Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union

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 the lives and security of citizens of the Soviet Union and the independence of our fatherland.’