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The August Coup: The Destruction of the Soviet Union and the Making of New Russia 1985-1991
A dramatic and expertly researched account of an extraordinary moment in Russia’s recent the August Coup.
In the summer of 1991, a group of eight plotters came together to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachëv, then the president of the USSR. These ruthless conspirators, who occupied positions of high office, declared a state of emergency to restore stability through authoritarian rule. The reality turned out to be a shambolic failure which hastened the fall of the USSR and a pivotal shift from communism to capitalism.
Beginning with a minute-by-minute re-enactment of Gorbachëv’s capture in his holiday home in Crimea, eminent historian Robert Service follows the plot from its inception to its humiliating collapse. The troubling side effects of Gorbachëv’s well-meant reforms in the Soviet Union – business fraud, government corruption, organized crime and interethnic conflict – increased exponentially, and a New Russia was born. Fathered by Boris Yeltsin, it brought lamentably less benefit to the Russian economy or its people than he had promised.
Linking the years from the coup itself to today’s Russia under Vladimir Putin, The August Coup is a thoroughly compelling and original chronicle of a moment that changed Russian and global politics forever.
In the summer of 1991, a group of eight plotters came together to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachëv, then the president of the USSR. These ruthless conspirators, who occupied positions of high office, declared a state of emergency to restore stability through authoritarian rule. The reality turned out to be a shambolic failure which hastened the fall of the USSR and a pivotal shift from communism to capitalism.
Beginning with a minute-by-minute re-enactment of Gorbachëv’s capture in his holiday home in Crimea, eminent historian Robert Service follows the plot from its inception to its humiliating collapse. The troubling side effects of Gorbachëv’s well-meant reforms in the Soviet Union – business fraud, government corruption, organized crime and interethnic conflict – increased exponentially, and a New Russia was born. Fathered by Boris Yeltsin, it brought lamentably less benefit to the Russian economy or its people than he had promised.
Linking the years from the coup itself to today’s Russia under Vladimir Putin, The August Coup is a thoroughly compelling and original chronicle of a moment that changed Russian and global politics forever.
608 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 11, 2026
About the author
Robert Service
37 books284 followersThis author is the British historian of modern Russia. For the British-Canadian writer of Yukon poetry, see Robert W. Service.
Robert Service is a British academic and historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
He is the author of the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, A History of Twentieth - Century Russia, Russia: Experiment with a People and Stalin: A Biography, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. He wrote a marvelous book on communism titled Comrades Communism A World History (International Bestseller). He is married with four children.
Robert Service is a British academic and historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. He is a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford.
He is the author of the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, A History of Twentieth - Century Russia, Russia: Experiment with a People and Stalin: A Biography, as well as many other books on Russia's past and present. He wrote a marvelous book on communism titled Comrades Communism A World History (International Bestseller). He is married with four children.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 20, 2026
Interesting read, and I learned a lot, but there was an awful lot of inter-necine wrangling involved that got a little bit tedious at times, but that's the history I suppose.
August 6, 2026
The August Coup was the first major historical event that took place in my area of expertise after I was active as an historian, albeit still in grad school. Technically the revolutions of 1989 were actually the first, but since I did not start my history grad studies until August of that year, I don't fully count them, thoroughly engaged in it as I was. The August Coup, by contrast, occurred while I was wrapping up my school work for the Harvard Ukrainian Summer School. Only a month earlier, we had actually held a little celebration of the first anniversary of the declaration of Ukrainian sovereignty. So I feel like I know it very well, even if I didn't know all the details. Robert Service's book handles it well in my opinion, and I learned a lot of specifics I'd not been bothered to learn before.
You can't tell this story without the background that starts with Gorbachev being elevated to First Secretary of the CPSU, and Service does that well. He also gives us a excellent review of the way the Soviet Union was being pulled in many different directions as a result of the reforms Gorbachev was making, as people all over the Soviet Union began to explore what they wanted rather than acting as subjects. Service gives us a sympathetic picture of Gorbachev, but not an uncritical one. Yeltsin is likewise shown to be a key not just as the disrupter of the coup, but as the figure, who had some idea of direction and the importance of power that Gorbachev lacked caught up as he was in an optimistic narrative of a grand march to socialist utopia. We also see how the once loyal bureaucrat Vladimir Kryuchkov became the main instigator of the coup in large measure out of legitimate concern that in the short term Gorbachev's reforms were making things worse rather than better, and yet how ill-prepared he and his conspirators were. It didn't help that all of them in different ways were confronting the massive failure of Marxist-Leninist ideology without any of the awareness of the alternatives that might have provided some direction in large part because Marxist-Leninist thinking was so deeply ingrained.
Service rightly draws a line from Kryuchkov to Putin, with the latter in many ways realizing the kind of de-ideologized authoritarian rule that Kryuchkov and his co-conspirators actually wanted. Reading this in the summer of 2026 in the fifth year of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the parallels are even stronger. The peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the lack of violence between Russia and Ukrainians that was so widely predicted in 1991 has now come to pass. And to his credit Service points how much Yeltsin and other Russian leaders were shaped by the implicit great Russian chauvinism that had little time for the idea that Ukraine, or any other member of the post-Soviet "near abroad" could actually act independently. This has been part of the story for a long time. Western Countries have coddled Putin and Russia at least in part in the hope that this would give Putin reason not to follow his worst impulses. Sadly that tactic failed massively, but itself was too deeply ingrained for Western Powers to adjust accordingly in a timely manner that might have prevented the full-scale invasion.
But the depth of great Russian chauvinism that is not the only continuity. Putin's massive misunderstanding of Ukraine seems a kind of replay of the coup-plotters own failed conspiracy. Just as Kryuchkov and his allies seem to have been driven by their very understanding of the world collapsing, so too was Putin's decision to go all in on destroying Ukraine, and the fiasco that followed. To be sure, four years on the Russia is still doing great damage to Ukraine, and there are no signs Russia is ready to stop, but the fact that Ukraine has lasted this long means it has already won. In this respect, just as Gorbachev was able to stay in power long enough that the coup-plotters could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again, Ukraine stayed independent long enough for it to stand as a real alternative to Great Russian domination.
You can't tell this story without the background that starts with Gorbachev being elevated to First Secretary of the CPSU, and Service does that well. He also gives us a excellent review of the way the Soviet Union was being pulled in many different directions as a result of the reforms Gorbachev was making, as people all over the Soviet Union began to explore what they wanted rather than acting as subjects. Service gives us a sympathetic picture of Gorbachev, but not an uncritical one. Yeltsin is likewise shown to be a key not just as the disrupter of the coup, but as the figure, who had some idea of direction and the importance of power that Gorbachev lacked caught up as he was in an optimistic narrative of a grand march to socialist utopia. We also see how the once loyal bureaucrat Vladimir Kryuchkov became the main instigator of the coup in large measure out of legitimate concern that in the short term Gorbachev's reforms were making things worse rather than better, and yet how ill-prepared he and his conspirators were. It didn't help that all of them in different ways were confronting the massive failure of Marxist-Leninist ideology without any of the awareness of the alternatives that might have provided some direction in large part because Marxist-Leninist thinking was so deeply ingrained.
Service rightly draws a line from Kryuchkov to Putin, with the latter in many ways realizing the kind of de-ideologized authoritarian rule that Kryuchkov and his co-conspirators actually wanted. Reading this in the summer of 2026 in the fifth year of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the parallels are even stronger. The peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the lack of violence between Russia and Ukrainians that was so widely predicted in 1991 has now come to pass. And to his credit Service points how much Yeltsin and other Russian leaders were shaped by the implicit great Russian chauvinism that had little time for the idea that Ukraine, or any other member of the post-Soviet "near abroad" could actually act independently. This has been part of the story for a long time. Western Countries have coddled Putin and Russia at least in part in the hope that this would give Putin reason not to follow his worst impulses. Sadly that tactic failed massively, but itself was too deeply ingrained for Western Powers to adjust accordingly in a timely manner that might have prevented the full-scale invasion.
But the depth of great Russian chauvinism that is not the only continuity. Putin's massive misunderstanding of Ukraine seems a kind of replay of the coup-plotters own failed conspiracy. Just as Kryuchkov and his allies seem to have been driven by their very understanding of the world collapsing, so too was Putin's decision to go all in on destroying Ukraine, and the fiasco that followed. To be sure, four years on the Russia is still doing great damage to Ukraine, and there are no signs Russia is ready to stop, but the fact that Ukraine has lasted this long means it has already won. In this respect, just as Gorbachev was able to stay in power long enough that the coup-plotters could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again, Ukraine stayed independent long enough for it to stand as a real alternative to Great Russian domination.
August 20, 2026
The August Coup: The Destruction of the Soviet Union and the Making of New Russia 1985–1991 by Robert Service offers a compelling examination of one of the decisive turning points in modern Russian and global history. By focusing on the failed August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, the book captures a moment when political uncertainty, competing visions of the Soviet future, and the struggle for power converged with extraordinary consequences.
One of the book's strongest features is its attention to the coup itself and the people behind it. Service's reconstruction of Gorbachev's capture in Crimea and the plotters' attempt to impose authoritarian control gives the historical episode an immediate sense of tension. At the same time, the book places the coup within the wider consequences of Gorbachev's reforms, including corruption, organized crime, economic upheaval, and interethnic conflict, helping readers understand why the Soviet system was becoming increasingly unstable.
The connection between the events of 1991 and the Russia that followed makes the book especially relevant. Readers interested in Soviet history, Russian politics, the Cold War, political leadership, geopolitics, and the origins of contemporary Russia should find The August Coup particularly valuable. Service presents the collapse of the Soviet Union not simply as an isolated historical event, but as a transformation whose consequences continue to shape Russia and global politics.
One of the book's strongest features is its attention to the coup itself and the people behind it. Service's reconstruction of Gorbachev's capture in Crimea and the plotters' attempt to impose authoritarian control gives the historical episode an immediate sense of tension. At the same time, the book places the coup within the wider consequences of Gorbachev's reforms, including corruption, organized crime, economic upheaval, and interethnic conflict, helping readers understand why the Soviet system was becoming increasingly unstable.
The connection between the events of 1991 and the Russia that followed makes the book especially relevant. Readers interested in Soviet history, Russian politics, the Cold War, political leadership, geopolitics, and the origins of contemporary Russia should find The August Coup particularly valuable. Service presents the collapse of the Soviet Union not simply as an isolated historical event, but as a transformation whose consequences continue to shape Russia and global politics.
October 14, 2026
Audio. The book started off very strong. 5 stars. I knew very little about how the coup developed and what actually happened behind the scenes. But then the book devolved into enormous minutia of so many characters it was impossible to keep track of all the never ending players with similar sounding names. I guess listening to such a complex book does not do it justice. It was also very confusing distinguishing all the political players and parties and entities involved. The republics vs the communists vs the various organizations (Nationalists, Federalists, etc) within Russia and the other entities and god knows who else. The politics was extremely confusing. Extremely difficult to make sense of the whole mess. It was also very difficult to follow the dissolution of the USSR. I was hoping to get a clearer understanding about how the dissolution evolved, but definitely not from this book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews