Ham Radio vs The Soviet Army: The 1991 Coup That Ended The USSR

In August 1991, a group of hardliners inside the Soviet government arrested Mikhail Gorbachev, sent tanks into Moscow, and shut down the national news. For three days, the country had no idea what was actually happening.

Except on the ham radio bands.

This is the story of R3A — an amateur radio station set up inside the Russian White House while it was surrounded by soldiers, run by ordinary ham operators who relayed Boris Yeltsin’s decrees to the rest of the country when every official broadcast facility was under the plotters’ control. They got jammed by the Soviet military. They moved 5 kilohertz up the band and kept going.

I’ve been licensed since 2010 and I had never heard this story until a few weeks ago. It was sitting in a magazine I’ve had access to the whole time.

This is a new kind of video for this channel. If you want more of these, subscribe — and if you know a story about somebody with a radio who did something interesting or important with it, let me know in the comments.

CHAPTERS
00:00 A plane leaving in 3 hours
01:23 The man who was never supposed to go back
03:07 “Mortal danger over the U.S.S.R.”
04:42 Tanks on the streets of Moscow
06:04 The call from Yeltsin’s headquarters
07:19 R3A goes on the air
08:54 The military starts jamming
09:35 The mistake
10:57 Three days, start to finish

PRIMARY SOURCE
“Soviet Hams Rally Against Coup” by Edward Kritsky, NT2X
QST magazine, November 1991 (ARRL). Expanded version by Kritsky available here:
https://rarc-russia.com/X-DHY-images/NT2X-QST-Condensed.pdf

IMAGE CREDITS
Historical photographs of the August 1991 Soviet coup attempt via Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons licenses (CC BY 3.0 / CC BY-SA 4.0). Includes work by Oleg Klimov / Liberty.SU and Kremlin.ru. Full license terms: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Additional footage licensed via Envato Elements.