It was the sunny Saturday morning of August 24, the day on which Yeltsin upstaged Gorbachev at the funeral for the defenders of the White House and on which the Soviet leader stepped down as head of the Communist Party. What would happen in Kyiv that day would send a shock wave around the Soviet Union considerably greater than the one set off by that day’s events in Moscow. The second Soviet republic would declare its complete independence from the Union.
