The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy

Yeltsin, who had prevented the coup plotters from saving the USSR, now adopted that mission himself. With the central bureaucracy defeated and its leader, Gorbachev, weakened, the Yeltsin supporters launched a hostile takeover of Union structures. The ones they could not or did not want to take over, such as the Communist Party, were destroyed. This hostile takeover of the center by a leader much more powerful and dynamic than Gorbachev caused the other republics to rebel, declaring their independence. Yeltsin had to back down. The attempt to take over the Union gave way to negotiations on a confederative structure that would give Russia enough power to implement economic and social reform on its own, free of any restraints on the part of the conservative elites of the non-Russian republics.