both in police custody.

I, hey, you got to admire the brass balls it takes to be like, okay, plan to murder you and overshoot your government failed. Would you be interested in talking things? Right. So now in the end, this desperate effort to save the Soviet Union ended up hastening us to mice. In the wake of the coup, Gorbachev had no choice but to dissolve the Communist Party altogether. Yelsen bolstered by the celebrity he'd earned in his defiance, suddenly dwarfed Gorbachev in stature. And before the end of the year, Gorbachev would resign as president of the USSR. And the next day, the USSR would be officially disbanded. And the people of Russia, thus freed from the yoke of oppression, would go on to live happily ever. If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

Uh, sometimes Russian leaders are way more kidnapable than you think it first. And can be cool. No, let's, uh, let's pick our fights. We're doing. And are you ready for the quiz? Oh, hell yeah. All right. No, uh, uh, living in a developed first world democracy in the 21st century, we're obviously insulated from violent insurrectionist coup attempts by narcissistic leadership seeking to regress

American society to a fictional moment within a racist revisionist history. Hey, no, no, I see that now. I see. I think I win that one by default. I know. No, what's the best name for a saliva-based political movement? A, the expectorate. B, Hocka vote.

C, dribble-tarians. D, D, flemmakrats. All right, they're all amazing, but the one that I want to dribble terians dribble terians. The the flemmakrats. That's what all right, they're all amazing, but the one that I want to replace the term it's lampooning is definitely C dribble, Terry. You are right. You are right.

All right. No, what's the best name for my upcoming musical about the August coup? A, Putin on the ritz. B, how to secede in snow business without really trying. Oh my God. It's okay. Show business. Yeah. Yeah. I can't like that. I can't. Yeah. You see a fiddler on the coup. Because it's got an oo sun. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I'm saying in there. I'm not going to say right. I'll go with C. I'll fill around the coup. No, it's secret answer. D. He keeps changing things in the show.

Get what you don't know. All right, nobody wins. Nobody wins. Nobody gets to announce next week's. What the show is over over I guess is over. I'm changing the format. We nothing. It's nothing now Tom you go next, okay What I don't have to yes, all right well for Tom Neelah I'm he thank you for hanging out with us today we'll be back next weekend by then Tom will be an expert on something else Between now and then you can hear Tom and Cecil on cognitive distance and you can hear Eli knowing myself on god with us, listen to past episodes, connect to social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com.

Okay, okay, how about the murder, soul numerous, we couldn't count them. No, no. Death on the road. No, no. The fall festival of 1944. Oh, hey, this, this sounds good. Yeah, let me finish. Let me finish that everyone got murdered during. Oh, okay.