How We Got Here : Diary of a Doomed Coup : A bungle-by-bungle look at how Moscow’s hard-liners grabbed for power, and missed.

Rarely in the long catalogue of human folly has a band of seemingly rational men been so willfully perverse.

The plot to unseat Mikhail S. Gorbachev, led by the custodians of the most powerful institutions in the Soviet Union, was so wooden-headed, so inimical to the goals that they hoped to achieve as to defy imagination.

These eight gray men set out to turn the clock back to a sterner, safer time. Instead they sent the hands spinning wildly forward, fracturing the union and ending the myth of communism as a viable concept of governance.

It was a plot that should have succeeded. From interviews with participants and eyewitnesses, new details of the foiled coup have emerged: The conspirators had prepared carefully, readying a detailed set of plans fully a month before; 300,000 blank arrest orders had been printed in advance; loyal KGB guards protecting Gorbachev in the Crimea had among them only a handful of small arms against an expected onslaught by Soviet army and naval forces, and a KGB squad sent to arrest the coup’s chief opponent, Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, narrowly missed him at several locations around Moscow.

But the details also show a bumbling, faint-hearted set of conspirators, and the military that they counted on riven by uncertainty and differences over where its true duty lay.

Ultimately, how could this conspiracy of dunces have been so spectacularly wrong about the people they presumed to rule?

Corrupted and blinded by what they thought was absolute power, they forgot that true power ultimately derives from the consent of the governed. They suffered from what historian Barbara Tuchman calls “the most frequent and fatal of self-delusions--underestimation of the opponent.”

From such miscalculations are epochs born.

The failed coup will change much in the lives of the Soviet peoples, but it revealed even more. The nation’s obvious economic failures, the deep ethnic fissures in the forced confederation were but symptoms of a deeper ailment, an incurable rot in the soul of the Soviet system.

But as this malignancy is carved out, what will replace it? What unifying idea can bring these disparate lands and distinct peoples together again? The nation has become a centrifuge, with Moscow at its center, gyrating madly toward an uncertain future.

Perhaps the Soviet Union’s 15 republics, held in thrall for 74 years by the iron bonds of terror, will evolve into a peaceful federation of autonomous equals. Perhaps mere anarchy will be loosed in a blood-dimmed tide, with a new generation of passionate tyrants sweeping away the well-intentioned but weak leaders of today.

A great drama has opened in the largest nation on earth. The final act awaits the moving hand of history.

There had been warnings.

Eduard A. Shevardnadze, once one of Gorbachev’s closest allies, had quit as foreign minister last December, warning that the conservatives were conspiring to reverse the reforms of perestroika. Other ominous signs followed in the spring, as the security forces and the army appeared to act independent of political control.

Indeed, there was an attempt at a governmental coup d’etat in June when Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov, a former tax collector with a porcupine brush cut, demanded that all of Gorbachev’s sweeping emergency powers be turned over to him because, he said, the president was unwilling to use them to pull the country out of its spiraling crisis.

The defense minister, interior minister and KGB chief all supported Pavlov, depicting the country as at the brink of catastrophe, threatened from within and without. Conservative deputies in the Supreme Soviet bayed for Gorbachev’s blood.

But Gorbachev, strengthened immeasurably by a new alliance with Yeltsin, crushed the revolt. Pavlov and his three colleagues in rebellion were harshly dressed down. They had struck at the king and missed, and yet neither they nor Gorbachev learned from the episode.

Emboldened by his victory, Gorbachev quickly moved toward agreement with Yeltsin and leaders of eight other republics on a Union Treaty laying a new political and constitutional basis for the country. Long-stymied decisions were made to proceed with the radical transformation of the economy, arms reduction agreements were reached with the United States, a Moscow summit was held with President Bush and a new party program was pushed through the Communist Party’s Central Committee, making social democracy, not communism, its goal.

On Aug. 5, a freshly confident Gorbachev left Moscow for vacation. “We’re on a roll,” one of his aides commented, noting that the president intended to spend only two weeks at his vacation home near Phoros in the Crimea and return to Moscow to sign the Union Treaty on Tuesday, Aug. 20.

Still, all was not quiet. The dramatic devolution of power envisioned under the Union Treaty deeply upset conservatives, who saw it as the end of the Soviet Union as it had evolved over the past seven decades. And perhaps what was critical was the final concession that Yeltsin had wrested from Gorbachev on July 29 in a night of hard bargaining: the authority to levy taxes would be a prerogative of the republics and the federal government would derive its revenues from them.

Unbeknown to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, a coup plot was by that time already well along. The group that later was to temporarily depose Gorbachev had drawn up a detailed set of documents establishing a state of emergency, clamping down on the press and declaring martial law throughout the land. The inch-thick package of decrees was locked away, awaiting the opening hours of the putsch.

Alexander Prokhanov, a prominent conservative writer, who had co-signed a letter with leading military and party officials denouncing the Gorbachev government, told the Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta that it was time to seize power “by the throat.”

“Our nation should have a real leader,” Prokhanov said. “People cannot be left to the mercy of fate at a time like this.”

These and other signs of impending trouble were not lost on the Soviet analysts at Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters in Langley, Va. Less than a week before the coup, the agency circulated an analysis saying that Gorbachev’s reform program was in trouble and conservatives were increasingly restless. The seers at the CIA correctly identified resistance to the Union Treaty, but, like Gorbachev, they failed to anticipate that its scheduled signing would be the flash point that would ignite a full-scale reactionary rebellion.

On Friday, Aug. 16, Alexander N. Yakovlev, another of Gorbachev’s closest advisers, warned that a “Stalinist” core of the party leadership was preparing a coup.

“The truth is that the party leadership, in contradiction to its own declarations, is ridding itself of the democracy wing of the party and is preparing for political revenge and for a party and state coup,” Yakovlev said.

Yakovlev’s warning, like so many others, was dismissed as another Cassandra’s cry.

Sunday, Day 1 Crisis in the Crimea

On the afternoon of Sunday, Aug. 18, Gorbachev was preparing to return to Moscow from Phoros where he, his wife, Raisa, their daughter Irina, her husband, Anatoly, and their daughter Anastasia had been vacationing. Anatoly S. Chernayev, a foreign policy specialist on his staff, was there, as was Gorbachev’s secretary, Olga Lanina.

The government-owned compound sprawls around a bay on the southern tip of the Crimea, halfway between Yalta and Sevastopol on the Black Sea. The presidential villa, surrounded by peace trees and an olive grove, overlooks a sandy beach. Inside the compound are several other buildings, including visitors’ cottages, a communications center and three-story staff quarters.

Gorbachev, preparing for a busy week in Moscow, had been telephoning his political allies around the country, touching base with republic leaders as well officials in Moscow and Leningrad.

Arkady Volsky, a former Communist Party official who now heads the Soviet Scientific and Industrial League, said the president had called him--despite some recent differences--at his own dacha to talk about accelerating the country’s economic reforms after the signing of the Union Treaty.

“He was in excellent spirits,” Volsky said later. “There was not an inkling of the trouble that came shortly.”

Shortly before 5 p.m. on Sunday, five men and their aides arrived at the compound and demanded admission. Because the group included Lt. Gen. Yuri Plekhanov, chief of the KGB’s equivalent of the Secret Service, their cavalcade of special Zil limousines had been admitted into the heavily guarded compound.

The visitors were some of the most powerful men from the most powerful institutions in the country--Valery I. Boldin, Gorbachev’s chief of staff; Oleg D. Baklanov, the first deputy chairman of the Soviet Defense Council; Oleg S. Shenin, a Communist Party Central Committee secretary; Gen. Valentin I. Varennikov, commander of Soviet ground forces and deputy defense minister, and Plekhanov, representing the KGB.

Wanting to find out who had sent the men and why, Gorbachev went to one of the special Kremlin telephones that connect him to officials throughout the country.

“I picked up the telephone but it wasn’t working,” he recounted later. “I picked up a second, a third, a fourth, but none of them worked. They were all cut off. I picked up an internal phone. But everything was cut off. I then realized that this mission was not the sort of mission with which we ordinarily had to deal.”

Gorbachev went to another part of the house, gathered his family and told them what was happening. He told them he intended to resist the expected threats from the group and began to make arrangements for their safety.

“I didn’t need additional information,” he said at his Moscow press conference. “I saw that this was a very serious situation. I thought that they were going to try to blackmail me or force me or compel me to do something. Anything was possible.”

By the time Gorbachev returned, the delegation was already in the house--an extraordinary breach of security engineered by Plekhanov and Vladimir Medvedev, Gorbachev’s adjutant and one of the conspirators. A virulent confrontation ensued.

“Who sent you?” Gorbachev demanded.

“The Committee,” they replied. “The Committee appointed in connection with the emergency.”

“Who appointed the committee?” Gorbachev asked. “I didn’t appoint such a committee, and the Supreme Soviet didn’t appoint such a committee.”

They demanded that Gorbachev issue a decree establishing a state of emergency and granting the State Emergency Committee full powers with Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev at its head. If Gorbachev refused, they said, he would simply be replaced.

“They sat in my study and presented me with an ultimatum,” Gorbachev told an aide immediately after the meeting. “Either I sign the decree on the state of emergency, they said, or I hand over my authority to Yanayev or--this was Varennikov’s proposal--I resign.

“Fuck off!” Gorbachev told the conspirators, according to foreign policy aide Chernayev. “You are nothing but adventurers and traitors, and you’ll pay for this. I don’t care what will happen to you, but you’ll destroy the country. You are pushing it to civil war.”

As Gorbachev looked at the list of committee members, he was stunned to read that the names of Marshal Dmitri T. Yazov, the defense minister, and Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, the country’s security and intelligence agency.

“I particularly trusted Yazov and Kryuchkov,” he said later.

For an hour, the men debated the country’s profound political and economic problems. Gorbachev said that declaring a state of siege would only exacerbate the crisis. The usurpers insisted that he had lost the respect of his government and control of the people. Gorbachev could make no headway, he said later, for “the demand was still that I resign. And I said, ‘You’ll never live that long!’ ”

The delegation left for Moscow with Gorbachev’s unequivocal “Nyet!” about 7:30 p.m.

The compound was sealed off from outside by KGB forces and army troops supporting the coup. Roadblocks were established throughout the Crimea and all planes were diverted on orders of the air defense forces.

Inside the compound, the president’s personal bodyguard of 32 KGB officers remained loyal and prepared to fight off an armed attack from a military garrison in nearby Simferopol and perhaps from the naval units offshore. But they had only their side arms and a total of six Kalashnikov assault rifles.

Family members were placed in protected spots, and to guard against poisoned or drugged food or water, the defenders decided to rely only on supplies already in the compound.

“We thought the attack would come shortly before first light,” one of the KGB guards recounted back in Moscow. “I don’t know what the president did, but I wrote a letter to my wife and children. I doubted anyone of us would see the dawn.”

With the return of Boldin, Baklanov, Shenin, Varennikov and Plekhanov to Moscow, the conspirators began the final preparations for the coup, readying the declaration of a state of emergency that would have to be proclaimed without Gorbachev’s signature.

Foreign Minister Alexander A. Bessmertnykh, dressed in jeans and knowing nothing of the previous hours’ events, was summoned to the Kremlin. There he found a meeting already under way, with a large number of generals participating, as well as Yanayev, Baklanov, Prime Minister Pavlov, Interior Minister Boris K. Pugo and KGB chief Kryuchkov.

Kryuchkov pulled him aside and led him into the next room, Bessmertnykh recounted.

“Listen, the situation in the country is terrible,” Kryuchkov told him. “The chaotic situation emerges. It’s a crisis. It’s dangerous. People are disappointed. Something should be done, and we decided to do something through emergency measures. We have established a committee, an emergency committee, and I would like you to be part of it.”

Bessmertnykh said he asked, “Is that committee arranged by the instructions of the president?”

“No, he’s incapable of functioning now,” the KGB chief replied, according to Bessmertnykh. “He’s lying flat in a dacha .”

Bessmertnykh asked for a medical report on Gorbachev, but Kryuchkov declined to provide one. Bessmertnykh said he then replied, “Mr. Kryuchkov, I am not going to be part of that committee, and I categorically reject any participation in that.”

As they went back to the meeting, Kryuchkov told the others, “Bessmertnykh refused.” And someone commented, “Well, we needed a liberal on the committee.”

Bessmertnykh, who was later fired by Gorbachev for failing to oppose the coup more resolutely, said he had argued with the group for a time but to no avail.

‘What you are doing will bring a terrible blow to the Soviet Union and its foreign policy situation,” he said he had told them. “It will be isolated. There will be sanctions. There will be embargoes. There will be no grain. There will be no food. That will be the situation.”

Ignoring Bessmertynkh’s warning was but one of a hundred blunders the conspirators made over the ensuing three days.

After the coup had failed, Pavlov told Russian television that the plan had been perfect except for one small flaw.

“If we had followed the original plan and convened the Supreme Soviet and Yanayev and everyone had signed the papers there, it would have been very simple,” Pavlov said. “If someone had not been so stupid and introduced combat vehicles into the city, nothing would have gone wrong.”

Warp Speed In Kennebunkport George Bush retired early Sunday night, exhausted by a day at his summer home at Kennebunkport, Me., that included morning church services, golf and boating--what he refers to as “vacating”--at warp speed. Slowed somewhat by thyroid troubles, he vowed to spend the month of August conducting as little government business as possible.

At 11:45 p.m., he was awakened by the ringing phone. His national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, was on the line from the White House staff headquarters at the Nonantum Hotel, a mile or so down Ocean Avenue from the President’s house at Walker’s Point.

The Soviet news agency Tass has reported that Gorbachev is ill, the low-key Scowcroft said. Gorbachev’s vice president, Gennady I. Yanayev, has stepped in as the acting president.

The news brought little reaction from the President.

“The information was so sparse. We had no details,” an Administration official said later. “The bottom line was, ‘Let’s see what’s happening.’ ”

Not only did the news catch official Washington by surprise; it caught it on vacation. Secretary of State James A. Baker III was on holiday in Wyoming, as were White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater and Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was on a long-planned trout-fishing expedition to remote British Columbia.

In Kennebunkport, the official said, “there was no one up here”--just Bush and Scowcroft.

Monday, Day 2 ‘Mortal Threats’ in Moscow

Monday dawned cool and drizzly in Moscow. The nation awoke to learn from radio and television broadcasts that “a mortal threat is hanging over the country” because perestroika, Gorbachev’s reform initiative, “has entered a blind alley.”

In somber tones, announcers read a lengthy series of communiques, decrees and statements--Gorbachev was ill in the Crimea, Yanayev had become acting president, a state of emergency had been declared in some parts of the country, effective at 4 a.m., and a new, eight-man “State Committee for the State of Emergency,” headed by Yanayev, had assumed power.

Declaring its intention to “overcome the profound and comprehensive crisis, political, ethnic and civil strife, chaos and anarchy” it said threatened the country, the committee declared that its decrees were now the law of the land.

It promised to impose “the most serious measures” to end the crisis.

The committee assumed the sweeping powers of the State Security Council, ordered the country’s security and military forces to carry out its directives without question, banned all protests, strikes and demonstrations and re-established strict controls on the media, closing all but seven central newspapers and taking independent radio and television stations off the air. The committee also issued a series of instructions to bring the country’s economy back under central government control and to restore industrial and agricultural production.

Most members of the new leadership were well known--Yanayev, Yazov, Kryuchkov, Pugo, Pavlov. But the other three--Baklanov, deputy chairman of the Defense Council; Vasily A. Starodubtsev, leader of the Soviet Peasants’ Union, and Alexander I. Tizyakov, a representative of the military-industrial complex--had been in the news only occasionally. Except for Starodubtsev and Tizyakov, all were considered part of the “president’s team,” each chosen by Gorbachev for his loyalty and his assumed commitment to reform.

The declarations, which were broadcast again and again through the day, had been brought to the official news agency Tass and the State Television and Radio Co. by Leonid P. Kravchenko, another of the “president’s men,” the former director of Tass and now the head of the country’s broadcast operations.

At Tass, Kravchenko handed the documents to Gennady Shishkin, the news agency’s first deputy director, at 5 a.m. with instructions to begin their distribution an hour later and continue at specified intervals throughout the day. KGB officers were stationed in Shishkin’s office and elsewhere in the Tass building to ensure compliance.

“The package Kravchenko brought was as thick as your fist, and every piece had its own release time--a real timetable,” one senior Tass editor who had been called in at 3 a.m., said later. “There was a script--this was not to be a ‘ coup d’etat ,’ this was to be a ‘constitutional transition of power and a responsible approach to a crisis situation.’ No need to panic, for good men are in charge of the country--that was the message.”

By 8 a.m., state-run television under Kravchenko had packaged the message: Bach cello concertos in place of the usual morning news-and-interview program, then a sober, gray-suited announcer reading the decrees, all followed, first, by traditional balalaika music with idyllic shots of the lush Russian countryside and fast pop music with pictures of young people in Moscow.

Reaction in Washington

In Kennebunkport and in Washington, President Bush’s men groped for the proper reaction to the stunning news.

Looking back on the Administration’s performance, officials said they were crippled by a lack of information. Until it became clear that the coup was indeed a genuine effort to overthrow the president of the Soviet Union, how could they be sure that Gorbachev--as the official Soviet news agency had first reported--was not indeed ill?

They debated: Should we issue a strong declaration of support for Gorbachev? At first, they hesitated.

One Administration official summed up the dilemma: “You come out very strongly and you find out Gorbachev did resign, you look like a fool. You come out very strongly and you find out Gorbachev didn’t resign, but Yanayev is there permanently, you’ve cooked your own goose.”

On Moscow’s Streets

On the streets of Moscow, shock was the common first reaction, for, despite all the political contention and the frequent predictions of coups, only the most pessimistic thought that Gorbachev could be replaced so easily.

Confusion was the general second reaction. The aims of the coup, if indeed it was a coup, were couched in opaque Soviet rhetoric. Only then did people try to work out whether it was bad or good. Some were for the takeover, many were against but almost everybody trudged off to work as usual.

“It didn’t sound good, but if Gorbachev had a heart attack or a stroke somebody had to do something,” Marina Frolova, 34, a philosophy teacher at a Moscow institute, said. “If the president is sick, you expect the vice president to take over. That was my first reaction.

“But then I thought, ‘What is this State Committee for the State of Emergency? Why a state committee when we have a government? Why a state of emergency if the president has appendicitis? Why decrees in the middle of the night when we have a parliament?’ By the time I got down to the grocery, I had a lot of questions all those statements hadn’t answered, and so did everybody else.”

Tanks in the Soviet Capital

By 9 a.m., Muscovites were confronted with the reality of the coup. Columns of tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks full of soldiers rolled into the city.

KGB units had been put on alert across the country at 2 a.m. Troops in army units around Moscow were awakened at 4 and 5 a.m. and put on the road to the capital; they were only told they were going to help maintain order in the city and would get instructions there. At 6 a.m., Yazov conferred briefly with regional military commanders, reportedly telling them only to ensure order in their districts, reinforce the protection of military facilities and listen to the radio.

As the first decrees were read, military commanders across the country quickly mobilized. Troops took up positions around such key facilities as government offices, radio and television stations, newspapers, universities and public squares. In the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, paratroopers and Interior Ministry commandos began surrounding and seizing communications and broadcast facilities, government offices and factories. In some cities, squads of soldiers began removing Gorbachev’s picture from the walls of government and party offices. States of emergency were proclaimed by many local commanders when civilian authorities in many areas refused to accept the State Emergency Committee’s decrees.

Arrests had begun at dawn and continued through the day. A special group of KGB operatives under Gen. Gennady Dobrovolsky made swoop after swoop across Moscow in search of leading democrats and took them to a new detention camp at Balashikha, a satellite town outside Moscow. Leaders of Shchit, an association of liberal military officers and veterans, were rounded up in Moscow. The heads of more than a dozen of the country’s new commodity and stock exchanges were taken from their homes and offices. A number of political activists from the Democratic Union and other radical groups were also arrested.

Even more arrests were planned: Gen. Nikolai Kalinin, the commandant of Moscow, had 300,000 blank detention orders printed at the KGB’s request on Monday, and the Interior Ministry picked up 250,000 pairs of handcuffs it had ordered 10 days earlier from a factory in Pskov, 350 miles northwest of Moscow.

But the first objective of the plotters was to deploy as many troops as quickly as possible throughout the Soviet capital, believing that such a show of massive force would discourage popular resistance. As leaders in Eastern Europe had learned two years ago and the Moscow conspirators were later to learn, a show of force was not enough.

“I was driving to work and saw a whole division moving up Leninsky Prospekt toward the Kremlin,” Yevgeny G. Dudin, a veteran army intelligence officer, now retired, recounted. “This was like my days in Africa--the military takes over in the name of ‘national salvation’ and ‘restoration of order.’ But we’re not Africa. We’re a civilized European nation with a constitutional order, democratic institutions now and strict military discipline that, even in Communist times, subordinated the army to the party.

“A putsch in Moscow--I would have said impossible, absolutely impossible. My brother officers were not putschists. Committed Communists, yes, for the most part, but coup makers, no. But there they were, every rusty old tank the generals could lay their hands on. And the look on those lads’ faces was one of absolute bewilderment at what was happening.”

In the coup’s earliest hours, the overall intention was to portray the changes as necessary to deal with the country’s unquestioned and profound crisis--problems that Gorbachev himself had spoken openly and repeatedly about--and as fully constitutional. Documents found after the coup’s failure stressed the need to avoid actions that would arouse popular resistance or give the world the impression that there had been a putsch. Aside from the KGB and Interior Ministry troops, most of the soldiers sent into Moscow had not even been issued ammunition for fear they would open fire.

Breakfast With Boris

Yeltsin heard the news about 7 a.m. while finishing breakfast at his summer dacha at Arkhangelskoye, about 15 miles west of Moscow. He had returned to Moscow on Sunday from a trip to Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia to discuss the signing of the Union Treaty, scheduled for Tuesday, and the further negotiations that would follow.

He quickly conferred with Ivan S. Silayev, the Russian prime minister, and Gennady Burbulis, his state secretary, who were in dachas nearby. They telephoned the Soviet president’s office, but were told that everyone was in a meeting. They telephoned the Central Committee; again, more meetings. They telephoned Gorbachev’s Crimean villa, but the call would not go through. They telephoned several newspaper editors, who now had their copies of the committee’s decrees from KGB couriers. That confirmed their suspicions: It was a coup.

Yeltsin decided on an immediate and direct challenge, according to aides, and went to the Kremlin where he has an office. The Kremlin guards, a special KGB unit, refused to let him in. Turning back, he went to the seat of the Russian Parliament along the Moscow River, the 19-story tower known as the “White House” for its marble facade.

Unknown to him, a KGB squad was hot on his trail across the capital. It had first gone to his home in northern Moscow. Not finding him there, it had sped to his dacha , missing him by 40 minutes. It missed him again at the Kremlin when the guards who refused him entry had not received an order to detain him. Now its last opportunity was gone: He had arrived shortly before 10 a.m. at the White House and already a crowd of supporters was growing.

Yeltsin met with Silayev and Ruslan Khasbulatov, the chairman of the Russian legislature, and other top aides. There was no question that they would oppose the coup; the issue was how.

A statement “To the Citizens of Russia” was drafted quickly, denouncing as “a reactionary, unconstitutional coup d’etat “ what had been portrayed by the plotters as a necessary transition of power. With plain, tough language, the Russian leadership--Yeltsin, Silayev and Khasbulatov--called for total mass resistance to the coup, including a nationwide general strike.

“The only effective weapon we have to stop the onset of a dictatorship is a general strike,” Khasbulatov told journalists. “They can defeat us in the streets, but we will win in the factories, the mines, the shops and, yes, in their very offices.”

Khasbulatov and Col. Alexander Rutskoi, a decorated air force officer who was elected as Yeltsin’s vice president in June, took turns speaking on the independent radio station Echo of Moscow, urging people to remain vigilant but calm and calling for civil disobedience to thwart the coup.

Resistance was already being organized by Democratic Russia, a broadly based political movement backing Yeltsin. Vladimir Boxer, one of its Moscow leaders, had gotten early word of the coup. Even before the first announcement was made on Radio Moscow, he had contacted several hundred activists. By 10 a.m., five telephone banks of 10 people each were set up to collect information from around the city and the country and to get more volunteers to the White House. By noon, 400 offices, factories and shops with Democratic Russia cells had been alerted, and they had begun mobilizing for mass protests. Supporters began to flow first to Manezh Square outside the Kremlin and then, to protect Yeltsin, to the White House.

Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, was sent to Paris and then Washington; his first mission was to seek Western support for the Russian government, but he was to remain abroad to establish a government in exile if the resistance in Moscow was crushed.

KGB officers at the Sheremetyevo Airport’s VIP lounge had orders to detain Kozyrev, but he slipped through the ordinary immigration controls unnoticed; in Paris, he avoided the Soviet Embassy, where Ambassador Yuri V. Dubinin, a former ambassador to the United States, had enthusiastically supported the coup.

The American charge d’affaires, James F. Collins, was called later Monday to Yeltsin’s headquarters and asked for U.S. support. A Yeltsin letter to Bush was quickly translated and relayed to Washington and to Bush’s Kennebunkport home. Collins then sent an embassy staffer back to Yeltsin’s office to get a telephone number so Bush could call him.

Yeltsin issued a decree ordering army, police and KGB units on Russian territory to stand down and not to back the coup.

“Soldiers, officers and generals,” he said in an appeal to the army for support, “I believe in this tragic hour you can make the right choice. The honor and glory of Russian men of arms shall not be stained with the blood of the people. In this tragic movement for Russia, I appeal to you: do not allow yourself to be ensnared in a net of lies and promises and demagogic calls to ‘military duty.’ ”

The tactic worked. A paratroop battalion had been sent to the White House with the view toward sealing it off. But Yeltsin talked with the unit’s commander, Maj. Gen. Alexander Lebed, whom he had met in June during a visit to the paratroopers’ training base at Tula. The unit switched sides to protect Yeltsin.

A squadron of 10 tanks from the elite Tamanskaya division was won over Monday evening after one of its officers, a young lieutenant, went in to meet with Yeltsin and then persuaded his commander to talk with the Russian leader as well.

In flyers handed out to the troops, pasted on the walls of the Moscow Metro and read over a few independent radio stations broadcasting despite attempts to close them, Rutskoi made an impassioned appeal to the armed forces to oppose the coup.

“Comrades! I, an officer of the Soviet armed forces, a colonel, a Hero of the Soviet Union, who has walked the battle-torn roads of Afghanistan and know the horrors of war, call on you my brother officers, soldiers and sailors not to act against your people, against your fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters,” he said.

In a moment that will live in history, on early Monday afternoon, Yeltsin clambered onto one of the dark green T-72 tanks surrounding the White House. Although the unit had not yet come over to him, the major in command said, “I am not going to order my troops to shoot Boris Yeltsin.”

Yeltsin on the tank, urging the nation to resist the coup and to launch a general strike, was the picture that went out not only around the world, bringing him much-needed international support, but--surprisingly--on the evening news on state-run television, along with shots of people building barricades to defend the White House. The conspirators had committed another major tactical error.

“They were just too clever,” Mikhail N. Poltoranin, the Russian minister of information, said later. “They wanted to use those pictures against us--to justify the assault they planned overnight on the White House and the arrest of Yeltsin. Instead, the pictures symbolized the struggle, and even those people who are politically passive understood what it was all about.”

Conspirators at the Kremlin

At 6 p.m., the Cabinet convened in the Kremlin under Pavlov, and the conspiracy entered its second stage. Again the meeting had been scripted by the coup’s planners to show that the government was still in place, operating under the constitution and dealing with the crisis.

Pavlov explained the state of emergency this way: He had been called to the Kremlin on Sunday evening for a meeting with Kryuchkov, the KGB chief, and the country’s top generals. A delegation had been to see Gorbachev at his Crimean dacha that day and found him in bed, sick and incoherent. Meanwhile, the KGB had discovered that a heavily armed group of “extremists” had come to Moscow and were preparing a coup and planning to assassinate top officials.

Only a few questions were asked, and the discussion was largely off the point. No one questioned the need for the state of emergency, no one asked where Gorbachev was, no one asked who appointed the State Emergency Committee.

“In principle, I think we agree that today’s situation means that our decisions have not been implemented and (we) could soon have a situation where industry will come to a complete standstill,” Pavlov said in justifying the state of emergency, according to detailed notes kept by Nikolai Vorontsov, the environment minister, the Cabinet’s only non-Communist and only one of two members to oppose the coup.

There was also considerable debate over the three-hour meeting on how tough to be, according to notes kept by Vorontsov and by another participant. But in the end, Pavlov had the support he wanted.

Boris Y. Panyukov, the civil aviation minister, complained, “We introduce the state of emergency too late.” Opposition was building quickly, he said.

An official from the tool-making industry said that the troops were not being tough enough in controlling the protests. Driving into the Kremlin, he came across a demonstration just beneath its walls.

“I saw what was happening in Manezh Square,” he said. “We have to move ahead more decisively. There were about 700 people there.”

According to Vorontsov’s notes, Pavlov replied, “I am against tanks. Let people stroll around and talk a little bit.”

Mikhail I. Shchadov, the coal minister, warned that the miners’ strike in response to Yeltsin’s call was spreading rapidly and soon the industry would be shut down--and shortly thereafter, most of Soviet industry. A state of emergency must be declared immediately in key mining regions to avoid bloodshed, he said.

The only demurral appears to have come from Vladimir A. Shcherbakov, the first deputy prime minister in charge of economic reform.

“So far, I don’t think I exactly understand the leadership’s policy,” Shcherbakov said toward the end of the three-hour meeting. “I will work honestly and will define my (political) position later . . . I support the idea of strengthening discipline, but without going back to the methods of 1929” when workers were held at their jobs by force.

Dilemma in D.C.

With details about the coup still scarce early Monday morning in Kennebunkport, National Security Adviser Scowcroft faced a dilemma. He wanted Bush’s statement to show that the U.S. White House was troubled by the takeover. But it still seemed possible that Gorbachev might indeed be sick and the transfer of power irrevocable.

A senior Administration official said the statement, drafted before dawn by Scowcroft and National Security Council spokesman Roman Popadiuk thus sought “to be as negative as we could without putting ourselves in a hole we couldn’t get out of.”

Scowcroft himself feared the worst. He doubted that hard-liners could regain permanent claim on the Soviet Union. But he worried that the coup could succeed for a number of years in a fatal blow to Bush’s vaunted “new world order.”

He flew back to Washington with the President on Monday afternoon and while enroute was handed a copy of a letter from Yeltsin making clear that the Russian leader intended to stand fast.

Scowcroft’s spirits were not buoyed. He fully expected crack Soviet forces to assault the Russian Parliament within the next several hours.

But by late Monday night in Washington, he sensed that a turning point had come. It was dawn in Moscow, and Yeltsin’s barricades remained unbreached. Perhaps, he allowed himself to believe, the nightmare might truly pass.

They Meet the Press

On Monday evening in Moscow, a press conference was arranged at the Foreign Ministry’s Press Center for Yanayev, the acting president, and four other members of the State Emergency Committee. All were in suits of varying shades of gray. Again, the message was to be that this was a constitutional transition and, despite the hasty conclusions of some, not a coup d’etat.

“The State Emergency Committee is well aware of the gravest crisis that we are going through,” Yanayev said, his hands shaking, “and it is determined to take full responsibility and to take the country out of the crisis.”

He pledged assistance for the poor and disadvantaged, a war on crime, more food in the stores and a housing drive. The basic commitment to perestroika remained, and there would be a full discussion of the Union Treaty so that it could be amended. Foreign policy would remain unchanged, though the Soviet Union would not accept “any attempt to dictate terms” to it.

Gorbachev, he added, was “on vacation and undergoing treatment in the Crimea. He grew very tired over these years, and he will need some time to get better. Nothing threatens Comrade Gorbachev. He is in a safe place, except he needs some time to feel better.”

He said Gorbachev might be back after recovery.

The official Soviet news media asked questions that were so safe and pat that the scripting was transparent. But the times had changed. The new independent Soviet newspapers and the foreign press wanted to know exactly where Gorbachev was and what was wrong with him, why the news media were being shut down and whether this coup would be better compared to the one in 1917 that brought the Bolsheviks to power or the overthrow in 1964 of Nikita S. Khrushchev and his replacement by Leonid I. Brezhnev.

“As for your suggestion there was a military coup,” Yanayev replied, “I beg to disagree because we are basing ourselves on constitutional provisions, and the endorsement of our decision by the Supreme Soviet next week will enable us to say that all the constitutional norms have been observed.”

The bland bureaucrats who were proclaiming themselves the nation’s new leaders projected an image of hesitation and weakness. This was the first and last time the committee members were seen by the public during the coup. It was a public relations disaster.

‘Coups Can Fail’

Bush spoke briefly to reporters just before 8 a.m. on Monday. He was deliberately noncommital on the coup and U.S. reaction to it. But he noted that “coups can fail” when they “run up against the will of the people.”

The statement reflected the Administration’s uncertainty and its unwillingness to commit itself fully to Gorbachev without knowing just what was happening.

Did Bush’s statement that coups sometimes fail reflect inside information even in those initial hours that the coup was in trouble?

“I don’t think we had any real information to that effect,” a senior White House official said, although “the CIA was reporting all along” that some military units would not follow orders from the coup leaders, and that there were some defections in the ranks.

“It was more a reflection of a presidential decision: We’re going to take stands opposing the coup as unconstitutional.”

Despite the lack of information and certainty, it became more and more clear that just what the Administration had feared--a coup from the right by hard-liners trying to return the Soviet Union to a pre-Gorbachev path--was indeed occurring.

Officials became more and more convinced, one said, as Gorbachev remained unseen and unheard, and Bush’s insistent efforts to reach his friend met with refusals by the Kremlin to put the Soviet president on the line.

It quickly added up, said one official, to “something fishy.”

There was Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation, standing on a tank opposing the new leaders. Here was Yeltsin, on the line with Bush, asking for a statement of support for Gorbachev.

With the leading edge of Hurricane Bob beginning to swipe at the Maine coast, Bush boarded his armored limousine for the 45-minute drive to Pease Air National Guard Base near Portsmouth, N.H., to begin a hastily arranged trip back to Washington.

At midafternoon in the White House, what is known as the “deputies committee” met in the Roosevelt Room, a windowless conference room across a corridor from the Oval Office. The crisis-monitoring group, which devises policy options for presentation to the President, is made up of the second-ranking officials at the NSC, the State Department, Defense Department, and CIA, among others. Around the polished, oblong table, were Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Deputy Defense Secretary Donald J. Atwood, Robert M. Gates, the deputy national security adviser, and several others.

Now they were joined by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin L. Powell, Scowcroft, and at one point, the President himself.

Two key points were made at the meeting: The deputy director of the CIA, Richard Kerr, reported that the unfolding coup did not have the earmarks of a traditional putsch: Communications had not been cut off, the military was not acting in concert to support the overthrow, crowds had been allowed to gather undeterred in the streets. There were signs, based on overt evidence as well as electronic intercepts and contacts between U.S. and Soviet officials, that the coup was beginning to unravel.

Out of Monday afternoon’s meetings came a much tougher statement than Bush’s morning remarks.

Gone were any doubts about what had occurred in the Soviet Union.

“This misguided and illegitimate effort bypasses both Soviet law and the will of the Soviet peoples,” Bush said in a written statement.

The President said the Administration would “avoid in every way possible actions that would lend legitimacy or support to this coup effort.”

And, most importantly, in a sharp shift in the Administration’s approach, Bush said: “We support President Yeltsin’s call for ‘restoration of the legally elected organs of power and the reaffirmation of the post of U.S.S.R. President M.S. Gorbachev.’ ”

One official who sat in on the meeting at which the new approach was prepared said:

“Overall, everyone was in agreement you had to do something. This was the last chance. If Gorbachev goes, we’re in deep trouble. If Gorbachev loses, it will be a setback and will have a major impact on the world situation.”

Still, it was Bush’s view, the official said, that “no one should look to the United States as having a magic wand” to immediately resolve the dilemma.

Resistance Grows

Resistance to the coup was growing in the streets--and in the heart of the Kremlin.

Gorbachev staff members, still loyal, had made their way to work Monday, and to their surprise, had not been arrested on arrival. Among them were Vadim V. Bakatin, Yevgeny Primakov, Veniamin Yarin, Valentin Karasev and Vadim A. Medvedev.

They began their countermoves, working in suites just down the hall from those of the conspirators in Gorbachev’s Kremlin headquarters, the yellow stucco Council of Ministers building.

“The conspirators made a strategic miscalculation,” Primakov said later. “In order not to give the appearance of a coup, they didn’t do all the usual things--round up anyone likely to be loyal to Gorbachev, anyone likely to oppose them. They wanted the appearance of a government functioning smoothly and constitutionally through a crisis. . . . This gave us the time we needed to organize.”

Resistance had been organized in other cities, too. In Leningrad, Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak quickly had his deputy, Adm. Vyacheslav Shcherbakov, appointed by Yeltsin as the local military commander, and then summoned the old commander, Col. Gen. Alexander Samsonov, who was believed to be supporting the putsch.

“Have you heard of Nuremberg?” Sobchak, a law professor, demanded, conjuring up the image of post-World War II war crimes trials.

Samsonov said he would confine his troops to barracks and remain neutral.

Yeltsin’s call for help had, meanwhile, brought thousands of frightened Muscovites to the White House on the embankment of the Moscow River where heavy battle tanks and armored personnel carriers, their guns all aimed at the building, were arrayed in fearsome columns along every road.

By the hour, the barricades around the building grew--an assemblage of construction materials, city buses, cement mixers and scrap metal.

“We were ready to die for democracy,” Natasha Laptev, the daughter of Ivan D. Laptev, a senior official of the Supreme Soviet, or national legislature, said of her three nights outside the White House.

Inside, Russian Federation police loyal to Yeltsin, squads of veterans from the 1979-1989 Afghanistan campaign and senior officers won over by Gen. Konstantin Kobets, the Russian Federation’s defense minister, began planning the building’s defense. Arms were issued, and a dozen bodyguards surrounded Yeltsin as he moved through the building. Altogether, there were about 500 armed defenders inside.

And everywhere Muscovites asked the soldiers whether they were prepared to shoot their own people.

“Would you kill your own mother, son?” Marina Lipsky, a grandmotherly high school teacher, asked a paratrooper outside the Central Telegraph Office. “Is this why she raised you--to shoot peaceful, innocent people?”

The youth, probably not much older than her own students, began to cry, Lipsky recalled. The Tula paratroopers were now fully deployed in the building’s defense--but they had no ammunition. About 10 p.m., the 10 Tamanskaya tanks came through the barricades, escorted by Yeltsin’s men, and took up positions around the White House, the barrels of their cannons turned outward.

The fear of an attack was well-founded.

At 5:30 p.m., Maj. Gen. Viktor Karpukhin, commander of the KGB’s Alpha Unit, an elite anti-terrorist group, gathered his commanders at the direction of Kryuchkov and told them that he had “an order from the government” to assault the White House.

Air and video reconnaissance were carried out, approaches to the building were mapped, the plans made. Police commandos and paratroopers were to clear the barricade with tanks and reinforced bulldozers. The thousands of protesters around the building were to have been disabled with tear gas.

Yeltsin, quoting from plans seized later, said, “They were to deliver devastating blows from all sides on the first floor, shooting everyone, all that was alive . . . then to penetrate into the president’s office, capture the president (Yeltsin) first of all. If there was any possibility that he might escape, they were to shoot him then and there. And then they were to capture 11 more people, 12 in all, and preferably shoot them.”

But then the impossible happened. The officers of Alpha Unit refused their orders.

“At first, we were simply shocked at the order,” said Mikhail Golovatov, then the unit’s deputy commander. “We immediately decided to disobey it although we were aware of the possible punishment.”

Although the group was now solidly committed to mutiny, it was in a quandary about what it should do.

“Everyone had made a difficult choice--we refused to obey an order,” Golovatov said. “This is without precedent for soldiers, especially for our unit. There had never been a refusal to carry out orders since the group’s formation in 1974.”

Alpha’s mutiny was conveyed to Kryuchkov, who ordered the unit to stand down and postponed the assault until another unit could be readied.

Alpha’s stand “saved the country from civil war,” said Golovatov, who has been promoted to command of the unit. “If Alpha began the assault on the White House, combat would have broken out between military units taking different sides. . . . The putsch was over when we decided to disobey the order as unconstitutional.”

Tuesday, Day 3

Seizes the Initiative

Both sides, the conspirators and the democrats, began Tuesday with new determination to break the stalemate that had developed.

Yeltsin, exhilarated by his sheer survival, seized the initiative and started with demands that Gorbachev be examined by independent medical experts, so that if he were well he be allowed immediately to resume his duties, that restrictions on the press, radio and television be lifted, that the state of emergency be rescinded, that the troops be withdrawn from Moscow and other cities and that the State Emergency Committee disband.

“We had taken the offensive on Monday, and we felt we had won the day,” said Poltoranin, the Russian information minister. “We had stopped the coup. Now, we were determined to reverse it.”

A flurry of decrees rolled out of Yeltsin’s headquarters challenging the central government’s authority. Through telephones, fax machines, computers and telexes, Yeltsin’s White House orchestrated the growing resistance.

By 9 a.m., a crowd of more than 50,000 surrounded the White House; through the day it would swell to more than 100,000. The armored units were now immobilized in a sea of people; to move a foot would mean to crush somebody.

Thousands more people had gathered before the Moscow City Hall, which the radicals had won in spring elections. Speaking from the same balcony from which the Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin had addressed crowds, the city’s mayor, Gavriil Popov, a radical economist, and two former Gorbachev aides, Shevardnadze and Yakovlev, called on people to defend the constitution.

“Away with fear!” Yakovlev shouted. “Unite in the struggle against the putschists!”

A quick opinion poll done Tuesday morning of 1,500 Muscovites for the Russian Federation’s legislature showed that 69% were completely against the coup, 10% were largely against it and that it was supported fully only by 6% of those questioned. Yeltsin drew an 82% approval rating, compared to 4% for Yanayev and the State Emergency Committee.

In Leningrad, Mayor Sobchak organized a massive rally as a show of the democratic forces’ strength.

“We wanted 100,000 people in the street to tell the plotters what they would face here, and we got nearly 200,000,” he said.

Around the country, the conspiracy met with growing opposition as a strike by coal miners spread but there was also limited support for the emergency committee, mostly from local governments in the conservative regions of central Russia.

In Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, increasingly active in recruiting support for Gorbachev, demanded that the president be allowed to speak to a meeting of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature. Leonid Kravchuk, the Ukrainian president, who had been equivocal about the coup Monday, now voted with the majority of the Ukrainian leadership to condemn it. In the Moldovan capital of Kishinev, President Mircea Snegur told a rally of 50,000 that his government would support Yeltsin.

From the Kremlin, Gorbachev loyalists managed to issue a declaration that the president was in good health and demanding that troops be withdrawn; let him address directly any charges against him, they said.

That statement was to strengthen the many in the government and Communist Party who thought at the outset that Gorbachev was indeed ill and that the state of emergency was constitutional and necessary.

‘Where’s the Party Support?’

At the Defense Ministry, Yazov met with top officials at 6 a.m. to get the overnight reports from around the country. He was not pleased.

“Where’s the support from the party?” he grumbled, according to accounts published later in Soviet newspapers. “What have we gotten into?”

Gen. Kalinin, the Moscow commandant, complained that he did not have enough troops to secure the capital: Many contingents in and around the city were under the command of other officers who would not release them. Yazov gave him three full divisions, about 30,000 men.

But deep splits were developing in the armed forces. The air force, the navy and the paratroopers had refused to back the coup, and now Yazov was told that commanders and senior political officers in a number of regions doubted the reliability of some of their units if ordered into the streets.

“Yazov cursed at every report,” Maj. Vladimir N. Lopatin, the deputy chairman of the Russian defense committee, said, quoting the accounts given by senior officers who were present. “From his point of view, his army was falling apart as a result of the coup, and with that, the coup would fail. . . . In short, he could look ahead and see defeat.”

At KGB headquarters that morning, Kryuchkov searched for an assault team to replace the KGB’s Alpha Unit that had refused to storm the White House.

Together with Yazov and Pugo, the interior minister, Kryuchkov canvassed the commanders of nearly 20 other elite units--police commandos, paratroopers, other KGB groups.

But one commander after another said his group was “not prepared” for an attack that night, a phrase that could be understood as simply not trained, equipped and ready--or that they were opposed to the operation and thus to the coup itself.

A team was finally pulled together from volunteers. The reconnaissance was done again, new plans were drawn up and more troops were ordered to draw closer to the White House to back up the operation.

Back in the Crimea

At Phoros, Gorbachev’s captivity grew harsher. The president again demanded that his communications be restored, and was rebuffed by Major Gen. Vyacheslav V. Generalov, the KGB commander in charge of keeping the compound cut off from the outside world. Surveillance of the Gorbachevs and foreign policy adviser Chernayev was increased, making it difficult for them to move around the compound.

Deputies from local governmental councils tried to visit the allegedly ailing president but were sent away at gunpoint. And the cook, assessing the food stocked in the pantry, said they had only enough for a day and a half.

But the morning news from the BBC cheered them.

“Objectively, I could not see the coup succeeding,” Chernayev said later in an interview on Soviet television. “We have watched many of these things from the Kremlin over the years, and I have developed a bit of feel for coups and the people who make them. . . . I told the president, ‘This is not going to succeed,’ but he answered, ‘Fine, but we must now make it fail. It must fail, and be seen to fail. They must be defeated if we are going to win.’ ”

Scanning the various meter bands on a jury-rigged radio, the two men listened to the shortwave broadcasts from the BBC, Radio Liberty and Voice of America for hours. Soviet radio was almost totally pro-coup, but one of the bodyguards managed to begin drawing in broadcasts from outlying regions that had gone to Yeltsin.

“We listened and analyzed, listened and analyzed--who was with whom, who was on strike, where had there been protests,” Chernayev said. “By late afternoon, the picture emerged that the plotters held Moscow and not much else of importance. Still, the president told me, ‘We must defeat them, they must be beaten, we must not accept a compromise.’ This was a dangerous moment, and we were afraid of very desperate actions in order to save the coup.”

‘Soldiers! Don’t Shoot at Mothers’

In Moscow, support for Yeltsin continued to grow.

More than 100,000 people had gathered around the White House by midafternoon despite intermittent rain. Two lines of women had been formed, more than 200 in all, to block any advance by the troops.

“Soldiers! Don’t Shoot at Mothers,” their banner said.

And the barricades got higher and higher as truckloads of construction materials and scrap metal were hauled in.

Outside Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin’s home city in the Ural Mountains, preparations began to establish an underground Russian government if the White House fell. Oleg Lobov, a first deputy prime minister under Silayev, flew with a group of senior Russian officials, including leaders of its Parliament, to the city shortly before noon; others arrived from Leningrad.

Emergency facilities, deep in the forest about 45 miles from the city and built to withstand a nuclear attack, were taken over on Yeltsin’s orders, and the center’s telexes and faxes began to relay Yeltsin’s decrees around the country. Information began to flow in from Yeltsin supporters on troop movements, the positions of regional and local governments and the spread of the strike.

“By midnight, we had a virtual double of the Russian government fully operational,” Lobov said on his return to Moscow. “If the White House fell, the resistance would still continue.”

The country’s emerging private business sector rallied to Yeltsin, sending about 15 million rubles in cash to buy food and supplies, more than 300 cars, buses and trucks to block the streets leading to the Russian Parliament and 300 private security guards to help protect the building.

McDonalds and Pizza Hut, two joint ventures with foreign companies, sent food for those in the Yeltsin headquarters. And another joint venture, Sovamer Trading Co., set up international telephone links through Finland. More than 120 fax machines from private businesses and joint ventures were used to circulate Yeltsin’s statements and decrees in and out of the country.

Russian Information Minister Poltoranin gathered the editors of 11 newspapers, all of them liberal, and made plans to publish a joint paper, which was named Obshchaya Gazeta, or the Common Newspaper, in defiance of the junta. A news office was set up on Novy Arbat, between the barricades at the White House and the Kremlin; type was set with computers at the weekly business paper Kommersant, whose main door was camouflaged with a nameplate from District Library No. 25. A small print shop was found on Tsvetnoi Boulevard that printed the newspaper for free.

On Tuesday, there were four pages; on Wednesday, six; by Thursday, eight. Copies were pasted on newspaper boards around the city as well as on the walls of the Moscow Metro.

British Prime Minister John Major telephoned Yeltsin on Tuesday afternoon with a message of support; as they were speaking, Yeltsin reported that tanks were moving toward the building. President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia called and pledged to rally Europe behind Yeltsin. And then Bush telephoned with his message of support.

Singing The Same Song

At 7:15 a.m. Tuesday, Bush sat down at his personal computer in the small study he uses just off the Oval Office to tap out a memorandum to himself of things he thought must be done next and points to be remembered.

Among them: The Administration’s leaders must take pains to speak “from the same sheet of music,” so they would not be sending mixed or confusing signals; he should call heads of state in South America, to encourage them to speak out and demonstrate hemispheric resolve; and he wanted to make sure his senior aides took care not to respond to political criticism. This was a crisis that transcended partisan bickering.

Later, the department deputies who had met Monday presented to the President an 11-page, single-spaced report outlining issues surrounding the crisis, laying out the challenges and offering possible policy options.

In the midst of his meetings in Washington, Bush stepped into the Rose Garden on a muggy Tuesday morning, using yet another news conference--his favorite forum for addressing the American people but in this case one that allowed him to reach foreign audiences too, through CNN and the Voice of America.

As tanks rumbled on the streets of Moscow, he insisted: “We are not giving up on the restoration of constitutional government in the Soviet Union.”

He said, too, that he had spoken with Yeltsin, offering encouragement and support for the campaign to overturn the coup.

The President’s comments were “very important for Yeltsin,” an Administration official said. “We knew it would get back to Yeltsin, and give him a shot in the arm. It would show we could get through on the phone lines, and therefore the coup was not in control. It would help unbalance the coup leaders. We were talking to another guy as a leader. Therefore, we didn’t have to talk to Yanayev.”

Meanwhile, the Administration continued to have no intelligence indicating anything about Gorbachev: Was he ailing? Where was he? The Administration was asking the same questions as everyone else, and was getting no answers.

Spy satellites intended to pick up electronic signals--high-flying eavesdroppers--heard nothing, an official said. Submarines and other systems used to pick up communications were turned toward the Crimea. They, too, heard nothing unusual.

“They broke down his communications links,” the official said, explaining that Gorbachev’s keepers had successfully cut him off from the rest of the world.

Disappearing Conspirators

One by one, the conspirators began to disappear.

First, Prime Minister Pavlov, a man of elephantine proportions, suffered an attack of high blood pressure, and was hospitalized. His deputy, Vitaly K. Doguzhiev, who managed the country’s new emergency control network, took over the government.

Then, Starodubtsev left his Kremlin office--he had moved into office No. 15 first thing Monday morning--for lunch about 2 p.m. and didn’t come back. Tizyakov went to a meeting of executives from the military-industrial complex. He, too, did not return.

Yanayev, the acting president, was contacted by telephone Tuesday afternoon by Kazakh leader Nazarbayev, who wanted guarantees that the Russian White House would not be attacked and that Gorbachev would be brought to Moscow for the Supreme Soviet session.

“Yanayev did not seem in touch at all,” Nazarbayev told local reporters in Alma Ata, the Kazakh capital. “He didn’t seem to know what was going on, why I was calling or even who I was. He may have been asleep or something else.”

(Yanayev is known to have a serious drinking problem.)

Now, mi