The Fall of the USSR, Pt II

**Chuck Bryant** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh Clark** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Hey, Chuck, you ended the last one, you want to start this one?

**Chuck Bryant** (0:16)
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Charles W. Chuck Bryant, to my left is Josh Clark.
Jerry's here in spirit and in reality this time. So, this is part two of the fall of the Soviet Union.

**Josh Clark** (0:31)
Bravo.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:32)
I hated doing that, by the way.

**Josh Clark** (0:34)
Oh, you did?

**Chuck Bryant** (0:35)
Yeah, this feels like Robin putting on Batman's outfit or something. This is very strange.

**Josh Clark** (0:41)
How do you know it's not Robin who announces the podcast?

**Chuck Bryant** (0:44)
Or whatever, Batman putting on Robin's outfit, although I heard he did that on the side as a kink.

**Josh Clark** (0:49)
He did, but who among us hasn't dressed up like Robin from Batman?

**Chuck Bryant** (0:54)
That's true, or Josh Clark from Stuff You Should Know.

**Josh Clark** (0:56)
Which is one and the same.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:58)
Yeah, I dress up like you.

**Josh Clark** (1:00)
You do?

**Chuck Bryant** (1:02)
Yeah, big shirts and cute sweat shirts.

**Josh Clark** (1:05)
I have to say, you have stepped up your style game lately, and it's nice.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:11)
Hey, thanks.

**Josh Clark** (1:12)
Your traveling outfits are...

**Chuck Bryant** (1:15)
Well, I was always into clothes growing up, and then I wore t-shirts and cargo shorts for 25 years, and then remembered, hey, I like fashion.

**Josh Clark** (1:25)
Well, you brought it back. Yeah. You're basically the Tom Ford of the podcasting world.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:31)
All right, so where we left off, December 8, 1991, the USSR is formally dissolved by decree by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
No one knows what's going to happen next with Russia. We've kind of covered the satellite states and the Soviet states themselves and what happened there, but everyone was sort of like, all right, well, Russia's still there, and like, what the heck is going to happen? And who rolls into town? But Boris Yeltsin with a bottle of Stoly in his hand.

**Josh Clark** (2:00)
Yeah, and another one in his belly.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:02)
Yeah, for sure.

**Josh Clark** (2:03)
So Boris Yeltsin was the first president of Russia, which is kind of confusing because we said that Gorbachev was the president of the USSR. But remember, Russia and the USSR were not one in the same. So for a little while there, Russia itself had pretty much two presidents at the same time for a couple of months, while Gorbachev was still in power, and while Yeltsin, who had been popularly elected in June of 1991, while he was like, I'm president of Russia. So there was a, what you could call a bit of a power struggle. And despite that, it wasn't until a three-day coup was mounted, and they didn't plan for three days, they didn't know how long it was going to go on. It just turned out to be a three-day coup, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
It wasn't until that was mounted against Gorbachev that his power was eroded enough to take his position away and for Yeltsin to take over and take Russia straight into the hands of the West, the open arms of the West. And ironically, that coup was by hardliners who wanted to keep, who wanted to save Communism and the USSR. But instead, they managed to remove the power from the one guy who conceivably could have still helped that happen and gave it to the guy who was diametrically opposed to making that happen, Yeltsin.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:32)
Yeah, and it ended up being a failed coup technically, but it had the result of finally getting Gorbachev out of power. So in a way, it kind of worked, but it was technically a failed coup. What happened was Gorbachev came in with all these big sweeping reforms, and so the conservative elites that he had previously worked with were terrified, obviously, because their existence depended on the Soviet Union being the Soviet Union. So they were like, Gorbachev is a traitor.
In 1991, they put him under house arrest while he was on vacation in Crimea, and they sent tanks in to Moscow and took control of the government. They didn't storm the parliament building, but they lined up outside the parliament building. And then they made a mistake in that they let Boris Yeltsin, I keep saying Yeltsin, get on one of those tanks and address the people. And this is a time where they had not jammed the TV signals coming from outside the Soviet Union. So all of these Soviets all of a sudden are watching this unfold on the BBC or CNN, and they're seeing this Yeltsin guy sitting on top of a tank talking to them.