A very interesting read.
Via the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:
Fall of the Soviet Union—The Inside Story
The fall of the Soviet Union and end of communism in Russia caught the world by surprise twenty years ago. In a Q&A, Ambassador James F. Collins, the most senior American diplomat in Russia at the time, describes how the United States responded as history unfolded and reflects on the personal diplomacy between the Cold War foes as an August 1991 coup ultimately led to the breakup of the Soviet Union in December.
How did the United States first react to the August coup and sudden implosion of the Soviet Union?
Three minutes after seven in the morning on August 19, I got a phone call from Ed Salazar, one of my political officers, asking if I had been listening to the radio. The radio had just broadcast the news that Mikhail Gorbachev had given up his office as president of the Soviet Union to Gennady Yanayev and that they had formed a committee on what they called an “extraordinary situation” and that Mr. Gorbachev was at rest in his dacha down in Foros in the Crimea.
Everybody assumed this meant they were trying to remove Gorbachev. This was the middle of the night in Washington, and so I suppose the initial government reaction from the United States was that of the embassy. Our own initial reaction was a degree of shock, because no one frankly expected this. There was also a degree of uncertainty about just what was going on because the announcement was made and nothing happened for a couple of hours. There were no military personnel to be seen—nobody showed up for a couple of hours. There were no tanks on the streets until later that morning. So nobody quite understood what was going on except what was on the radio and the fact that they had been making these announcements.
At the embassy, we gathered and tried to make sense of this. I pulled together all of the key members of my staff and we made one decision: at least until instructed otherwise, we would not recognize in any form—by our actions or by our statements—any change in the status of the Russian government. In other words, we wouldn’t recognize what the people who were saying they were in charge were proclaiming. And that we would have nothing to do with them except for the protection of American citizens and the safety and security of American citizens and property.
So that was where we were. We called everyone in Washington as they started to wake up and nobody said we were wrong. As the day wore on and events unfolded, we felt at the embassy that it was wise for the United States government to take no action other than what we’d done as it wasn’t at all clear where this was going to go. By this time, it was clear that Boris Yeltsin had not been captured and he was taking a position on the events which was in essence that they amounted to an unconstitutional act and that as President of the Russian Federation he does not recognize the change.
There was something of a standoff that began this whole process over the next two days of watching the people in Moscow, the Russian White House, and the people around Mr. Yeltsin setting up barricades, defying the authorities, challenging the authorities to act against them, and so forth.
What was it like inside the U.S. Embassy?
The embassy was a very different thing from what it is today. At that time, the American embassy had no Russian employees; the total staff was 254 people. It was very much a Cold War institution and there was a high degree of concern about the security of the embassy. This didn’t mean physical security, but mostly whether intelligence could be gathered without information leaking out or if we could control our environment.
So when the coup came in 1991, there were relatively few of us. We were physically about 200 yards from the building in which Mr. Yeltsin set up his headquarters. During the coup, we ended up inside the barricades that were erected to protect the White House. There was one way out through an ally that one could almost get a vehicle through. And in that sense, we were very much a part of one side of what was going on. We were not off in any remote way.
Continue reading HERE.