Attempted coup in the USSR in 1991

USSR. Moscow. Flowers in the barrel of a tank of one of the units of the Taman Division, which sided with USSR President Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and RSFSR President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, at the House of Soviets of the RSFSR on Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment during an attempt by members of the State Emergency Committee (SEC) to carry out a coup d'etat. In order to prevent the signing of the Union Treaty, which was supposed to replace the USSR with a new federation of sovereign states, representatives of the highest Soviet leadership, headed by USSR Vice President Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev, removed the president of the USSR from power and declared a state of emergency in the country. Sergei Mamontov/TASS