Historical Events
Tajikistan · Events 2
The Nationalities Crisis and the Collapse of Central Authority
The sequence running from the Sumgait pogrom of 1988 to the killings in Vilnius in 1991 is the process by which the Soviet national order and Soviet central authority came apart together under perestroika. The four episodes were not of one kind. Sumgait was an anti-Armenian pogrom touched off by the Nagorno-Karabakh question and a failure of policing; Tbilisi in 1989 was the military dispersal of an unarmed national and independence movement; Baku in 1990 was a large military intervention where ethnic violence and the collapse of central power overlapped; Vilnius in 1991 was force used against the sovereign institutions of a republic that had declared independence. Yet they show one crisis. The centre could not protect people from ethnic violence, and still reached for the army whenever a republic moved politically away from it.
The August Coup and the Collapse of the USSR
In August 1991, hardliners seeking to stop the signing of a new union treaty confined Gorbachev and set up a State Committee for the State of Emergency to stage a coup. Led by Kryuchkov, Yazov, Pavlov and others, the coup collapsed within three days as Yeltsin resisted atop a tank and citizens rallied. The coup’s failure only accelerated the dissolution of the union.