Cold War (1945-⁠91): origin, end and impact | ISC Class 12 History Notes

This note covers the Cold War (1945-91): the end of wartime unity and the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, Molotov Plan, COMECON and Cominform, Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe including the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Blockade, NATO and the division of Germany, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Détente and its effects on Eastern Europe, the downfall of communism in Poland and East Germany, and the reasons for the breakup of the USSR including the 1991 coup and the demand for independence by the Soviet republics.

Background: The End of Wartime Unity

During the Second World War, the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union had fought together against Nazi Germany.

This wartime alliance was always an uneasy one: the Western powers were capitalist democracies, while the Soviet Union was a one-party communist state built on the ideals of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Once Germany's defeat became certain, the wartime partners met to settle the shape of the post-war world, and it was in these settlements that the seeds of mutual suspicion were sown.

At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin agreed on the occupation of a defeated Germany by the Allied powers, on free elections in the liberated states of Eastern Europe, and on the creation of the United Nations.

At the Potsdam Conference of July to August 1945, held after Roosevelt's death and Germany's surrender, Harry Truman, Clement Attlee and Stalin settled German reparations and the administration of occupied Germany, but could not agree on how the Soviet-liberated states of Eastern Europe would actually be governed.

The ambiguity of these wartime agreements, and the Soviet Union's rapid installation of friendly governments across Eastern Europe, convinced the Western powers that Stalin intended to keep the region under permanent communist control.

This breakdown of the wartime partnership between 1945 and 1947 is usually treated as the true beginning of the Cold War.

Definition: Cold War. A prolonged state of political, ideological, economic and military rivalry between the capitalist bloc led by the United States and the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, from 1945 to 1991, that stopped short of direct armed conflict between the two superpowers.

Why did the Cold War Begin?

Once the wartime allies drifted apart, each superpower built an institutional framework to bind its own bloc together and to resist the other's expansion. The United States adopted a policy of containment: stopping the spread of communism wherever it appeared, rather than trying to roll it back by force.

The American response: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan

In 1947, President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine, promising American economic and military aid to any country resisting communist takeover, beginning with Greece and Turkey.

Later that year, the United States launched the Marshall Plan, a large programme of economic aid to help the war-shattered economies of Western Europe recover, on the reasoning that prosperous, stable states would be less likely to turn to communism.

The Soviet response: the Molotov Plan, COMECON and Cominform

The Soviet Union viewed the Marshall Plan as an attempt to draw Eastern Europe into the American economic orbit and refused to let its satellite states accept it.

Instead, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov announced the Molotov Plan in 1947, a system of bilateral trade agreements that bound the economies of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.

This was formalised in 1949 as COMECON (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), a Soviet-led economic organisation for the socialist bloc.

Politically, the Soviet Union set up the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) in 1947 to coordinate the policies of communist parties across Europe and keep them aligned with Moscow. Together, these moves split Europe into two rival economic and political camps.

How did the Rift with Eastern Europe Widen, 1945-48?

Between 1945 and 1948, the Soviet Union steadily tightened its grip on the countries its army had liberated from Nazi occupation: Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany were all given communist governments modelled closely on the Soviet system, with the Communist Party as the only effective political force and the economy brought under state planning.

The term "Iron Curtain", used by Churchill in a famous 1946 speech, described this division of the continent into a Western, capitalist half and an Eastern, communist half.

The most dramatic single episode of this process was the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948.

Czechoslovakia had kept a multi-party coalition government after the war, but in February 1948 the communist members of that government, backed by Soviet pressure, forced out the non-communist ministers and took full control of the state.

This coup, coming in a country that many in the West had hoped would remain genuinely democratic, alarmed Western governments and hardened their conviction that the Soviet Union would use any method, including the suppression of elected governments, to extend its control.

It directly influenced the decision of Western Europe and North America to form a permanent military alliance the following year.

Note: Students sometimes confuse the Cominform (1947), a political body that coordinated communist parties, with COMECON (1949), an economic body that organised trade and planning among Soviet-bloc states. Keep the two separate: one was ideological control, the other was economic integration.

What were the Major Cold War Crises?

The Berlin Blockade, NATO and the division of Germany

After the war, defeated Germany was occupied in four zones (American, British, French and Soviet), and the capital, Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, was itself divided into four sectors.

When the Western powers moved in 1948 to introduce a common currency in their zones, Stalin responded by blockading all road, rail and canal access to the Western sectors of Berlin, hoping to force the Western Allies out of the city.

The Western powers answered with the Berlin Airlift, flying in food, fuel and other supplies to West Berlin for almost a year until Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949.

The crisis convinced the Western powers to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in April 1949, a military alliance committing its members to mutual defence against attack.

In the same year, Germany was formally split into the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and in 1961 East Germany built the Berlin Wall, a barrier more than 150 kilometres long separating East from West Berlin, to stop its citizens fleeing to the West.

The Soviet Union answered NATO in 1955 by forming its own military alliance of Eastern European states, the Warsaw Pact.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

The most dangerous single confrontation of the Cold War came in October 1962, when American reconnaissance discovered that the Soviet Union, under Nikita Khrushchev, was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, close enough to strike most of the United States within minutes.

President John F. Kennedy responded with a naval blockade (a "quarantine") of Cuba and demanded the missiles' removal.

For thirteen tense days the two superpowers stood on the brink of nuclear war, until Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret undertaking to remove American missiles from Turkey.

The crisis frightened both sides so deeply that it led directly to confidence-building measures, including a direct telephone "hotline" between Washington and Moscow and the first nuclear test-ban treaty in 1963, and is widely seen as the turning point that pushed both superpowers towards more careful management of their rivalry.

What was Détente, and why did it happen?

Détente (a French word meaning the relaxation of tension) describes the period, mainly through the 1970s, when the United States and the Soviet Union deliberately eased the confrontation of the early Cold War.

Several reasons drove this shift: both superpowers had reached rough nuclear parity, making a direct war ruinously dangerous for both; the huge cost of the arms race was straining both economies; and leaders on both sides, notably Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Leonid Brezhnev, judged that negotiated limits on weapons served their own interests better than open confrontation.

The most visible results were the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which produced the SALT I agreement in 1972 capping certain categories of missiles, and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, in which Western and Eastern European states, together with the two superpowers, agreed to recognise existing European borders in exchange for Soviet-bloc commitments on human rights.

Détente had an important, if unintended, effect on Eastern Europe: the human-rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords gave dissident groups inside the Soviet bloc, such as Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, a legal peg on which to hang their demands for greater freedom, even though their own governments had signed the agreement without intending to honour it.

Détente itself proved fragile: it broke down after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which the West saw as a return to Soviet expansionism and which led to a renewed, costly arms build-up in the early 1980s.

How did Communism Collapse in Poland and East Germany?

By the late 1980s, the economic and political strains that had been building up for years inside the Soviet bloc broke into the open, and two of the most important breakdowns occurred in Poland and East Germany.

In Poland, worker discontent over food prices led to strikes at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980, out of which emerged Solidarity, an independent trade union led by Lech Wałęsa, the first such organisation permitted (briefly) in the Soviet bloc.

The communist government imposed martial law in 1981 and banned Solidarity, but could not restore its own legitimacy or fix the economy.

Round-table talks between the government and Solidarity in 1989 led to partly free elections, which Solidarity won overwhelmingly, producing the first non-communist-led government in the Soviet bloc.

In East Germany, mounting popular demonstrations through 1989, encouraged by the fact that neighbouring Hungary had already opened its border and that the new Soviet leadership showed no sign of intervening, forced the communist government to open the border crossings.

On 9 November 1989, crowds began tearing down the Berlin Wall, which had stood for twenty-eight years and had symbolised the division of the capitalist and communist worlds.

This event is usually taken as marking the beginning of the end of the communist bloc, and it was followed within a year by the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990.

One after another, the eight East European countries that had formed the Soviet bloc replaced their communist governments in response to this wave of mass demonstrations, and the Soviet Union, under Gorbachev, did not intervene militarily to stop them.

Draw Berlin split into four occupation sectors in 1945, then into West Berlin and East Berlin from 1949, with the Berlin Wall built in 1961 running through the city; mark the fall of the Wall on 9 November 1989 and German reunification in 1990.

Why did the USSR Break Up?

The Soviet Union was more than a country; it was the leader of an entire bloc, held together by the Warsaw Pact and the one-party rule of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Its collapse in 1991 had several interlocking causes.

First, there were deep internal weaknesses. The Soviet economy had become stagnant by the late 1970s: wages continued to grow, but productivity and technology fell far behind the West, consumer goods were in chronic shortage, and food imports rose every year.

A huge share of resources went into maintaining a nuclear and military arsenal and into subsidising the Eastern European satellite states and the Central Asian republics, a burden the system could no longer bear.

Politically, the Communist Party had ruled for over seventy years without being accountable to the people, and ordinary citizens were alienated by slow administration, rampant corruption and the inability of the system to correct its own mistakes.

Second, Mikhail Gorbachev, who became General Secretary in March 1985, tried to save the system through the reform policies of perestroika (economic and political restructuring) and glasnost (openness), but these reforms set in motion forces that proved impossible to control.

Some sections of society felt the reforms moved too slowly, while Communist Party hardliners felt their own power and privileges were being eroded too fast; Gorbachev lost support on both sides.

The reforms also changed the political system itself. In March 1989 elections to a new Congress of People's Deputies allowed contested seats for the first time. In March 1990 the Communist Party lost its constitutional monopoly of power when Article 6 of the Soviet constitution was amended, opening the way to other parties, and the Congress elected Gorbachev to the new post of President of the USSR.

In June 1991 Boris Yeltsin became President of Russia by popular vote, giving the largest republic a leader with his own mandate. Gorbachev's last attempt to hold the union together was a new Union Treaty giving the republics far more power; it was due to be signed on 20 August 1991, and the hardliners' coup was launched the day before to stop it.

Third, and most immediately, the rise of nationalism and demands for sovereignty inside the fifteen Soviet republics proved decisive.

The independence movement began in Lithuania in June 1988 and spread to Estonia and Latvia; in March 1990 Lithuania became the first republic to declare independence, and in June 1990 the Russian parliament itself declared Russia's sovereignty, putting its own laws above those of the Soviet Union.

Nationalist feeling turned out to be strongest not in the economically backward Central Asian republics, as many had expected, but in the more "European" and prosperous Baltic states, Russia, Ukraine and Georgia, whose peoples felt they were paying too high an economic price to keep the backward areas inside the union.

Matters came to a head with the coup of August 1991, when Communist Party hardliners tried to seize power from Gorbachev while he was on holiday.

The coup collapsed within days largely because Boris Yeltsin, by then the elected President of Russia, led popular resistance against it in Moscow and emerged as a national hero.

In December 1991, under Yeltsin's leadership, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared the 1922 treaty that had created the USSR annulled and set up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS); eight more republics joined soon after.

On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union, and the USSR ceased to exist.

1. Gorbachev becomes General Secretary in March 1985 and launches perestroika and glasnost.
2. Independence movements spread across the Baltic republics from 1988 and the first republic (Lithuania) declares independence in March 1990.
3. Communist Party hardliners stage an abortive coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, which Yeltsin's resistance defeats.
4. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus annul the 1922 union treaty and form the CIS in December 1991.
5. Gorbachev resigns on 25 December 1991, formally ending the Soviet Union.

How did Different Groups Participate in the Cold War and its End?

The superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union

The two superpowers drove the Cold War at every stage: the United States through containment, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO; the Soviet Union through the Molotov Plan, Cominform, COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.

Their leaders, from Truman and Stalin through Kennedy and Khrushchev to Nixon, Brezhnev and finally Gorbachev and the first President Bush, negotiated the crises, the arms-control treaties and ultimately the terms on which the Cold War ended.

The peoples of Eastern Europe

Ordinary citizens of the Soviet bloc were not passive bystanders. Polish workers formed Solidarity in 1980 and kept it alive underground after it was banned in 1981; East Germans staged mass demonstrations through 1989 that forced open the Berlin Wall;

Czechoslovak dissidents used the human-rights clauses of the 1975 Helsinki Accords to press their own governments. These popular movements, not military defeat, were what actually brought down the communist governments of Eastern Europe.

Reformers and hardliners within the Soviet Union

Inside the USSR itself, Gorbachev's reforms divided opinion sharply. Reformers who felt change was too slow, Communist Party hardliners who felt their privileges were threatened, and nationalist leaders in the republics, especially Boris Yeltsin in Russia, each pulled the Soviet system in different directions.

The abortive coup of August 1991 and Yeltsin's resistance to it were the decisive clash between these groups, and Yeltsin's victory determined that the Soviet Union would be dismantled rather than reformed.

Alliances versus Détente: How do the Two Phases of the Cold War Differ?

The Cold War is often divided into an early confrontational phase, built around rigid alliance blocs and crisis after crisis, and a later phase of Détente, when the superpowers deliberately managed their rivalry. The table below sets out the main differences.

Timeline of the Cold War, 1945-91

What was the Impact and Significance of the Cold War's End?

The end of the Cold War, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the breakup of the USSR in 1991, brought about three broad and enduring changes in world politics.

First, it ended the ideological confrontation between capitalism and socialism that had driven the arms race and the division of Europe into rival military blocs for over four decades.

Second, it changed the balance of power: with the Soviet Union gone, the United States emerged as the sole superpower, and institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund became powerful advisers to the former communist states as they tried to shift to capitalist economies, a process known as shock therapy.

Third, the breakup created many new independent countries, from the Baltic states to the Central Asian republics, each with its own foreign-policy choices: some sought membership of NATO and the European Union, while others, especially in Central Asia, sought to balance ties with Russia, China and the West.

The transition was often painful. In Russia, the old state-controlled industrial system nearly collapsed as most industries were rapidly privatised, the value of the rouble fell sharply, inflation wiped out savings, and the collective-farm system broke down, leaving the country dependent on food imports;

Russia's real GDP in 1999 was still below its 1989 level. Several former Soviet republics also saw violent conflict in the years after independence, including secessionist fighting in Chechnya, and a long civil war in Tajikistan, while beyond the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia broke up violently in the Balkans.

Glossary

• Cold War — the rivalry between the US-led capitalist bloc and the Soviet-led communist bloc from 1945 to 1991, fought through diplomacy, propaganda and proxy conflicts rather than direct war.
• Iron Curtain — the political and ideological boundary dividing communist Eastern Europe from the capitalist West after 1945.
• Containment — the American policy of stopping the spread of communism beyond its existing borders, without trying to reverse it by force.
• Truman Doctrine — the 1947 American pledge to give aid to countries resisting communist takeover, beginning with Greece and Turkey.
• Marshall Plan — the 1947 American programme of economic aid to rebuild Western Europe after the Second World War.
• Molotov Plan — the 1947 Soviet system of trade agreements binding the economies of Eastern Europe to the USSR.
• Cominform — the Communist Information Bureau, set up in 1947 to coordinate communist parties under Soviet direction.
• COMECON — the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the 1949 Soviet-led economic organisation of the socialist bloc.
• NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the 1949 Western military alliance for mutual defence.
• Warsaw Pact — the 1955 Soviet-led military alliance of Eastern European communist states.
• Détente — the period of deliberately reduced tension between the superpowers, mainly through the 1970s.
• Perestroika — Gorbachev's policy of economic and political restructuring in the USSR from 1985.
• Glasnost — Gorbachev's policy of openness and freer public discussion in the USSR from 1985.
• Shock therapy — the rapid, World Bank and IMF-influenced transition of post-communist economies to capitalism through privatisation and free trade.
• Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — the loose association formed by Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and most other former Soviet republics after the USSR's dissolution in December 1991.

Common errors and misconceptions

• Misconception: Détente ended the Cold War. Correct: Détente was only a period of eased tension in the 1970s; it broke down after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the Cold War itself did not end until 1989-91.
• Misconception: The Marshall Plan and the Molotov Plan were the same scheme under different names. Correct: The Marshall Plan was American aid to Western Europe; the Molotov Plan was the Soviet alternative binding Eastern Europe to the USSR.
• Misconception: NATO and the Warsaw Pact were formed at the same time. Correct: NATO was formed in 1949 after the Berlin Blockade; the Warsaw Pact followed six years later, in 1955.
• Misconception: The Berlin Wall was built at the start of the Cold War. Correct: It was built only in 1961, more than a decade after the Cold War began, and it fell in 1989.
• Misconception: The Soviet Union collapsed because of a Western military victory. Correct: It collapsed mainly due to internal economic stagnation, political alienation, and nationalist demands for independence within its own republics.
• Misconception: Gorbachev wanted to break up the Soviet Union. Correct: Gorbachev wanted to reform and strengthen the system through perestroika and glasnost; the breakup was an unintended consequence of the forces these reforms released.
• Misconception: Communism fell in Poland and East Germany through armed revolution. Correct: In both countries, it fell through sustained peaceful protest, negotiation and mass demonstration, not armed uprising.

Exam-style questions with model answers

Q1. Name the body set up by the Soviet Union in 1947 to coordinate the policies of communist parties in Europe. [1 mark]

1. The Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), set up in 1947.

Q2. In which year was the Berlin Wall built, and in which year did it fall? [2 marks]

1. It was built in 1961.
2. It fell on 9 November 1989.

Q3. State any four reasons why the Western powers formed NATO in 1949. [4 marks]

1. The 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia had alarmed Western governments about Soviet methods of taking over states.
2. The Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 showed that the Soviet Union was willing to use direct pressure against the Western-occupied zones.
3. Western Europe wanted a formal mutual-defence guarantee against any further Soviet expansion.
4. The Soviet Union's tightening control over Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1948 made a permanent military alliance seem necessary for collective security.

Q4. Distinguish between the causes of the Cold War's confrontation phase and the reasons for Détente in the 1970s. [4 marks]

1. The confrontation phase arose from the breakdown of wartime unity after Yalta and Potsdam and from rival alliance-building through the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, Molotov Plan and Cominform.
2. It was marked by direct crises such as the Berlin Blockade (1948-49) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
3. Détente, by contrast, arose because both superpowers had reached rough nuclear parity, making war ruinously dangerous.
4. The high cost of the arms race and the leadership choices of Nixon, Kissinger and Brezhnev pushed both sides towards negotiated limits such as SALT I (1972) rather than confrontation.

Q5. In 1989, Solidarity in Poland and the mass demonstrators in East Germany both brought down communist rule within the same year. Discuss how communism collapsed in each of these two countries. [8 marks]

1. In Poland, worker strikes at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980 led to the formation of Solidarity, an independent trade union led by Lech Wałęsa.
2. The communist government banned Solidarity and imposed martial law in 1981, but could not restore its own economic or political legitimacy.
3. Round-table talks between the government and Solidarity took place in 1989.
4. Partly free elections in 1989 were won overwhelmingly by Solidarity, producing the first non-communist-led government in the Soviet bloc.
5. In East Germany, popular demonstrations mounted through 1989, encouraged by Hungary opening its border and by the Soviet Union's refusal to intervene.
6. The East German government was forced to open its border crossings.
7. On 9 November 1989, crowds began tearing down the Berlin Wall, which had stood for twenty-eight years.
8. Both collapses happened through sustained peaceful protest and negotiation rather than armed revolution, and both were followed within a year by democratic elections and, in Germany's case, reunification in 1990.

Q6. Analyse any four reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. [4 marks]

1. Long economic stagnation produced chronic consumer shortages and rising food imports, while productivity and technology fell far behind the West.
2. The Communist Party had ruled for over seventy years without being accountable to the people, breeding corruption and alienation.
3. Gorbachev's reforms of perestroika and glasnost, begun in 1985, set in motion forces that divided and weakened support for his leadership on all sides.
4. Nationalist movements for independence in the Baltic republics, Russia, Ukraine and Georgia, together with the failed coup of August 1991, made the union impossible to hold together.

Q7. Explain the causes and effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. [4 marks]

1. The crisis was caused by the Soviet Union, under Khrushchev, secretly installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, close enough to threaten most of the United States.
2. President Kennedy responded with a naval blockade of Cuba and demanded the missiles' removal, bringing the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.
3. Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret removal of American missiles from Turkey.
4. The crisis frightened both sides enough to lead to confidence-building measures such as a direct hotline between Washington and Moscow and the first nuclear test-ban treaty of 1963.

Key takeaways

• The Cold War began when wartime unity broke down after the Yalta (1945) and Potsdam (1945) Conferences and rival blocs formed through the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, Molotov Plan, Cominform and COMECON.
• The communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 convinced the West that the Soviet Union would use any method to extend control over Eastern Europe.
• The Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 led directly to the formation of NATO in 1949 and the formal division of Germany.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War and pushed both superpowers towards more cautious management of their rivalry.
• Détente in the 1970s eased tension through treaties such as SALT I (1972) but broke down after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
• Communist governments in Poland and East Germany fell in 1989 through sustained popular protest, led respectively by Solidarity and by mass demonstrations against the Berlin Wall.
• The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 due to economic stagnation, political alienation, the unintended consequences of Gorbachev's reforms, and nationalist demands for independence that culminated in the failed August 1991 coup.
• The end of the Cold War left the United States as the sole superpower, pushed former communist states into painful "shock therapy" transitions, and created many new independent states with their own foreign policies.

Test yourself

What was the Truman Doctrine?

It was the 1947 American policy of giving economic and military aid to countries resisting communist takeover, beginning with Greece and Turkey.

Which event in 1948 convinced the West that the Soviet Union would use any method to control Eastern Europe?

The communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, in which communist ministers forced out the non-communist members of the coalition government.

Why did the Western powers launch the Berlin Airlift in 1948-49?

To supply West Berlin by air with food and fuel after the Soviet Union blockaded all land routes to the city.

What triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962?

The discovery that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, within striking range of most of the United States.

What ended the period of Détente in 1979?

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which the West saw as a return to Soviet expansionism.

Who led the Solidarity movement in Poland?

Lech Wałęsa led Solidarity, the independent trade union formed after the 1980 Gdańsk shipyard strikes.

What happened on 25 December 1991?

Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union, formally ending the USSR's existence.

Who emerged as a national hero by opposing the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev?

Boris Yeltsin, the elected President of Russia, led popular resistance against the coup.