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Article: Rulers and victims: the Russians in the Soviet Union: Geoffrey Hosking looks at the place of Russia within the Soviet Union, a position fraught with paradoxes that still resonate today.
- Article from:
- History Today
- Article date:
- April 1, 2006
- Author:
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THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION left one image that most of us remember: the Russian president Boris Yeltsin standing defiantly on top of a tank outside the White House, the Russian parliament building, on August 19th, 1991. The tank had been sent by the so-called 'Emergency Committee', which had 'temporarily' seized power in USSR in the absence of Soviet President Gorbachev (then on vacation), as part of a plan to arrest Yeltsin and put pressure on the Russian parliament. The Committee's aim, as they put it in a proclamation to the people, was to 'overcome the profound and comprehensive crisis, the political, ethnic and civil strife, the chaos and anarchy which threaten ...