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Acknowledgments
    Like one of the characters in this book, the Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, I left Moscow on the second day of the coup, August 20, 1991. He was on a flight to Paris, while I took the Aeroflot flight to Montreal. Until we landed, no one knew whether the plotters in Moscow (or, rather, the Aeroflot authorities) would allow the plane to go all the way to Canada or reroute it to Havana. They never did what many on my flight were afraid of—they let us fly all the way to our destination. More important, they lost control not only over our plane but also of the situation on the ground in Moscow.
    By the next day, there was no longer a coup to worry about. My colleagues at the University of Alberta in Canada, where I was scheduled to teach as a visiting professor, were excited about the events in the Soviet Union and wanted me to teach a course on the USSR in crisis, focusing on the fate of Russian and Soviet democracy and its final victory over totalitarianism. Coming from Ukraine and being aware of the importance of national mobilization in that Soviet republic, I offered instead to teach a course on the nationality question in the USSR. My hosts were skeptical. The nationality question appeared to be marginal, with no clear relation to what was going on in Moscow, or at least that was how the events were viewed by many in North American academia. I insisted, and they dropped their objections.
    By the time my course ended in December 1991, there was no Soviet Union anymore. Instead of exemplifying the triumph of democracy, it disintegrated into fifteen republics. Unlike many of my North American colleagues, I realized the importance of the “nationalquestion” in the USSR and closely followed the drive of the Soviet republics toward independence. Like them, however, I was taken aback by the speed of developments and had little understanding of the peaceful but revolutionary process that took place between the defeat of the coup and the triumph of democracy on the streets of Moscow in August and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December.
    The existing literature on the collapse of the Soviet Union, written by journalists, political scientists, and, in the past decade, by historians, offers little help in explaining what exactly happened in the Soviet Union during my Canadian sabbatical. It turned out that I had little choice but to write this book in order to understand what actually took place in the Soviet Union and in the world during the last months of 1991 and why it happened. To answer these and many other related questions, I relied on the help and assistance of many people.
    I would like to begin here with participants in the events who agreed to be interviewed for this book. They include President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine; the Speaker of the Belarusian parliament, StanislaÅ­ Shushkevich; the minister of defense of Ukraine, General Kostiantyn Morozov; the deputy of the Soviet parliament, Ukrainian writer, and later diplomat Yurii Shcherbak; the American ambassador to Poland and, later, to Pakistan, Thomas Simons; and National Security Council staffer, and later ambassador to Greece and undersecretary of state, Nicholas Burns. I am also grateful to those who helped me arrange the interviews: Marshall Goldman, Marta Dyczok, Lubomyr Hajda, and Leonid Poliakov.
    Secretary of State James Baker gave permission to use his papers in the Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University. Ambassador Burns read the entire manuscript and provided exceptionally useful comments and corrections. Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Adamishin of the Russian Federation read the book and did not raise major objections. I am also grateful to my Harvard colleagues Mark Kramer and Mary Sarotte and to my graduate student Elizabeth Kerley for their comments on various drafts of the manuscript.
    Terry Martin, Charlie Maier, and Erez Manela commented on my papers and presentations based on research for this