The seventh anniversary of the Moscow palace coup that shook the world in August 1991 is almost upon us. The remnants of the old guard that controlled the Communist Party, the armed forces and the security apparatus tried to overthrow Gorbachev and thus save the socialist state from certain death, but instead dealt it the final blow.
One side in the struggle believed it was necessary to stop all the developments that had accompanied the Gorbachev regime, while the other wanted to speed up the process. Perestroika had fostered the growth of a market economy, while Glasnost undermined the authority of the totalitarian state and encouraged pluralism. Ironically, it was Boris Yeltsin who emerged victorious.
The Soviet working class was an important factor in this struggle.Their apathy is the best proof that the Soviet state was not the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and that the communist system was not the expression of their interests.
The working class's preferences were made abundantly clear during the presidential elections of 1996, when the leader of the Communist Party was not elected. Hatred of the totalitarian communist state superseded even popular resentment of widespread unemployment and organised crime. The destruction of the old system, rather than the search for an alternative, became imperative.
Russia took the world by surprise in 1917, two decades after the beginning of this century, with the socialist revolution. Two decades before the end of the century, it pulled off another coup de théâtre with the dramatic collapse of the socialist state.
*This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy director of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
The seventh anniversary of the Moscow palace coup that shook the world in August 1991 is almost upon us. The remnants of the old guard that controlled the Communist Party, the armed forces and the security apparatus tried to overthrow Gorbachev and thus save the socialist state from certain death, but instead dealt it the final blow.