A group of senior Communist Party and military officials, alarmed by Gorbachev's reforms and the impending signing of a new union treaty, isolated the Soviet leader at his Black Sea vacation home in Foros, demanding he declare a state of emergency or resign. Gorbachev refused. The coup collapsed within three days, but it fatally weakened Soviet authority and hastened the union's dissolution by year's end.
Gorbachev had gone to Crimea to prepare for the August 20 signing of a treaty that would have devolved significant power to the Soviet republics, effectively transforming the USSR into a looser confederation. Hardliners in the KGB, military, and party apparatus saw this as the death knell of the union they had spent their careers serving, and they moved to stop it.
On the morning of August 18, a delegation arrived at Gorbachev's dacha in Foros and found his phone lines, including the nuclear command line, already severed. They presented him an ultimatum. Gorbachev, according to his own later account, refused with characteristic bluntness, telling them to 'go to hell.' He and his family were confined under guard for three tense days while, in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament to rally resistance. The plotters lost their nerve, the coup unraveled, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow a diminished figure. Within months the Soviet Union he had tried to save no longer existed.
Key people: Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin