Thirty years after the Moscow coup, democracy is in a crisis of self-esteem | Rafael Behr

Much has been squandered since 1991, but the biggest threat to democracy today is the global contagion of cynicism

On 19 August 1991, citizens of the Soviet Union woke up to the news that Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist party, was standing down due to ill health. That news was a lie, as many of those citizens had come to expect from their media. Tanks rolling through Moscow told the true story: a coup by politburo hardliners, determined to abort Gorbachev's experiments in democratisation. They failed. The coup unravelled within two days. Five months later the USSR had ceased to exist.

No one in the west saw it coming, but shock at the unpredicted event yielded to conviction that it had been inevitable. The implosion of a superpower built to fulfil Marxist prophecy should have served as a warning against all claims to know the rules of history and chart its destination. But no. The fashionable idea took hold in western policy that liberal democracy was the ideological terminus.