ABSTRACT
The August coup and its failure gave greater impetus to the revolution from above, ultimately putting an end to perestroika as a nascent transition. The political, structural, and institutional obstacles to the Novo Ogarevo pact's completion were exceedingly difficult to overcome. Clearly, a Soviet transition would have been difficult to consolidate. The institutional matrix and the structure of strategic political action that had produced the Novo Ogarevo pacting process were upset. Perestroika's eighth and last conjuncture consisted of a new imbalance and asymmetrical character in the moderates' dilemma, and a new and amorphous institutional arena. During the August coup, Yeltsin and other union republic leaders used the political vacuum created by the hardliners' isolation of Gorbachev in Foros, to seize control of central institutions and departments in their republics, accelerating the dismantling and seizure of partocratic structures. With the collapse of the hardline August coup, the moderates' dilemma became unbalanced and asymmetrical once more.
