“In the following months, the strain started to show as ethnic turmoil and bloodshed intensified in the Caucasus and Soviet security forces seemed to be out of control, killing protesters in Lithuania. The Politburo and security service, the KGB, plotted to overthrow Gorbachev: in August 1991, a committee of incompetent drunken communist leaders and Chekists arrested Gorbachev on his Black Sea holiday and sent tanks into Moscow, but crowds defended the White House offices of Yeltsin. Yeltsin bravely climbed onto a tank outside to defiantly address the crowds. The coup fell apart, but its real victim was Gorbachev, who had lost his prestige. When Gorbachev tried to regain the momentum, Yeltsin ended the monopoly of the Communist Party and then conspired with the elected presidents of the other Soviet republics to end the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day 1991, thus ending the Soviet Union, which broke up into its independent republics. Gorbachev realised that communist oligarchy was wrong, and after his fall he sincerely embraced liberal democracy but it was too late.”