The hands that did not shake

August 1991. The Soviet Union is fifteen republics and a country of empty shelves. To stop a treaty that would hand the Kremlin's power to those republics, eight men form the State Committee for the State of Emergency. They seal President Gorbachev in his Crimean dacha at Foros and cut his telephones. Tanks of the Taman Division roll into Moscow behind a screen of Swan Lake on every channel. Two accidents save the old order in our record. A KGB team watches Boris Yeltsin's country house at Arkhangelskoye and is never ordered to move, so he reaches the parliament and climbs a tank. And the plan to storm that parliament is called off in the dark by commanders who will not spill the blood.

In the timeline recorded here, the committee does not lose its nerve. The team at Arkhangelskoye is ordered in, and Yeltsin is taken at his own gate before he can reach the tank and the crowd. The storming is not cancelled. Before dawn on the twenty-first the special forces cross the last barricade, and the men inside are led out under guard. Above the Senate dome the red flag hangs still in the freezing air, and no one alive imagines it coming down.