By Pavel Felgenhauer

        I had good connections in the Russian State Defense Committee, a small prototype Defense Ministry that was formed by Yeltsin and headed by General Konstantin Kobets. The White House was a natural center of resistance to the coup.

On Aug. 19, the entrances of the building were watched at first by a detachment of extremely distressed policemen armed with sub-nosed AKS-74U guns, the same men who usually guarded the building. These men did not want to fight anyone at all.

A column of T-72 tanks from the Tamanskaya motor rifle division moved onto the Krasnopresnenskaya Naberezhnaya, but before they could pass the White House they were stopped by a crowd of Yeltsin supporters. The tank crews did nothing then or when Yeltsin himself climbed up on one of the tanks and appealed to Russians to defy the coup. Short of running over the defenders, they could have done little anyway. The tanks had no ammo and even the soldiers' hand guns were not loaded.

A separate unit from the Tamanskaya division had orders to guard the nearby bridge. Yeltsin's men persuaded the officer in charge, Major Sergei Yevdokimov, to move six unarmed tanks close to the White House to form a semblance of a defense. Officers from the defense staff that was forming around the Kobets committee immediately began phoning their military friends, telling them "part of the Tamanskaya division has turned coat," creating panic and disorder in the Defense Ministry ranks.

On the same day, I attended a meeting of the Russian government. It was short — all pledged support to Yeltsin — and then all present were encouraged to go to another room where weapons would be handed out.

There were more than 100 guns in the White House, but mostly sub-nosed AKS-74U assault rifles and various hand guns — no good for any serious fighting against stormtroopers backed with armor. There were also several Kalashnikov machine guns with ammunition.

The first thing the defense staff in the White House did was to stop handing out guns to men who did not know what to do with them, to disarm as many politicians as possible and to send machine-gun crews to the roof where they could at least prevent an Mi-8 helicopter from landing an assault party. It was obvious that the defenders inside the White House were only capable of putting up a token resistance. Professional military officers were awaiting what looked like an almost inevitable assault with bewilderment: They knew they did not have a chance and that their lives depended on the attackers' disposition to take prisoners.

But instead of stormtroopers came demonstrators, thousands of them, to defend Yeltsin and democracy. Inside the defense staff there was an instant surge of energy and enthusiasm: A human shield could be a serious defense against an army reluctant to kill civilians in its own capital. The officers also knew that their soldiers were trained to obey any order, but still this was a glimmer of hope.

At 10 p.m. on Aug. 19, a battalion of paratroopers from the Ryazan regiment of the Tula 106th airborne division arrived with up to 20 armored BMDs, small armored personnel carriers. They were led by General Alexander Lebed, who was the deputy of Pavel Grachev, the commander of the Soviet airborne corps. Lebed announced that he had been given orders to "secure" the building.

Colonel Alexander Tsalko, a deputy to Kobets, believed that Lebed was moving in to attack. Tsalko saw Lebed with officers of the Alpha KGB special anti-terrorist assault unit, who came to the White House to do reconnaissance.

The plan, according to documents seen later, was for the paratroopers to secure corridors through the crowd and storm the entrances, giving Alpha room for a final room-to-room, hand-to-hand sweep of the building. A similar plan with paratroopers and Alpha was successfully executed in October 1993 by troops loyal to Yeltsin.

Tsalko ordered the demonstrators to stop the paratroopers with friendly embraces 10 meters from the walls of the building. Flag-waving youths climbed onto the BMDs and sat on the hatches so the paratroopers inside could not suddenly go on the attack. These defenses were flimsy, but on the morning of Aug. 20, Lebed's troops withdrew without explanation.

General Mikhail Kolesnikov was army chief of staff. His superior — the commander of the army and active member of the GKChP, General Valentin Varennikov — left for Crimea and Kiev, leaving Kolesnikov in charge. Varennikov asked Kolesnikov to go to the Moscow military district staff and help General Nikolai Kalinin, who was appointed commandant of Moscow, to impose martial law and a curfew.

Kolesnikov later told me: "I came to Kalinin and asked his men, 'What do you have?' They reported, and I said, 'Guys, I'm going home to have a nap and advise you do the same — with the forces you have assembled you don't have a leg to stand on in a martial law situation.'"

In 1989, the Chinese sent 10 full-strength divisions (over 100,000 men) into Beijing to enforce a curfew in a city smaller than Moscow. In 1991, the Soviet army managed to send in less than 10,000 men. Together with airborne, Interior Ministry and KGB units, there were up to 20,000 men in Moscow, with more than 100 tanks and up to 1,000 other pieces of armor, but there was no effective unified command. The city police force was neutral, and the curfew was not enforced at all.

On Aug. 20, near Mayakovskaya Ploshchad, I met a major from the Kantemirovskaya division with 10 T-80 tanks. He told me he had not slept for almost 40 hours, his men had no rations, no decent sanitation, and that he, personally, was fed up.

The military brass apparently believed that just showing armor was enough to quell all opposition. When this did not happen, they did not know what to do. This was a sad preview of the disastrous march into Grozny in 1995: Tanks sometimes with only a driver, without ammo, not ready for any action. Of course, the Muscovites in 1991 did not have RPG-7 launchers to slaughter the armor, but they began to mass-produce Molotov cocktails, drinking up to free up the bottles.

The rebels in Moscow were becoming increasingly aggressive as the moral of the troops sagged. An assault on the White House resulting in heavy casualties could have caused a mass rebellion that the military would have been unable to control.

On Aug. 21, the military chiefs decided to move the troops back to the barracks. It was all over. We had a great party with officers from the White House defense staff — with tons of hot pizza and other food and drink provided to the defenders of freedom by new capitalist joints after it became obvious who was winning.

The next morning, bewildered troops began their retreat from Moscow — a preview of what would happen in Grozny in August 1996.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.