Attempted coup d'etat in the USSR in 1991

USSR. Moscow. Protesting supporters of USSR President Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and RSFSR President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin near a barricade of trolleybuses near the Tchaikovsky Tunnel on the Garden Ring on the night of August 20-21, 1991, during an attempt by members of the State Committee on the State of Emergency in the USSR (GKChP) to carry out a coup in the country. 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. Andrei Solovyov/TASS