agricultural settlements in the south and the establishment of trade routes through the Black Sea. In the process, the military democracies of the Cossack hosts along the Dnieper, Don and Volga rivers lost their autonomy and special privileges; the wealthier officers became Russian nobles, receiving the right to own and settle serfs on their own lands, while the fierce horsemen sank to the level of peasants with special military obligations. Despite the heritage of Peter and Catherine, by the time of Nicholas II (1894-1917) Russia was in disarray, fighting an onerous war and plagued by internal misery and oppression. The Kerensky provisional government, a moderate attempt to resolve the problems, collapsed in the face of the Bolshevik revolution. Given the Bolshevik desire to dominate the whole of Russia and the rest of the former tsarist empire, civil war was inevitable. Stalin would complete the consolidation of Communist power begun by Lenin. And he would lead Soviet Russia through the greatest threat to its existence, and help it emerge as one of the world's superpowers following the Second World War. But in the ensuing Cold War, Russia's economy tottered towards collapse. The people turned to Boris Yeltsin, a liberal Party functionary. Elections to the Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989 saw him score a stunning victory. He used his newfound legitimacy to promote Russian sovereignty, to advocate and adopt radical economic reform, to demand Gorbachev's resignation, and to negotiate treaties with the Baltic republics, in which he acknowledged their right to secede from the union. An ill-conceived, ill-planned, and poorly executed coup attempt to unseat Yeltsin occurred August 1991, bringing an end to the Communist Party and accelerating the movement to disband the Soviet Union. Yeltsin dissolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1991, banned the Communist Party in Russia and seized all of its property.