1991Hardliners try to seize power from Gorbachev in Moscow
By the summer of 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms had loosened the Communist Party’s grip on the Soviet Union, and several republics were pushing for independence. A new Union Treaty, which would hand far more power to the republics, was due to be signed on 20 August. On 18 August, while Gorbachev was on holiday at Foros in Crimea, a delegation from Moscow demanded that he hand over power. He refused, and was cut off and held at his villa.
Early on 19 August 1991 Soviet radio announced that Gorbachev was too ill to govern and that a State Committee for the State of Emergency, led by Vice President Gennady Yanayev with the heads of the KGB, the army and the government, had taken charge. Tanks rolled into Moscow. Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected president of Russia, climbed onto a tank outside the Russian parliament building and called the coup illegal, and crowds built barricades to defend it. Within three days the plot collapsed and the plotters were arrested, but the Soviet Union itself survived only until the end of the year.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: 1991 Soviet coup attempt ↗
1953A coup backed by the CIA and MI6 topples Iran’s prime minister
In 1951 Iran’s parliament, led by the nationalist Mohammad Mosaddegh, voted to nationalise the country’s oil industry, which had been run for decades by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Britain answered with a boycott of Iranian oil, and as the economy suffered Mosaddegh fell out with the shah, the clergy and parts of the army. Britain persuaded the United States, which feared that Iran might drift towards communism, to join a secret plan to remove him.
A first attempt in mid-August 1953 failed, and the shah fled the country. Then on 19 August crowds, some of them paid, and army units loyal to General Fazlollah Zahedi took over the streets of Tehran, seized the radio station and attacked Mosaddegh’s house. Some 300 people were killed. Zahedi became prime minister, the shah returned in triumph, and Mosaddegh spent three years in prison and the rest of his life under house arrest. The coup left a lasting distrust of the West in Iran.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: 1953 coup in Iran ↗
1945The Viet Minh take power in Hanoi in the August Revolution
France had ruled Vietnam since the 19th century, but during the Second World War Japan occupied French Indochina, and in March 1945 it threw out the French administration altogether. Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, a communist-led independence movement, had spent the war building up support and small guerrilla forces in the north, and was ready when Japan’s surrender left a sudden gap in power.
The Viet Minh called a general uprising, and on 19 August 1945 huge crowds filled the streets of Hanoi as its supporters took over government offices with almost no resistance. The movement spread to Hue and Saigon within days, the last emperor, Bao Dai, gave up his throne, and on 2 September Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. France soon returned to fight for its colony, and Vietnam faced 30 years of war. Vietnam still marks 19 August as the day of the August Revolution.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Vietnam, World War II and independence ↗
1561Mary, Queen of Scots comes home to Scotland
Mary became Queen of Scots when she was six days old, and at the age of five she was sent to France to be brought up at the French court, safe from English attempts to marry her to Henry VIII’s son. In 1558 she married the heir to the French throne, and for little more than a year she was Queen of France. When her young husband, Francis II, died in December 1560, the 18-year-old widow had no future in France and decided to go home.
She landed at Leith, the port of Edinburgh, on 19 August 1561, earlier than expected and in thick fog, so that no proper welcome was ready. The country she returned to had changed: in 1560 the Scottish parliament had broken with the pope and made Scotland Protestant. Mary, a Catholic, was allowed to hear Mass privately in her own chapel at Holyrood, but the preacher John Knox thundered against it. Her personal rule would last less than six years.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Museums Scotland: Life and deathline of Mary, Queen of Scots ↗
2005Burundi’s parliament chooses a president to end a long transition
Burundi, a small country in the hills of central Africa, was torn by civil war after its first elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was murdered in an army coup in 1993. Fighting between the Tutsi-led army and Hutu rebel groups cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Peace talks led to the Arusha agreement of 2000, a power-sharing government and, in 2003, a deal with the largest rebel movement, the CNDD-FDD.
In 2005 Burundians approved a new constitution and the CNDD-FDD won the parliamentary elections. On 19 August 2005 the two houses of parliament, meeting together, elected the movement’s leader, Pierre Nkurunziza, a former teacher and rebel commander, as the first president since the transition, by 151 of 162 votes. He was sworn in a week later. Nkurunziza went on to rule for 15 years, and his bid for a third term in 2015 plunged the country into a new crisis.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Pierre Nkurunziza ↗
