By Yevgenia Albats

        I don't blame President Vladimir Putin for not saying a word on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the 1991 coup. After all, what could he say?

   He belongs to the breed of second-rank Soviet nomenklatura who succeeded in gaining the most out of those events. However, his upbringing, career, professional culture — a whole set of beliefs — has been keeping him on the other side of barricades, opposite to those Russians who were sincerely ready to die by throwing themselves under the tanks (and in fact, three were killed) defending democracy a decade ago.

   I also do not blame former President Boris Yeltsin for betraying the ideals of the Soviet-era democrats who supported him then or for offering up the fruits of the August 1991 victory into the hands of a man who represents the KGB, the main force behind the attempted coup. By declaring a KGB man his heir, Yeltsin openly acknowledged the role those KGB colonels and their pals in other key Soviet institutions played in those events.

   And that role should not be underestimated. The coup, after all, failed primarily because the second echelon of power did not support the leadership of their institutions.

   There were three factors that contributed to this rational disobedience. First, hierarchical control had been loosened. By 1991, discontent had spread beyond the public and into key Soviet institutions as well. Opportunists from the Party apparatus, the KGB and the military-industrial complex enjoyed the (albeit still silent) support of colleagues who were tired of their bosses who could not face reality and who dreamed of pushing them aside and making their own way to the top.

      This was an important, but not sufficient, factor in the collapse of the Soviet empire. Decades earlier, the same sort of opportunism allowed Nikita Khrushchev to oust the powerful secret-police chief Lavrenty Beria. It also brought down Khrushchev himself in 1964. However, these Byzantine-style coups did not shake the foundations of the regime.

The second important factor in 1991 was the desire of regional elites to wrest power from central institutions. Yeltsin himself was from the Urals and a profound advocate of this drive. However, there was no unity among regional elites and their interests alone were too diverse to make things happen.

   That is why a third factor, in combination with the first two, was necessary for the coup de grace that brought down the regime. That factor was the commercialization of the Soviet bureaucracy, a process that had been rapidly under way since 1989 when Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which guaranteed the Communist Party's monopoly on political power, was repealed.

   When this happened, Soviet institutions rapidly lost their appeal to the second-rank nomenklatura. These institutions were no longer able to ensure their personal well being. Shrewd and intelligent conformists within the Party apparatus and the KGB quickly realized that they needed to find another feeding trough outside their institutions.

   Some, like Putin, decided to sit on two chairs. Others chose to capitalize on their old positions while transferring Party and KGB assets into newly created businesses. That was the end of the story, as the regime was split apart by the multiplicity and diversity of the personal interests of the nomenklatura.

   The state was dead long before we pulled the sheet over its face. As early as the beginning of 1991, top Party apparatchiks were acknowledging in secret memos that state-owned banks were bankrupt and no longer capable of servicing the country's foreign debt. Sberbank, which held the private deposits of ordinary citizens, appeared to be empty as well. The state eroded away.

   The failure of the August coup made the process of stealing state assets legitimate. But the turbulent ensuing years were not easy for the nomenklatura. Many of them lost what they had gained. Others realized that they still needed the state to protect their assets which they knew would be quickly lost in a world of free-market competition.

   This is where Vladimir Putin comes in. Under him, the bureaucratic state is back, alive and well. As for those like me who believed back then that we were part of a truly democratic revolution, well, those three days will forever remain the best days of my professional life. I still feel lucky that I had a chance to be part of that grand illusion.

   Yevgenia Albats is an independent journalist based in Moscow.