Mark Rice-Oxley, Ami Sedghi, Jenny Ridley, Sasha Magill

They were three days that shook the world - and shook the Soviet Union so hard that it fell apart.
But for better or worse? Twenty years on from the Soviet coup that ultimately ended Mikhail Gorbachev's political career and gave birth to 15 new states, ...
It was in many senses a traumatic break-up. Like a marriage, there was so much that was jointly owned that it was hard to make a clean break. Industries, military units, whole populations, were scattered across an empire, indivisible. Moreover, the economic crisis that led the USSR to the brink tilted most of the emergent countries into the abyss. GDP fell as much as 50 percent in the 1990s in some republics, Russia leading the race to the bottom as capital flight, industrial collapse, hyperinflation and tax avoidance took their toll. Almost as startling as the collapse was the economic rebound in the 2000s. By the end of the decade, some economies were five times as big as they were in 1991. High energy prices helped major exporters like Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, but even perennial stragglers like Moldova and Armenia began to grow...