A new book by the historian Robert Service revisits the three days in August 1991 when the Soviet Union's Marxist-Leninist system — 74 years old and still governing the largest country on Earth — effectively collapsed.

The August Coup: The Destruction of the Soviet Union and the Making of New Russia 1985–1991, published by Pan Macmillan on 11 June 2026, traces the arc from Mikhail Gorbachev's arrival in power in 1985 to the failed coup that sealed the USSR's fate. The Guardian, in a review published on 3 August 2026, describes Service as "the English-speaking world's foremost historian of 20th-century Russia and Bolshevism." The hardcover runs to 432 pages; a Kindle edition is also available on Amazon.

Gorbachev came to power intending to save the Soviet Union, the Guardian review notes. His two signature policies — perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) — were meant to modernise the system without dismantling it. Instead, Service argues, they proved wholly ineffective at stopping the rot. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. Within two years, the Soviet state itself was gone.

The coup that broke things open was launched in August 1991 by hard-line conservatives — old-guard Communists who feared Gorbachev's reforms had gone too far. The plot was headed by Vladimir Kryuchkov, the boss of the KGB, the Soviet Union's feared intelligence agency. According to Service's book, as quoted in the Guardian review, Kryuchkov was driven less by institutional self-interest than by a genuine alarm at the disintegration of the entire Soviet system.

But the coup was botched almost from the start. Acting president Gennady Yanayev, installed by the plotters, had reportedly been drinking solidly for an entire day. Many KGB officers refused to join the conspiracy. Within three days the coup had failed, and Gorbachev was back at his desk — but the damage was fatal. The man who had tried to save the USSR returned to find his authority shattered.

Four months later, at the end of 1991, Gorbachev was removed from power altogether by Boris Yeltsin, then president of the Russian Republic — the largest, richest and most effective part of the old USSR. The Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Service's account, drawing on decades of scholarship, frames the August coup not as a dramatic turning point in the usual sense but as the final act of a system that had already unravelled. The three days of bungled conspiracy simply made the collapse visible. The book covers the period 1985–1991, from reform to ruin, and positions the coup as the moment when the gap between the Soviet state's pretensions and its actual power became impossible to ignore.

For readers approaching the collapse of the Soviet Union for the first time, Service's book offers a single-volume account from a historian who has spent his career in the archive. For those already familiar with the story, the detail — the drinking, the KGB officers who held back, the quickness of the end — gives it the texture of a political thriller grounded in documented fact.