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As the August Coup in Moscow Came to an End, the Soviet Union Breathed a Sigh of Relief
And then it turned into the Russia that would violently wage a war of genocide against Ukraine.
Hundreds of thousands converged on Red Square in Moscow, then the capital of the Soviet Union. It was August 22, 1991, and the coup plotters, a group of gray, wrinkled, unattractive Soviet bureaucrats with a few generals sprinkled in, announced that they were traveling to speak to Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been under house arrest at his dacha on the Black Sea since the 19th.
The residents of Moscow, like leaders all over the world, exhaled in unison, and the parties in Moscow began. The little clear, plastic wraps on the tops of vodka bottles were peeled carefully off millions of bottles, and the country prepared itself for an unofficial holiday on the 23rd of August — the return to totalitarianism had been avoided. Boris Yeltsin was promising a march to democracy and economic reforms. The Soviet citizens, not sure what “market reforms” meant, enjoyed what they were seeing on those days, though, as truckload after truckload of the sweetest watermelons from the Soviet Union’s southern republics — soon to be independent counties — rumbled into Moscow. The watermelons were given out free or next to nothing to anyone…
