In the autumn of 1988, the Independent magazine sent me to Estonia to report on the Kremlin’s waning power in the Soviet Baltic. Alexander Chancellor, the editor, sensed that the USSR was in trouble: Estonia was agitating for independence; Poland, Hungary and other Eastern bloc states on the edge of the Slavic world were sure to follow. I decided to travel to Estonia by ferry from Helsinki. A hammer and sickle ensign flapped red from the stern; lifeboat instructions were in Cyrillic only. 

In the capital, Tallinn, an air of indigence hung over the Soviet shops where Estonians queued hopefully for scrag ends of meat. The foyer of the Intourist hotel where I was staying teemed with money-changers (‘Comrade, we do deal?’) and prostitutes from Tashkent and other parts of Soviet Central Asia where the red star of revolution had never shone that brightly. The top floor officially did not exist; it was occupied by the KGB, whose in-room listening devices and electronic limpets (fitted to the underside of restaurant dinner plates) came to light only after Estonia broke free of the Kremlin in 1991. The talk was of Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic reforms but the common complaint in Tallinn was ‘vene värk!’ (Russian stuff!): it was easier to find a packet of Moscow cigarettes than a tin of Baltic sprats. Soviet tanks were stationed in front of the parliament building in the Upper Town and a fleet of black ZiL limousines with curtained windows was parked outside my hotel: nomenklatura.

Cold War Tallinn was effectively a Soviet garrison city. Kremlin hard-­liners were aghast that Estonia had become a display case for Gorbachev’s plan to introduce controlled profit-­making into the Soviet command economy and, as Robert Service puts it in his superb new book on the USSR’s collapse, eradicate ‘seventy years of communist rigidity’. It was unthinkable that a Politburo stalwart like Gorbachev could relinquish control over any of the fifteen Soviet republics unless militarily defeated. Did he want to sink the Soviet ship of state? Not since Lenin had revitalised the Russian economy with his New Economic Policy of 1921 had the free market raised its head in this way. How would it end?

In The August Coup, Service examines in detail the last days in power of Gorbachev, who learned too late that an absolutist regime is at its most vulnerable when it sets out to reform itself. In August 1991, Gorbachev’s own Communist Party allies mounted a coup against him. KGB agents and Soviet border guards loyal to the sanctity of the USSR detained the beleaguered leader and his wife, Raisa, at gunpoint in their holiday villa on Crimea’s Black Sea. Far from saving the great Slavic superstate, however, the putschists accelerated its disintegration. Two days later, on 20 August, Estonia became the first Soviet vassal state to assert its full sovereignty. Moscow protested, but the impulse for reform was by now unstoppable.

In early November 1991, six years after Gorbachev initiated his reforms, the newly appointed Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, visibly inflamed with vodka, banned the Communist Party. The red flag was then taken down from the Kremlin towers and replaced by the pre-revolutionary white, blue and red tricolour devised by Peter the Great. The USSR was now a sandpile ready to slide. On 1 December, Ukraine, the largest of the non-Russian Soviet republics, voted overwhelmingly for independence. The day after Christmas that momentous year, the USSR suffered what historians call ‘State Death’ when it was officially dissolved by Yeltsin and his advisers. Fifteen independent countries emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, the largest being the Russian Federation; the smallest, Estonia. Gorbachev was finished. Under a more autocratic ruler, the USSR might have limped on by whipping restive states like Estonia into line. But, Service contends, the Soviet Union had become too clogged with corruption and political cynicism to absorb much of Gorbachev’s enlightened guidance.

Service, now in his late seventies, is one of our finest historians of Soviet Russia. In order to reconstruct the years leading up to the August coup, he has minutely scrutinised Communist Party parliamentary files and memoirs by leading Politburo figures. His book is over 400 pages long but I was never once bored. At first, many Russians supported Gorbachev in his mission for glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). His assumption that exposing the crimes of the Stalinist past would somehow strengthen and purify Soviet socialism was nonetheless misguided. The Moscow-centred reform movement under Gorbachev lifted the ban on countless anti-Bolshevik books and films, but there was suddenly too much to read, and what Russians were likely to read was apt to undermine rather than shore up their faith in Lenin’s revolutionary legacy. Vasily Grossman’s great novel of Russia during the war against Hitler, Life and Fate, which had been confiscated in typescript by the KGB in the early 1960s because it dared to compare Nazism to Stalinism, was published to acclaim in Moscow in 1988. To what end? Russia had existed as an absolutist regime for so long that it could not suddenly reinvent itself as a democratic nation-state.

Estonia and the other non-Russian republics took Gorbachev’s reforms further and faster than he was prepared to allow. Even then, Gorbachev could not seriously have anticipated that communist regimes across Eastern and Central Europe would disappear in his lifetime. Socialism had history on its side – until history went off the rails. Service describes the USSR as its ‘own kind of empire’. The term had not been applied to the Soviet Union by its communist leaders because only plutocrats ran empires. However, once the USSR was seen as an empire, its abrupt disintegration could be ascribed to the Soviet peripheries or ‘colonies’, such as Estonia, liberating themselves from the imperial centre in Moscow. For the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinksi, the USSR was ‘the last colonial empire on earth’ – an imperium, he called it. 

Considering the magnitude of what happened during the last days of the USSR, remarkably few people died. The deaths, millions of them, would come later, Service reminds us, in the interethnic rivalries over Chechnya and Nagorno-Karabakh, and in Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. News of the USSR’s demise led many in the West to believe, instead, that Europe’s long search for peace was finally over and that German unification in 1990 had brought the Second World War to its belated formal close. Francis Fukuyama’s much-read tract, The End of History and the Last Man, from 1992, provided a slogan for the euphoric mood and the belief that the supposed endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution had been reached. 

What had come to an end was not history at all, of course, but an imperium whose time had run out. In the Western hubris that followed Gorbachev’s tragic governance, no one paused to think that an autocrat might one day return to offer the Russian people mythic dreams of nationalist redemption or that, as Fukuyama himself later put it, there might be ‘an emptiness at the core of liberalism’. Western democracy and liberal democratic capitalism were so obviously vindicated as the source of prosperity that they were viewed as universal, says Service. A decade of unimpeded American hegemony profited from the death of the USSR as Yeltsin’s post-Soviet Russia opened up its markets to transatlantic investment and goods, with a fulfilment of the US political commentator Thomas Friedman’s personal wish: ‘I want everyone to become an American.’ McDonald’s and Coca-Cola moved in while the Russian oligarchs stripped the dead state of its assets. The August Coup – a work of quite exceptional scholarship and narrative verve – is the beginning of wisdom in these matters.