Plausibility check: Hardliner Soviet coup succeeds

By 1991 the Soviet Union was all but gone.
Peaceful revolutions had ousted most of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe (violent in the case of Romania), East Germany had been relinquished and allowed to reunify, the Baltics, the Caucasus and the Central Asian states were de facto independent from Moscow, and even the Russian SSR itself was ignoring the central government in what was called the "War of Laws".

In the face of all this massive disintegration and unrest taking place, the 1991 coup looks like a very feeble, late attempt to restore the hardliners to power.
They placed Gorbachev on house arrest rather than summarily executing him. They failed to arrest important figures like Yeltsin, Silayev or Khasbulatov.

Yanayev, the coup's figurehead, claims he was hesitant about it until the very last second. On his TV nationwide address to the Soviet Union he appeared to be drunk and shaking.

When Yeltsin had roused the Russian people to resist the coup, repression and an operation to take over the Russian White House was ordered and organized, but General Lebed spoke against it, and Yazov ultimately ordered the troops to pull out from Moscow.

The coup plotters hesitated, they did not know what to do. They had no stomach for the bloodshed that would have been needed to consolidate their authority. (Thankfully!)

Eventually, Gorbachev restored communications with the outside world and the coup collapsed.

My question is, is there any way this coup could have succeeded or was it doomed from the start? Is 1991 simply too late for a hardliner restoration of CPSU control?

Could a coup have taken place earlier, say 1987 or 1989?

What would happen in such a scenario?
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
I can think of several TLs on this site which cover a coup before the end in 1991. I written two myself and others have done the same thing.
 
I think the best chance is before the Eastern Bloc fell in 1989. Perhaps a coup that stops all of this. To me, this story is more interesting than most follow on stories exploring the divergences.
 

GarethC

Donor
Can a coup succeed if the plotters were less drunk, less old, and less tentative?

Sure.

The question of whether it can restore the USSR without falling victim to a counter-coup or collapsing in a civil war is more complex and significantly less sure.

I have a vague recollection that Western intelligence agencies were ready to foment public unrest in the Baltics (with assets and materiel in place to assist the locals) at the time, FWIW.

While you can keep the RSFSR communist, at least for awhile, and the Central Asian states were, while independent, not making a big deal about it like the European satellites were, the fundamental issue remains that the Russian economy was a disaster. For decades, the information that was fed to the central bureaucracy about the performance of every sector in the country was basically just made up. Every single industry missed its targets for input and output and then lied about it. Which meant that where the economy had touchpoints with inflexible interfaces like externalities or consumers, it failed to deliver.

There's a truism about how the Russian people demand one of bread, empire, and revolution, and the Tsar can only sometimes choose which. In 1990, any coup would need some sort of triple-entry bookkeeping (Credit, Debit, Twilight Zone) just to keep the bread and cabbage in the shops. The conscript RKKA was paid in arrears - but paying the troops won't help if the stores don't have food for them to buy.

So, this being an AH site, the situation is one in which unpaid conscripts are being asked to repress civil unrest when their own situation is pretty close to that of the protesters, and its really down to authorial fiat as to how the discpline and loyalty of the former compares to the anger and desperation of the latter.

My own guess is that a more dynamic coup ends up pretty much exactly like Ceaucescu, though after a lot of people get killed in a lot of nasty urban fighting with troops on both sides, but the time between the coup succeeding and the wheels coming off is probably about 6 months or so, to let the economic pressures bed in, the troops get bored of feeling like winners when their parents are out of food and vodka, and the pot to come to the boil when the weather gets a bit nicer in the spring.
 
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