Good morning.
Whitewater’s Saturday forecast calls for sunny skies and a high of seventy-four.
On this day in 1991, diehard Soviet leaders launched a coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. But it was Boris Yeltsin, not Gorbachev, who defeated the plotters:
Yeltsin and his backers from the Russian parliament then stepped in, calling on the Russian people to strike and protest the coup. When soldiers tried to arrest Yeltsin, they found the way to the parliamentary building blocked by armed and unarmed civilians. Yeltsin himself climbed aboard a tank and spoke through a megaphone, urging the troops not to turn against the people and condemning the coup as a “new reign of terror.” The soldiers backed off, some of them choosing to join the resistance. After thousands took the streets to demonstrate, the coup collapsed after only three days.
Here’s a Euronews video from 2011 with scenes from the coup:
Google’s daily puzzle asks about the other unopposed presidential candidate: “Other than George Washington, I was the only candidate ever to run for U.S. president unopposed. What was the era of my presidency called?”