By Moscow Times.

The White House defenders during the coup of August 1991 used flowers in a charm offensive to get the tanks to switch sides.

    And what the dozen or so Communist hard-liners behind the plot did not realize was that not only the public, but the military and they themselves had been too transformed by six years of Gorbachev's reforms to follow through with the discipline, decisiveness and cruelty needed for a coup d'etat. They arrested no key figures. Their attempts to limit the flow of information failed. They could not muster the manpower or wherewithal to defeat their opponents by force. Even generals questioned their commands.. Continue...

  The Coup That Changed The World
By Valeria Korchagina
At about 1 a.m. on Aug. 19, 1991, Sergei Yevdokimov, a major in the Soviet army's elite Tamanskaya division, was roused from his bed by a messenger who told him to report immediately to the division's grounds. When Yevdokimov arrived, other officers who also had been called in were hanging around, chatting and smoking while waiting for further commands. "Maneuvers were to start in a day, so we figured it was just part of that," he said in a recent interview. Continue...

Diary of a Coup By Yevgenia Albats Aug. 19, 1991. So it's happened, after all. My husband woke me this morning with the words, "Get up, Cassandra, there's a coup." The State Committee for a State of Emergency, GKChP, announced that Gorbachev has been taken ill and therefore could not perform his presidential duties. They really are idiots — they couldn't even come up with something more original than the 1964 formula when they kicked Khrushchev out: "The president has been taken ill and is therefore incapacitated." Continue...

  Freed Republics Cling to Russia's Embrase
By Judith Ingram: The Associated Press
When the Soviet Union collapsed 10 years ago, so did a web of ties developed over seven decades. Thousands of huge factories went idle after their suppliers or customers ended up across new borders, in new countries. Contracts evaporated and jobs disappeared. Some of the former Soviet republics started knocking on NATO's door, and their citizens, too, turned away from Russia — Continue...

Defenders Recount Their Moment of Glory By Robin Munro First they came by the dozens, then by the hundreds and by the thousands. From the morning of Aug. 19, 1991, as they heard about the coup and the Yeltsin-led opposition forming at the White House, people began converging there and — unarmed — placed themselves in the line of fire should the coup leaders try to storm the building. Undeterred by rain, the White House defenders built barricades out of bricks, concrete blocks, rusted bathtubs, cobblestones, tree trunks and branches — whatever was at hand. They moved the materials by forming lines and passing them person to person. Continue...

  Mapping the Soviet Union's Disintegration
By Valeria Korchagina
The disintegration of the Soviet Union was no overnight phenomenon. It had been growing steadily throughout Gorbachev's reign, as the relatively young Soviet leader — who made unprecedented attempts to liberalize the economy, augment civil liberties, decentralize government control and chip away at the political monopoly of the Communist Party — increasingly found himself caught between die-hard conservatives and reformers far more radical than himself Continue...