Video: 'Top News Story August 22, 1991'

(Thursday, August 22, 1991, 2:15 a.m. Eastern European Summer Time; during the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt; part of the Revolutions of 1989 and Dissolution of the Soviet Union) — A coup by hard-line Communists collapsed yesterday as abruptly as it began, and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev returned to Moscow early this morning to reassert control of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev landed at Vnukovo Airport on his return from his summer retreat in the Crimea, where he had been placed under house arrest early Monday at the start of the short-lived putsch.

In impromptu remarks to Soviet television that were aired later on a morning news program, Gorbachev appeared weary but clearly angered by the efforts of the conspirators to get him to surrender power.

“The whole world should know about this, what exactly was being plotted,” he said upon arriving at the airport, “and what it is that they did not succeed in getting from me.”

Gorbachev described the coup leaders as “a miserable group” that had tried to “break” him and ” to influence his family” by surrounding them with troops and isolating them for 72 hours.

Video: 'The Week That Shook The World: The Soviet Coup — ABC News (1991)'

The Soviet President congratulated the Soviet people for having had the “responsibility and dignity” to resist the takeover.

He particularly thanked the President of the Russian federated republic, Boris Yeltsin, for standing up to the coup leaders.

The coup leaders, the top military and civilian leaders just below Gorbachev, were hard-line opponents of Gorbachev’s reform program, angry at the loss of control over Eastern European states, and fearful of the new union treaty that was about to be signed. The treaty decentralized much of the central government’s power to the 15 republics.

The hard-liners were very poorly organized. They met defeat by a short but effective campaign of civil resistance mainly in Moscow, led by Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who had been both an ally and critic of Gorbachev.

The coup collapsed in only two days and Gorbachev returned to office, while all the plotters lost office. Yeltsin became the dominant leader and Gorbachev lost much of his influence.

The failed coup led to both the immediate collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the USSR four months later.