In the wake of the failed hardline coup against him, Mikhail Gorbachev suspended all Communist Party activities throughout the Soviet Union. The move stripped the party of its central role in governing the state it had built since 1917, accelerating the dissolution of the USSR that would be completed within four months.
Days earlier, a cabal of hardline Communist officials had tried to seize power while Gorbachev vacationed in Crimea, only to see their coup collapse amid public defiance led by Boris Yeltsin, who famously climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament building. The plotters' incompetence and the visible refusal of troops to fire on protesters revealed how hollow Soviet authority had become.
Gorbachev returned to Moscow a weakened figure. Yeltsin, now the real power broker, pressured him to dismantle the very institution that had ruled the Soviet Union for nearly three-quarters of a century. Gorbachev's decree suspending party activities on Soviet territory was a stunning admission that the Communist Party could no longer be trusted to run the government it had created.
Within days, republics across the USSR began declaring independence. Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states moved swiftly toward sovereignty. By December, Gorbachev would resign, the Soviet flag would be lowered from the Kremlin for the last time, and the Cold War's great rival to American power would cease to exist.