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The State Committee on the State of Emergency, abbreviated as SCSE, was 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. American publicist Georges Obolensky also called it the Gang of Eight. 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.

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Oleg Dmitriyevich Baklanov was a Soviet politician, and high functionary in government and industry. He was a scientist and businessman. As Minister of General Machine Building, he was responsible for Soviet space industry during the 1980s.

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Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov was a Soviet lawyer, diplomat, and head of the KGB, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

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Valentin Sergeyevich Pavlov was a Soviet official who became a Russian banker following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Born in the city of Moscow, then part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Pavlov began his political career in the Ministry of Finance in 1959. Later, during the Brezhnev Era, he became head of the Financial Department of the State Planning Committee. Pavlov was appointed to the post of Chairman of the State Committee on Prices during the Gorbachev Era, and later became Minister of Finance in Nikolai Ryzhkov's second government. He went on to succeed Ryzhkov as head of government in the newly established post of Prime Minister of the Soviet Union.

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Boris Karlovich Pugo, OAN was a Soviet Communist politician of Latvian origin.

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Vasily Alexandrovich Starodubtsev was a Soviet and Russian politician and governor of Tula Oblast from 1997 to 2005. He was also one of the GKChP members during the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt and was a leader of the Agrarian Party of Russia.

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Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev was a Soviet politician who served as the first and only Vice President of the Soviet Union. Yanayev's political career spanned the rules of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, and culminated during the Gorbachev years. Yanayev was born in Perevoz, Gorky Oblast. After years in local politics, he rose to prominence as Chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, but he also held other lesser posts such as deputy of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.

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Dmitry Timofeyevich Yazov was a Marshal of the Soviet Union. A veteran of the Great Patriotic War, Yazov served as Minister of Defence from 1987 until he was arrested for his part in the 1991 August Coup, four months before the fall of the Soviet Union. Yazov was the last person to be appointed to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union on 28 April 1990, the only Marshal born in Siberia, and at the time of his death on 25 February 2020 the last living Marshal of the Soviet Union.