The August Coup

Robert Service is the English-speaking world’s foremost historian of 20th-century Russia and Bolshevism … Service has displayed a remarkable grasp of the vast sources, and a delightfully clear writing style which makes even the complexities of Soviet bureaucracy easy to understand … Service guides the reader through the chaos of the collapsing system and the machinations of the coup leaders with ease and grace … magnificent – John Simpson * The Guardian *
A lively and insightful account … [from] Britain’s foremost expert on Soviet history – Edward Lucas, The Times
A masterly piece of scholarship, written like a political thriller … it’s likely to become a definitive account of a key moment in the last days of the Soviet Union – NJ McGarrigle * The Irish Times *
He is a master of old-time prosopography … a meticulous account – Bruce Clark * The New Statesman *
One of our finest historians of Soviet Russia … The August Coup [is] a work of quite exceptional scholarship and narrative verve * Literary Review *
Robert Service has a historian’s rare and welcome capacity to dig deep, without losing sight of the big picture. He tells the story of a three-day drama in unprecedented detail, while placing it clearly within the context of the failure of Gorbachev’s reform project, making it a must-read for those fascinated by the decline and fall of the USSR and the emergence of a new Russia – Dr Mark Galeotti, author of Forged in War
This immensely well-researched and compellingly written book grips the reader from page one. You are right there in the room with Mikhail Gorbachev as he is interned in his own dacha, cut off from the outside world, and subjected to a coup attempt intended to alter world history drastically. If you want to understand Vladimir Putin today, you need to get into the plotters’ mindset in 1991, and no-one is better at taking you there than Robert Service – Lord Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny
Robert Service ingeniously and meticulously disentangles the extraordinary web of intrigue, criminality, naive ambition and fortuitous events that marked the collapse of the USSR – Professor Donald Rayfield, author of A Seditious and Sinister Tribe
Robert Service’s gripping narrative and brilliant research takes us behind the scenes, reliving the drama and banality, courage and cowardice, hopes and fallacies manifested during those fateful days of August 1991 and lowering the final curtain on the communist era in Europe – Professor Amir Weiner, author of Making Sense of War
Remarkable … a finely argued, carefully researched, and beautifully written account of the fall of the Soviet Union and rise of the Russian Federation. Service understands Russian affairs as few others. His ability to penetrate the murky waters of Moscow’s politics during [these] dramatic events … helps us understand how we ended up with Putin’s Russia – Professor Norman M. Naimark, author of Stalin and the Fate of Europe
With The August Coup, Robert Service reminds us why he is such an outstanding historian. The book combines detailed research with engaging storytelling. The result is a compelling account of a dramatic episode in late Soviet history that we need to understand today for its continuing relevance to Russia, and to the world – James Rodgers, author of The Return of Russia

• Fellow of the British Academy
• Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford

Selected Works:

• Lenin: A Biography
• Russia: Experiment with a People
• Stalin: A Biography
• Comrades: A History of World Communism
• Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin
• Trotsky: A Biography (Winner of the 2009 Duff Cooper Prize)

Robert Service lives in London.

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