The Hunted

Far easier to have somebody meet them in Budapest and discreetly hand over the heavy artillery. On August 19, 1991, the old boys had their last desperate fling at preserving an empire hanging by its fingernails. Gorby, who had wrought so much damage with his flailing attempts at reform, was vacationing at his Black Sea resort when a clutch of rough-looking KGB officers stormed the building and took him hostage. In Moscow, a cabal including his chief of staff, vice president, prime minister, minister of defense, and KGB chairman promptly seized the organs of government.

A few thousand troops were rushed to the capital, the state television stations were seized, and water reservoirs secured; heavily armed guards were posted in front of food distribution centers to ensure a stranglehold on the city population. Tanks were littered at strategic intersections around the government section of the city-the usual signs of a beerhall putsch in progress.

Next, the cabal convened a hasty televised press conference to introduce themselves as the saviors of communism and the union. It was a disaster. They were wrinkled, sclerotic old men, unpleasant, nasty, and afraid. And it showed. Their hands trembled, their voices quivered and shook, no facial expression registered above a fierce scowl.

Never before had they smiled at their people: why start now?

Worst of all, they appeared disorganized, feeble, nervous, and ancient-as impressions go, at that precarious, decisive moment, the wrong one to convey to a fractious, anxious nation.

To say it was a glorious gift to Boris Yeltsin, a born opportunist and addicted rabble-rouser, would be an understatement. He rallied a band of fellow flamethrowers and issued a call for all Russians to join together and battle for their freedom. A large, unruly mob flocked to the Russian Congress building, heckling and chanting and daring the men who led the coup to do something about them. The cabal had been supremely confident their good citizens would respond in the best Soviet tradition-like scared, obedient sheep. The combative show of opposition caught the old boys totally by surprise.

Half argued strenuously to slaughter the whole bunch and hang their bodies from lampposts. A fine example, a paternal warning and long overdue, too. That wet noodle Gorby had been a sorry mollycoddler. The nation had grown soft and spoiled, they insisted; a good massacre was exactly the paternal medicine needed to whip it back in shape. The more dead wimps the better.

The other half wondered if a bloody spectacle might incite a larger rebellion. They weren't morally opposed by any means. In Lenin's hallowed words, as one of them kept repeating, as if anybody needed to hear it, omelets required broken eggs. But the nation had grown a little moody toward tyrants, they cautioned. The wrong move at this brittle time and they, too, might end up swinging on lampposts. Ignore the mob, they argued; in a day or two, at the outside, the crowd would grow bored and hungry and melt into the night.

Agreement proved impossible. Kill them or ignore them? Stomp them like rodents or wait them out? The old men were cleanly divided in their opinions, so they sat and squabbled in their gilded Kremlin offices, brawling and cursing one another, drinking heavily, collectively overwhelmed by the power they had stolen.

For two sleepless days the world held its breath and watched. Boris's protestors turned rowdier and more daring by the hour. They constructed signs. They howled protest chants and hurled nasty taunts at the security guards sent to control them. They erected camps, stockpiled food, heckled and sang, and prepared to stay for the duration; the coup leaders argued more tumultuously and drank more heavily.

Despite serious attempts to scare away the press, a small pesky army of reporters had infiltrated the mob and was broadcasting the whole infuriating standoff via satellite, smuggling out photographs and earning Pulitzers by the carton. The whole mess was on display, in living color for the entire globe to see.

Yeltsin adored the spotlight, and was almost giddy at having all the world as his stage. Televisions were kept on in the Kremlin offices 24/7. The old boys were forced to sit and watch as Boris-miraculously sober for once-pranced repeatedly in front of the cameras, calling them all has-beens and wannabe tyrants, threatening to run them out of town. That clown was thumbing his nose and shooting the bird at them.

For an empire in which terror was oxygen, it was humiliating; worse, it was dangerous.