Quite an interesting documentary that in general emphasised the need to control the military, bureaucracy and media to stage a coup and hold on to power. There were interesting little titbits of information like the fact that Napoleon owned 2 newspapers and the way that Peter I's wife Catherine bribed a Turkish vizier (who was later executed by the Sultan) to release Peter, though I fail to see how that counts as a coup, how Yeltsin took advantage of Gorbachev's temporary absence from the corridors of power (he was on holiday) to send the military against him and strong arm him into surrendering power, and how Catherine the Great used her influence with the Russian imperial guard to depose, and possibly poison to death, her husband Peter the Great (who was Tsar Peter III, not Peter I). This 40 minute programme tried to deal with too many coup leaders (Julius Caesar, Mussolini, Hitler, Catherine the Great, Napoleon, Trotsky/Lenin/Stalin; also Franco, the Greek colonels and Idi Amin were very briefly mentioned) while inevitably missing some others like Castro, Mao and various Mexican figures and not touching on the financing of coups and coup leaders at all; or indeed other factors like the industrial scale espionage carried out against Chiang Kai Shek by Mao and the Soviet Union, the fact that the USSR had in fact kidnapped Chiang's son and used that against him and the way Mao sent his fellow revolutionaries to certain death in battle to reduce any internal threats to his power. I think this would be better as a series instead.