With the failed hardline coup against Gorbachev collapsing days earlier, the Communist Party's grip on Soviet institutions dissolved at astonishing speed by late August 1991. Republic after republic suspended party activities and seized central assets, a cascading collapse that would culminate in the formal dissolution of the USSR itself just months later.
The coup attempt of August 19-21, launched by hardliners hoping to halt Gorbachev's reforms and preserve the union, had instead accelerated the very collapse it sought to prevent. Boris Yeltsin's defiant stand atop a tank outside the Russian parliament became the iconic image of the coup's failure, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow a diminished figure.
By August 30, republics across the USSR were racing to declare or reaffirm independence, and party structures that had run the Soviet state for seven decades were being suspended, banned, or simply abandoned by their own officials.
Gorbachev himself would resign as party general secretary within days and formally dissolve the party's central apparatus, a stunning coda for an institution that had ruled a sixth of the earth's land surface. The USSR itself would cease to exist by December.
Key people: Mikhail Gorbachev