Photo Gallery Gorbachev's Last Days
Communist hardliners staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev 20 years ago, and the Soviet Union collapsed soon afterwards. Previously unknown documents, which SPIEGEL has obtained, show just how desperate the last Soviet leader was as he fought to retain power -- and how he begged Germany for money to save his country.
The documents suggest that Gorbachev knew more about violent crackdowns in the last days of the Soviet Union than he has admitted. Here, Azerbaijanis look at the bodies of people killed by Soviet troops in the streets of Baku (1990 photo).
In the Georgian capital Tbilisi, Russian soldiers used sharpened spades and poison gas to break up a protest march in the city on the night of April 8-9, 1989.
Pro-independence protests in Lithuania in September 1989. Fourteen people were killed in a Soviet crackdown in January 1991. "I am now under tremendous pressure to introduce presidential control in Lithuania," Gorbachev said in a telephone conversation with US President George Bush a few days before the military action. "I am still holding back, and only in the case of a very serious threat will I take tough measures."
The Gorbachev files reveal how he tried to undermine the rise of Boris Yeltsin.
"Yeltsin is a destroyer by nature," Gorbachev said in Feb. 1991. "He has nothing constructive left to offer." This photo is from August 1991.
In the last days of the Soviet Union, stores ran short of essential goods such as butter. Gorbachev begged Germany for financial support. "We need money for current expenses, so that we can continue to live and maintain imports while the negotiations on the restructuring of our short-term debts are underway," he told the German foreign minister in September 1991.
