| Summary/Abstract |
The failure of a hardline coup attempt in the Soviet Union in August 1991 spelled the end of Communist Party (CPSU) rule in the USSR and left the Soviet state teetering on the brink of dissolution. In a September 1991 article in the Washington Post, David Ignatius attributed the coup’s defeat—as well as the crumbling of Soviet-style communist regimes across Eastern Europe in 1989—in part to a new weapon in the U.S. foreign policy arsenal: independent, overt democracy aid. “[T]he old era of covert action,” Ignatius proclaimed, “is dead.” Instead, over the past decade, a new “network” of private democracy organizations based in the United States had been “doing in public what the CIA used to do” covertly. By providing assistance to anti-communist groups in the Soviet bloc, he argued, these organizations had played a key role in nurturing the growth of democratic opposition movements across the Soviet empire.1
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