Attempted coup d'etat in the USSR in 1991

USSR. Moscow. Soviet T-72 Ural tanks at a barricade of trolleybuses erected by supporters of USSR President Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and RSFSR President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin at the Kalinin Bridge on Kutuzovsky Prospekt during the attempted coup d'état by members of the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR (GKChP). 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. Valery Khristoforov, Alexander Chumichev/TASS