By Oksana Yablokova

        Vladimir Isayev joined the thousands of people who formed a human chain around the White House on Aug. 20, 1991.

He stuck with the crowd on Aug. 21 when the air was filled with the palpable fear that the White House would be stormed.

Men trying to bring down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky on Aug. 22, 1991. The sign "Khunte Khana" says "The junta is finished."

And he cheered with other defenders on Aug. 22 when the tanks retreated, signaling the collapse of the coup by hard-line Communists.

But, Isayev said, those cheers were mixed with something else — shock that bloodshed had been avoided, disbelief that democratic forces had prevailed and sheer exhaustion.

"For me it was a day of very strong emotions," said Isayev, then a 22-year-old math student. "There was a feeling of victory, a feeling of being involved in a historic event. And everybody was stressed out."

With those conflicting feelings, the crowd desperately needed some relief. They found it in Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Late that night a crowd of about 10,000 toppled the towering statue of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret services, on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad at KGB headquarters.

The fall of "Iron Felix" marked the culmination of the popular protest against a retreat to the Soviet past. It also served to mark the end of the omnipotent and omnipresent Soviet-era KGB. Four months later, the once-dreaded secret service was broken up into a handful of agencies. They would only see a resurrection after one of their own, Vladimir Putin, became president almost a decade later.

But all that was far from the minds of the tired but jubilant crowd outside the White House on Aug. 22, 1991.

President Boris Yeltsin addressed a victory rally, thanking Russians for their support and calling for a ban on the Communist Party. Ruslan Khasbulatov, head of the Supreme Soviet, announced that he had drawn up a bill to nationalize the Communist Party headquarters on Staraya Ploshchad.

Then, like a roaring wave, the defenders marched past gutted trolleybuses and crude barricades onto a nearby street, crisscrossed with deep indentions left by tank treads. They headed down Prospekt Kalinina — now Novy Arbat — for an informal victory parade through Red Square.

But something was wrong.

"The people felt something had not been completed," said Lev Ponomaryov, one of the organizers of the White House rallies and a deputy in the Supreme Soviet.

As if trying to release the tension, White House defenders tried to storm the Communist headquarters. They found the entrances locked and barricaded and were only able to shatter a couple of glass plates on the facade.

The disappointed crowd — by this time largely drunk after gulping down victory toasts — then moved to Ploshchad Dzerzhinskogo, now called Lubyanskaya Ploshchad.

Protesters considered storming the KGB building, but then the 15-ton statue of Dzerzhinsky caught their attention. They swarmed around it.

"I think it was good that this energy eventually focused on the monument," said Konstantin Borovoi, then head of the Russian Raw Materials and Commodities Exchange. He brought 2,000 brokers to the White House victory bash.

According to some reports, there were about 1,200 KGB staffers inside the headquarters at the time.

Borovoi said he was one of about 15,000 protesters at the monument.

The imposing Dzerzhinsky, in his silent, unwavering tribute to the KGB's power, only seemed to intensify the crowd's rage.

At about 5 p.m., people began scaling the statue, tying rope around it in hopes of pulling it down with a truck.

"I remember sitting on the lane near the pedestal, watching some guys climbing on the monument, clinging it with ropes," said Boris Belenkin of Memorial. The statue "swayed slightly but remained standing. It looked pretty dangerous, given there was an underpass and metro underneath."

Ponomaryov barked through a megaphone, urging the crowd to wait for proper equipment to arrive.

"I saw some drunken people climbing on the statue and thought that something bad would happen," he recalled in a recent interview. "But the crowd was hardly controllable, and all we heard were insults in response."

Borovoi called Deputy Mayor Sergei Stankevich to ask for equipment to bring the statue down "in a civilized way," but Stankevich refused to deal with what he called a drunken crowd.

As dusk set in, Stankevich came to the square to plead with the crowd to hold off until the next day. He was met with jeers.

Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov, in a book describing the days around the coup, said he finally caved in to the crowd, fearing they would riot.

But he was faced with a problem that only the U.S. Embassy could resolve.

"It turned out that it could not be thrown onto the ground. The metro and underpasses were underneath," Popov wrote in "In Opposition Again."

"We failed to find the equipment with the needed capacity," he said. "The U.S. Embassy offered help. They had construction going on on the embassy's grounds and had the crane we needed."

Meanwhile, on the square, rain showers tested the mettle of the crowd. Some called it quits and went home.

The borrowed crane arrived at about midnight. Nikolai Amelin, a street sweeper, was lifted to the top of the 20-meter statue. He tied a cable around the statue's neck.

The crane raised Felix off the pedestal, the body swinging in what looked like a hangman's noose. The crowd broke out in loud cheers and applause.

Then the statue — which had been erected in 1958 at the height of Nikita Khrushchev's reign — was trucked off to a backyard for forgotten Soviet-era monuments near the Central House of Artists, where it remains to this day.

"The dismantling of Dzerzhinsky's statue was a victory over and revenge against the Communist past," said Nikita Petrov, a historian with Memorial specializing in the history of KGB and Soviet-era repressions.

"Later, it became clear that it had been too early to call it revenge," he added.

Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich suggested erecting a monument to writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in its place. Other proposals have been studied and panned over the past 10 years, while the spot has remained vacant.

Konstantin Preobrazhensky, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who quit shortly after the August 1991 events, said the failed coup, crowned with the dismantling of the statue, was a major blow to the KGB.

The protesters who pulled down Felix had little to fear from the KGB even then because the agency was in upheaval. KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, one of the driving forces behind the coup attempt, was immediately arrested. Within months, Mikhail Gorbachev split the Soviet KGB into five units.

"The KGB was left demoralized and rudderless," Preobrazhensky said.

Throughout much of the 1990s those KGB successors, including the domestic Federal Security Service, had been mostly toothless tigers.

Then their fortunes began to change. Putin, a former KGB agent in East Germany, was appointed FSB chief in 1998. A year later, Yeltsin named Putin as his heir apparent, and Putin easily won election in 2000.

Putin has handed many top government posts to former FSB men. The agency's activities have won the media spotlight, particularly for aggressive measures against what it labels spies.

Moreover, Putin has also put the FSB in charge of the military campaign in Chechnya. While the secret services were thought to have played a role in the Afghan War and first Chechen conflict, the president made no secret of the FSB's involvement this time around.

The apparent revival of the secret police was applauded by 43 prominent Communists in a recently published open letter. That letter also called for the secret services to be handed broadened powers.

Preobrazhensky said Russia over the past 10 years lost an opportunity to create efficient secret service agencies by restricting reforms to structural changes alone.

"Russia should have followed the example of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, where personnel were completely replaced by new, democratic-minded people," he said. "That greatly improved the image and overall quality of their work."