Western Bloc and NATO countries , left, is seen with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Bush condemned the coup and the actions of the "Gang of Eight". • :
Prime Minister of Australia Bob Hawke said that "The developments in the Soviet Union ... raise the question as to whether the purpose is to reverse the political and economic reforms which have been taking place. Australia does not want to see repression, persecution or vindictive actions against Gorbachev or those associated with him." External Affairs Minister
Barbara McDougall suggested on 20August 1991 that "Canada could work with any Soviet junta that promises to carry on Gorbachev's legacy".
Lloyd Axworthy and
Liberal Leader
Jean Chretien said Canada must join with other Western governments to back Russian President Boris Yeltsin, former Soviet Foreign Minister and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and others fighting for Soviet democracy." McDougall met with the
chargé d'affaires of the
Soviet embassy, Vasily Sredin. As part of the
NORAD defense network, the government acknowledged that any US-Soviet nuclear confrontation would directly impact Canada as well. Canadian leaders believed both the US and Canada would be treated as a single set of targets. • : Israeli officials said they hoped Gorbachev's attempted removal would not derail the
1991 Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in Madrid (co-sponsored by the US and USSR) or slow
Soviet Jewish immigration. The quasi-governmental
Jewish Agency, which coordinated the massive flow of
Jews arriving from the Soviet Union, called an emergency meeting to assess how the coup would affect Jewish immigration. "We are closely following what is happening in the Soviet Union with concern," Foreign Minister
David Levy said. "One might say that this is an internal issue of the Soviet Union, but in the Soviet Union ... everything internal has an influence for the entire world." Japan left open the question of the coup's legitimacy; government spokesman Taizo Watanabe said that "[the Soviet government has] the right to decide whether it is constitutional or unconstitutional. Japan notably differed from western states by not announcing an outright condemnation of the coup. " The Bush statement, drafted after a series of meetings with top aides, was much more forceful than the President's initial reaction that morning in Maine. It was in keeping with a Western effort to apply both diplomatic and economic pressure on the Soviet officials seeking to gain control of the country. On 2September, the United States re-recognized the independence of
Estonia,
Latvia and
Lithuania when Bush delivered the press conference in Kennebunkport. Secretary of State
James Baker issued a statement warning "The whole world is watching. Legitimacy in 1991 flows not from the barrel of a gun but from the will of the people. History cannot be reversed. Sooner or later your effort will fail." The coup also led several members of Congress such as
Sam Nunn,
Les Aspin, and
Richard Lugar to become concerned about the security of
Soviet weapons of mass destruction and the potential for
nuclear proliferation in existing unstable conditions. Despite public opposition to further aid to the Soviet Union and ambivalence from the Bush administration, they oversaw the ratification of the
Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991, authorizing the
Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program and providing funding to
post-Soviet states for the decommissioning of WMD stockpiles. Former president
Ronald Reagan said: • Meanwhile,
CPUSA Chairman
Gus Hall supported the coup, causing division within an already shrinking party. The CPSU had broken ties with the CPUSA in 1989 over the latter's condemnation of Perestroika. • :
Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen said the process of change in the Soviet Union could not be reversed. In a statement, he said "So much has happened and so many people have been involved in the changes in Soviet Union that I cannot see a total reversal." • :
Chancellor Helmut Kohl cut his Austrian vacation short and returned to
Bonn for an emergency meeting. He said he was sure Moscow would withdraw its remaining 272,000 troops from the
former East Germany on schedule.
Björn Engholm, leader of Germany's opposition
Social Democratic Party, urged member states of the
European Community "to speak with one voice" on the situation and said, "the West should not exclude the possibility of imposing economic and political sanctions on the Soviet Union to avoid a jolt to the right, in Moscow." In the aftermath of the coup,
Mohammad Najibullah came to resent the Soviets for abandoning him, writing to former Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze "I didn't want to be president, you talked me into it, insisted on it, and promised support. Now you are throwing me and the Republic of Afghanistan to its fate." In the winter of 1992, newly independent
Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan provided food aid to Mohammad Najibullah's of their own accord in an attempt to save the regime, also establishing contacts with the Mujahideen. The end of Soviet weapons deliveries caused the defection of militia leader
Abdul Rashid Dostum from
Mohammad Najibullah to
Ahmad Shah Massoud, spelling the end of the DRA in April 1992. • : During the coup, Communist
Party of Labour of Albania leader
Ramiz Alia was still in power, having won the
1991 Albanian parliamentary election. Encouraged by the coup's unraveling, three opposition parties demanded expedited reforms. The
1992 Albanian parliamentary election resulted in a crushing defeat for the now-democratic
Socialist Party of Albania, leading to Alia's resignation as president in favor of
Sali Berisha. Several Chinese people said that a key difference between the Soviet coup leaders' failed attempts to use tanks to crush dissent in Moscow and the hardline Chinese leaders' successful use of tank-led
People's Liberation Army forces during the
1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre was that the Soviet people had a powerful leader like Russian president Boris Yeltsin to rally around, whereas the Chinese protesters did not. The Soviet coup collapsed in three days without any major violence by the Soviet Army against civilians in June 1989, the
People's Liberation Army killed thousands of people to crush the democracy movement. • : Congo was already moving away from Marxism–Leninism and had organized a democratic conference in June. All references to Communism were removed from the Congolese Constitution in April 1992, yet former Soviet protégé
Denis Sassou Nguesso would later regain power and rule
Congo through to the present day. • : On August20, the Cuban Government issued a statement insisting on its neutrality, saying that the conflict was "not Cuba's to judge". In the same statement, Cuba also criticized the West for inciting divisions within the Soviet Union. A Western diplomat alleged that in private, Cuba's officials hoped the coup would succeed because the plotters would continue the
special Soviet relationship with their country. In September 1991, three-quarters of Cuba's consumer goods came from the USSR, underlining the importance of Soviet events to Cuba's leaders. As the Soviet coup unfolded, Cuban officials did not believe its leaders would prevail. While Gorbachev was in power,
Fidel Castro never agreed with Perestroika and in July 1991 had reiterated his position that there would be no changes in Cuba, saying "In this revolution there will be no changes of name or ideas." The end of Soviet assistance sparked the
Special Period crisis that would last ten years. • : As the coup began, newspapers published documents from the GKChP without comment or statements of support. Privately, the regime instructed its officials to support the coup to "defend Socialist achievements". North Korean diplomats were present in Moscow and kept informal contacts with Russians as events unfolded, including soldiers on the ground. By the end of the first day,
North Korea's embassy in Moscow reported to
Pyongyang that the coup would not succeed. At the time, there were changing attitudes in the north toward South Korea and a brief shootout at the
DMZ border. After the coup's failure, Vice President
Pak Song-chol said "The invincible might of our own style of socialism is being highly demonstrated," and the "North is basically stable" in a reference to
Juche. Pyongyang would later blame Perestroika for the fall of the USSR, calling "Gorbachev's wrong anti-socialist policy" a "
revisionist" one. The end of Soviet assistance was a direct cause of the
Arduous March that began in 1994. • : The coup came at a time when promised Soviet aid was being slowed and later halted. Vietnamese Communists decided to not embrace a multi-party system in Vietnam due to the experience of Perestroika. An unnamed official said that "Vietnam would probably not feel sorry to see [the end of the Soviet president's career] because Gorbachev has made many mistakes... too many compromises with the West. He has also made the position and the role of the Soviet Union in the world weaker." The official also said that Vietnam would benefit from a return to Communist rule in the Soviet Union. "These changes would also affect positively Vietnam's economy because the West would carry out a hard policy towards the Soviet Union, then the latter would look for trade relations with such countries as Vietnam and China." After the coup, top Communist Party official Thai Ninh was asked by foreign press if Vietnam felt betrayed by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. He answered, "It's better to let the Soviet people decide that". The failed coup prompted Vietnam to
normalize relations with China in November, ending the
Sino-Vietnamese conflicts of the 1980s. In a major political victory for China, Vietnam recognized the
State of Cambodia (SOC). Increasingly,
Beijing and
Hanoi felt an ideological affinity with one another and a mutual desire to resist American-led
Peaceful Evolution. Vietnam would look to
ASEAN for new trading partners in the aftermath of the
Soviet dissolution. • : The Coup was a profound event for all of Yugoslavia,
United Press International reported reactions from ordinary Yugoslavs including economist Dragan Radic who said "Gorbachev has done a lot for world peace and helped replace hard-line communist regimes in the past few years.Yet, the West failed to support Gorbachev financially and economically and he was forced to step down because he could not feed the Soviet people." Officially, President
Slobodan Milošević, in charge of
Serbia, was silent. Unofficially, there were numerous interactions between Yugoslavia and the USSR leading up to the start of the coup. The violent
breakup of Yugoslavia had begun the previous year. Political actors in both nations realized the similarities of their political situations. On the anti-communist side, separatists in the USSR were building relations with Yugoslavia's breakaway republics. At the end of July, Lithuania recognized Slovenia and in August, Georgia recognized Slovenia and Croatia's independence. On the side of hardliners, both nations had factions embracing a
red-brown coalition between traditional communists and ultranationalists to maintain the territorial integrity of both the USSR and Yugoslavia. In the weeks leading up to the coup, conservatives in the USSR were using the precedence of Yugoslavia as an excuse to violently suppress uprisings of non-Russians. In fact, Yugoslavia may have been a major cause for the Gang of Eight to believe their actions were necessary to prevent the USSR's collapse. When Yugoslav Prime Minister
Ante Marković visited Moscow in early August, Gorbachev pointed out the parallels between problems looming in both countries. Croatian president
Franjo Tuđman claimed in October that "Communist Yugoslav Generals" had openly supported the coup and that they had received instructions from Moscow. The victory of the democrats in the USSR had major implications for Yugoslavia. Yeltsin knew that Milošević had secretly supported Soviet conservatives and relations between the two were dismal. By the time the USSR collapsed, the problem of Yugoslavia had become a part of the Russian political landscape. Yeltsin and liberal elites would publicly take an even-handed approach and encourage international cooperation to solve the crisis. In contrast, post-Soviet conservatives looked to create advantages for Russia by supporting Orthodox Serbs in their struggle to control the remaining Yugoslav nations. Sociology Professor Veljko Vujačić assessed the similarities and differences between the breakup of Yugoslavia and dissolution of the Soviet Union. Both nations were multi-national Marxist–Leninist states with Slavic rulers facing major secessionist movements. In Serbia, patriotism was linked with statehood. Milošević told his nationalist followers that every generation of Serbs has had their own "
Kosovo battle", dating back to the 14th century. In contrast, Russian nationalists including
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn drew a distinction between 'patriotic' Russian people and the 'oppressive' Russian state. Boris Yeltsin and his followers saw the USSR as an oppressor of Russia, thereby accelerating the mostly peaceful division of the former Soviet Union. On 27April 1992, Yugoslavia formally disintegrated and with it vanished any mention of Marxist–Leninism in its
Serbian and Montenegrin successor state.
Former Warsaw Pact members The
Warsaw Pact had dissolved in July, and its members had rapidly changed, with
Marxist–Leninist pro-Soviet governments deposed or elected out of office. As a result, all criticized or expressed weary sentiments about events in Moscow. Some former Warsaw Pact members deployed armed forces to strategically important areas. • :
President Zhelyu Zhelev stated that "Such anti-democratic methods can never lead to anything good neither for the Soviet Union, nor for Eastern Europe, nor for the democratic developments in the world." • : As the coup was ongoing, Indian leaders indicated a degree of sympathy for Soviet hardliners.
Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao said "Mr. Gorbachev's ouster was a warning to people who favored reforms without controls." Likewise, India's ambassador in Moscow remarked that Gorbachev had "brought about the disintegration of the [Communist] party".
Chief Minister of West Bengal and
Communist Party of India (Marxist) cofounder
Jyoti Basu wholeheartedly endorsed the coup. When the coup failed, India's government changed course, celebrating "the reassertion of democratic values and a triumph for the will of the people." Despite official support for Yeltsin's victory, Indian politicians feared that a spill-over effect from the
dissolution of the Soviet Union would encourage secessionist movements at home. The loss of an economic partner and ideological friend upset the Rao Administration and India's leftist movement, as the
Indian National Congress felt it shared some of the CPSU's values. The
Christian Science Monitor wrote that "India feels orphaned – ideologically, strategically, economically" • :
Saddam Hussein was a close ally of the Soviet Union until Gorbachev denounced the
invasion of Kuwait that preceded the
Gulf War, and relations between the two countries had grown tense. One Iraqi spokesman quoted by the official
Iraqi News Agency said that "Iraq's right and steadfastness was one of the main reasons behind the fall [of Gorbachev]... because [Iraq] exposed [his] policy of treason and conspiracy. It is natural that we welcome such change like the states and people who were affected by the policies of the former regime." In other words, Hussein seemingly took credit for inspiring the coup. This position was echoed by the Jordanian Newspaper ''
Al Ra'i''. • : The Palestinian Liberation Organization was satisfied with the coup.
Yasser Abed Rabbo, who was a member of the
PLO Executive Committee, said he hoped the putsch "will permit resolution in the best interests of the Palestinians of the problem of Soviet Jews in Israel." ==Subsequent fate of GKChP Gang of Eight==