In the intelligentsia’s mythology, 1991 was the year of Russia’s bloodless revolution. But it was not bloodless: its victims included the three men who died in Moscow in August and the nineteen people killed in Vilnius and Riga in January, and the hundreds who had died in Azerbaijan since 1988 and during the brutal breakup of a demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989.15 Nor was it a revolution. For the remainder of 1991 Yeltsin focused not on destroying the institutions of the Soviet state but on taking them over. He claimed, for his newly independent Russia, the army, the central bank, and
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