By Burton Frierson Reuters

            RIGA, Latvia — Ivars Godmanis knew something was wrong when he looked up from the waves during a morning swim in the Baltic Sea on Aug. 19, 1991, and saw his interior minister standing in the sand.

    At the time, Godmanis was the prime minister of Latvia, one of the three Baltic states trying to work its way free from the Soviet Union after five decades of rule by Moscow.

"The Baltics had been pressing for independence since Gorbachev came to power in 1985."

    He was about to learn that Communist hard-liners had launched a coup to oust Mikhail Gorbachev, whose perestroika reforms had changed the face of the Soviet Union, and that his own government in Riga was under threat.

    "My feeling was that this was the end," Godmanis said in an interview.

    Instead, the plan for the putsch failed and led to the unravelling of the rest of the Soviet Union.

    The chain of events would hand the Baltic states independence almost immediately. The end of the Soviet occupation drove them to seek security in the European Union and NATO, which they hope join in the next few years.

    The Baltics had been pressing for independence since Gorbachev came to power in 1985, taking advantage of his late 1980s glasnost reforms aimed at fostering openness.

    Estonia and Latvia declared sovereignty in 1988 and 1989, in hope of negotiating a full exit from the Soviet Union after a transition period. In 1990 Lithuania did the unthinkable, declaring full and immediate independence from Moscow.

    A series of articles dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the August 1991 coup. Shocked by the move and Gorbachev's inability to rein in the three tiny republics, conservatives backed a January 1991 crackdown aimed at snuffing out their independence movements, killing 14 in Vilnius, Lithuania, and six more in Riga. They failed to topple their pro-independence governments, which had been elected in 1990, but left many believing the January events were a dress rehearsal for something bigger.

    "I should say we were even more afraid in August than in January because in August we knew what kind of brutality could be implemented by the Soviet Army," said Andrius Kubilius, a Lithuanian independence activist then and later prime minister.

    Back in Riga, Godmanis met parliamentary leaders and the government. Parliament Speaker Anatolijs Gorbunovs condemned the coup and urged Latvians not to heed orders given by the coup plotters.

    The other Baltic states made similar statements and pleas for international help. Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis, spearhead of his country's independence movement, appealed to the United Nations and vowed "We will resist faithfully," in a CNN interview.

    Latvian Foreign Minister Janis Jurkans was sent to Sweden to lead a government in exile should the hard-liners topple Godmanis, who was holed up in a government building awaiting attack.

    In Vilnius, the Sajudis independence movement met and decided to call on Lithuanians to rally around their parliament in peaceful defense, just as they had done in January.

    Estonia's Supreme Soviet also gathered.

    Godmanis decided against rallying Latvians around public buildings after receiving a warning from a top Soviet general in the region that it would result in bloodshed.

    "He said that if we called the people on the street as in January 1991 with the barricades, that he'd would crush the people with tanks," Godmanis said.

    Meanwhile, elite Soviet troops began seizing vital communications facilities, including broadcast centers and telephone exchanges, throughout the region. At that point, the coup did not look set for failure.

    "It was very short, a couple of days really, but it is only now we hear everybody saying they expected the coup to fail. The feeling was not at all that certain back then," said Gorbunovs, now Latvia's transport minister.

    For Godmanis, it seemed a question of when, not if, Soviet troops would come for him and it was vital Latvia not capitulate easily, as the Baltic governments did in the 1940 takeover.

    "So we had to show that they were attacking the real government and that we were not on the run," he said.

    A tense waiting game followed, with Godmanis, security guards and deputies sitting in the government building, surrounded by troops outside.

    A bizarre series of phone calls followed, but no attack. First the phone rang with warnings of violent and imminent assault, advising Godmanis to leave. Then came calls from Colonel-General Fyodor Kuzmin, the Soviet commander of the Baltic military district, demanding the surrender of a cache of arms in the government building. Kuzmin was responsible for implementing the coup on the ground there.

    Still no attack, and Godmanis — puzzled by the vastly superior Soviet army's hesitance over a few rifles — decided to make a deal for a handful of weapons to buy more time.

    "This situation was not really clear to me because it was totally against my feeling that this was the end," he said.

    Shots were fired when an armored vehicle arrived, presumably to take the arms, and several of the Latvian security guards disappeared, arrested but released shortly afterward.

    But the night passed with no invasion and Kuzmin said in a call early Aug. 20 that the arrests of the guards were due to a miscommunication among his forces.

    "I do believe that at this moment when this happened it was a decisive time when Kuzmin got information that things would go very wrong in Moscow," Godmanis said.

    The hard-liners had hesitated in Moscow, leaving Russian President Boris Yeltsin in place at his headquarters at the White House parliamentary building and sparking doubts about their resolve to see the coup through.

    "I think that first night was the most terrible, when it seemed in Moscow they would occupy both the Kremlin and the so-called White House," said Kubilius, who was Lithuania's prime minister from 1999 to 2000. "And when it failed the first night, it became more and more clear that something was wrong in the organization of the coup."

    Late in the night of Aug. 20, Estonia's parliament declared immediate independence and Latvia's followed suit the next day.

    Arnold Ruutel, then chairman of Estonia's Supreme Soviet, said his country would have declared independence in a month or two anyway. But the Baltics seized on the coup for a quicker exit of the Soviet Union.

    "Definitely the developments in Moscow were crucial to the outcome of the coup, and in those conditions of a power vacuum the Baltic states successfully used their chances," he said.

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