ABSTRACT
Among the growing pressures Gorbachev confronted, none were more acute, or potentially threatening, than those from the Soviet Union's fifteen constituent republics, for those national awakenings called into question the very existence of Soviet statehood. The shifting balance of power between the center and the republics found expression in four successive drafts of the Union Treaty, each of which featured a weaker center than the one before. Both paralleling and overlapping the nationalist challenge to Gorbachev's program was the rise of a democratic movement. Then Gorbachev's reforms, and all that followed from them, profoundly threatened this established system and, not surprisingly, prompted an increasingly politicized conservative awakening that bitterly contested many of those reforms as well as the democratic and nationalist movements that perestroika had spawned. The case with the August coup, which dramatically changed the balance of political forces in the Soviet Union and led, within four months, to the country's disintegration.
