State Committee on the State of Emergency

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (April 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Russian article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Wikipedia article at [[:ru:Государственный комитет по чрезвычайному положению]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ru|Государственный комитет по чрезвычайному положению}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

State Committee on the State of Emergency (SCSE)
Государственный комитет по чрезвычайному положению (ГКЧП)

Press conference in the MFA building, August 19
Formation	19 August 1991
Dissolved	21 August 1991
Type	Self-declared provisional government
Legal status	Dissolved by the Russian SFSR and Soviet Union
Purpose	Prevention of the New Union Treaty signing, governance for planned six-month state of emergency
Headquarters	Moscow Kremlin, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union[1][2]
Location	Moscow, Russian SFSR
Region served	Soviet Union
Official language	Russian
Chairman	Gennady Yanayev
Affiliations	CPSU KGB Soviet Army Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs

The State Committee on the State of Emergency (Russian: Госуда́рственный комите́т по чрезвыча́йному положе́нию, romanized: Gosudárstvenny komitét po chrezvycháynomu polozhéniyu, IPA: [ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)ɨj kəmʲɪˈtʲet pə tɕrʲɪzvɨˈtɕæjnəmʊ pəlɐˈʐɛnʲɪjʊ]), abbreviated as GKChP (Russian: ГКЧП) and nicknamed the Gang of Eight, was a self-proclaimed political body in the Soviet Union that existed from 19 to 21 August 1991.^[3][4] It included a group of eight high-level Soviet officials within the Soviet government, the Communist Party, and the KGB, who attempted a coup d'état against Mikhail Gorbachev on 19 August 1991. The coup ultimately failed, with the provisional government collapsing by 22 August 1991 and several of the conspirators being prosecuted by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.

From 22 to 29 August 1991, former members of the dissolved SCSE and who actively assisted them were arrested, but from June 1992 to January 1993, they were all released on their own recognizance.^[5][6][7][8] In April 1993, the trial began. On 23 February 1994, the defendants in the SCSE case were amnestied by the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation,^[9][10] despite Yeltsin's objection.^[11] One of the defendants, General V.I. Varennikov, refused to accept the amnesty and his trial continued, which he ultimately won.

Diplomatic support came from several countries,^[12][13][14] such as Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Iraq, Laos, Libya, North Korea, Palestine Liberation Organization,^[15] Vietnam, Socialist Republic of Serbia, and Socialist Republic of Montenegro.