Faced with politically mobilized societies in most of the union-republics mustered behind their respective sovereign states, the Soviet regime responded with a politics of restoration. In autumn 1990, it launched a ‘low-intensity’ coup d'état, menacing, probing and pressuring the national-democratic movements on a variety of fronts in a war of manoeuvre. From the standpoint of political organization, this meant a reassertion of nomenklatura rule by relying on those state agencies with the capacity for physical violence: the KGB, the army, paramilitary forces (OMON) and the police. From that of communication, it involved a reassertion of the regime's longstanding prerogative to define and interpret the world. Each figured centrally in the politics of restoration: violence and intimidation directed against bodies on the one hand; lies, disinformation and blackouts inflicted on minds on the other. In Russia, the low-intensity coup was punctuated by two ostensible efforts at compromise. The first, in summer 1990 involving economic reform, came to nothing. The second, a negotiated revision of the federal system, precipitated the seizure of power by the self-proclaimed State Committee for the State of Emergency (SCSE) on 19 August 1991.

The protracted siege imposed by the party-state established a particular context for the development of Russia's nascent political society, erasing any possibility of ‘normal’ politics and inscribing into it the martial virtues of solidarity, resistance and heroism. This chapter analyses the political struggle that prevailed in Russia under the tacit ‘state of emergency’ that lasted from autumn 1990 till the defeat of the August coup. Its aim is to situate state-building and political development within it, demonstrating that structures of resistance, and those alone, brought cohesion and form to political relations.