Soviet Coup Archive

Welcome!

This is an archive of materials related to the coup that took place in the Soviet Union during late August of 1991.

This material is available via anonymous ftp on cs.oswego.edu. Please use your e-mail address as a password. There are plans to develop software to allow examination of this material from remote sites. When that software is available there will be an announcement. There is currently no mail server available for this material. Please contact dab@moxie.oswego.edu if you wish to retrieve some of this material and you do not have access to anonymous ftp.

For our information, and curiousity, please send e-mail to either lpress@isi.com or dab@moxie.oswego.edu and let us know who you are, where you are from, and how you intend to use this information (for personal interest, research, class use, whatever). Thank you in advance.

This material is available here complements of several individuals, most notably:

Larry Press, (lpress@isi.edu)
California State U. at Dominguez Hills
Nick Sandru, (ns@csd.cri.dk)
CRI A/S, Case Systems Division
Doug Jones, (jones@cs.uiowa.edu)
University of Iowa
Peter Staugaard, (peters%monty@rand.org)
Rand Corporation
Dave Bozak, (dab@moxie.oswego.edu)
SUNY College at Oswego

and of course

Vadim Anatov and Polina Anatova and their colleagues at Demos
(avg@hq.demos.su and polina@hq.demos.su)
(avg%hq.demos.su@relay.eu.net and
polina%hq.demos.su@relay.eu.net)


CONTENTS:

There are several subdirectories related to different information or different sources of information. They are:

DENARC

This is a collection of postings to USENET News newsgroups soc.culture.soviet and talk.politics.soviet. These were kept as received by Larry Press from Nick Sandru and each file name indicates a time-stamp of arrival. All files are named in the following manner:

coup08dd.hhn

where

dd - day of receipt
hh - hour of receipt
n - part number (if multiple files for same day and
hour)

The selections contain actually most of the postings sent during that period; only non-related subjects and some irrelevant stuff (such as mail addresses sent by many posters) have been excluded. The articles are ordered as they were received on Nick Sandru's PC/AT Minix system.

Also within this directory is a file, edited, which collapses all of the other files, removes repeated postings, minimizes header information and replaces Russian text with translations. This was prepared by Doug Jones.

IMAGES
This directory, only available through the web site, contains scanned photos taken by Maxim Markevitch, at the time a 25 year old graduate student at the Institute for Space Research in Moscow.

MISC

A collection of stuff, including uucp maps and e-mail addresses and a tar file of interesting postings taken from an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) window connected to a computer in Moscow (complements of Kurt Jaeger, pi@rus.uni-stuttgart.de). There is also a pointer here to a collection of memoirs available on the Russia Filelist.

SOVARC

This is one (large!) file which contains the archive of postings maintained by the folks at Demos.

PAPERS

This directory contains papers or articles concerning the coup or the role of telecommunications in maintaining information flow during the coup.

RLA

These are the daily reports from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during the period August 19 through September 6, 1991.

RLR

These are in-depth analysis articles from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during the period August 18 through September 3, 1991.

TL

Here we have a program to change the transliteration of Russian language postings to make it somewhat more easy to read. This software can be used on the body of various postings contained in the SOVARC file. Credit for the software belongs to Steve Gaarder (gaarder@theory.tc.cornell.edu).

There is also a tar file containing KOI-7 and KOI-8 fonts and three utilities to handle the addition and stripping of the 8th bit. The fonts were developed on a Sun SparcStation and may not be valid on other architectures. This material is complements of Ken Hardy (uunet!racerx!ken).

There is also X11R4 cyrillic software, complements of Neal Dalton (nrd@redwood.cray.com) and Serge Vakulenko (val k@kiae.su)

VAL-L

This directory contains one file from the VAL-L list at UCF1VM. This file contains the view of the coup from the perspective of Valentine Michael Smith, based on reading the Demos/RELCOM posts, GlasNet posts, talk.politics.soviet posts, soc.culture.soviet posts, and posts from the list RUSSIA. Valentine is a non-traditional undergraduate student majoring in history with minors in writing and political science. He has been a long-time contributor to such lists as Politics, History, USSR-L and NewsE-L. He has had his own List since 1/91. He can be reached at CDELL@VAX1.UMKC.EDU.

Should you have access to other material related to the coup, please contact me at dab@moxie.oswego.edu. I would like to make this collection as complete as possible. Thank-you.