MOSCOW — Oleg Shenin, a Soviet Communist Party official who played an active part in an abortive attempt to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, died Thursday. He was 71. He died in Moscow, the Russian Communist Party said in a statement that did not give a cause of death.

Shenin was part of a group of party hardliners who briefly unseated Gorbachev in their attempts to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The group attempted to hold Gorbachev under house arrest, but the three-day coup failed when the army refused to quell protests backing Boris Yeltsin, who was leading the opposition to the plotters. The 1991 coup sped the collapse of the Soviet Union.