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.

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.

[18][19] On 23 February 1994, the State Duma declared amnesty for all GKChP members and their accomplices, along with the participants of the October 1993 crisis.

The SCSE were hard-line members of the Communist Party (CPSU) who were opposed to Gorbachev's reform program and the new union treaty he had negotiated, which dispersed much of the central government's power to the republics.

On 14 December 1992, a year after the attempted coup, the Prosecutor General of Russia Valentin Stepankov approved the indictment in the GKChP case.

Anatoliy Ukolov, a deputy chairman of the Collegiate, was charged with reviewing the case, and the hearing was scheduled for 26 January 1993.

The defendants included the aforementioned seven living members of the group plus Oleg Shenin (1937–2009), Politburo and secretariat member; Anatoly Lukyanov (1930–2019), Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union; and Valentin Varennikov (1923–2009), General of the Army, Deputy Minister of Defense, and Commander of Land Forces.

A prosecution commission was assigned to the case by the Collegiate, consisting of nine people and headed by Denisov, a Deputy Prosecutor General.

Ten days after the close, the Presidium of the Supreme Court revived the prosecution, ruling that procedural infringements regarding the amnesty had occurred.

According to Vzglyad, Anatoliy Ukolov, the original person charged with the prosecution of the SCSE, blamed the occurrence of the 1991 coup attempt on Gorbachev, implying that the leader should not have taken a vacation at the time.

However, in an interview with Komsomol Pravda, Ukolov also mentioned how the members of GKChP chose not to follow the letter of law, but rather to take the situation into their own hands.