In late July 1991, a report from the Soviet security services to the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR, Leonid Kravchuk, described a scenario for the possible collapse of the USSR — predicted by analysts in the United States. Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the Soviet Security Service, would later claim that communist intelligence agencies had sensed the approaching collapse years earlier.
What happened behind the scenes of the August Coup, which made the dissolution of the USSR swift and irreversible? How did it come to pass that, of the four scenarios outlined in the CIA’s forecast, Ukrainians chose the most radical — “Collapse”?
This book reconstructs the events of 1991 day by day. It presents formerly classified archival documents from the CIA and Soviet security services, and for the first time compares the recollections of participants and witnesses to Ukraine’s independence — politicians, historians, and writers. It seeks to answer the question: who truly destroyed the empire of evil?
