ABSTRACT
19 August 1991. Five nervous, uncharismatic men file into the conference room at the Foreign Ministry’s lavish modern press centre on Moscow’s Sadovoye Ring Boulevard at five in the afternoon, and take their places on the dais. They are Vice-President Gennady Yanaev, who has held this newly created office since January; Interior Minister Boris Pugo, installed the previous December; Party Secretary Oleg Baklanov, in charge of the military-industrial complex; “Peasants’ Union” leader V.A.Starodubtsev (really representing kolkhoz—collective farm— chairmen); and A.I.Tiziakov, head of the Association of State Enterprise Directors. Together with three other top officials, absent at the moment— Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, Minister of Defense Dmitri Yazov, and KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov—these representatives of the highest organs of power in the Soviet Union have constituted themselves the “State Committee on the State of Emergency.” Perceiving the crumbling of all authority around them, and fearful of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, these “conservatives” have just put the Soviet president under house arrest, ordered troops to secure the city of Moscow, and assumed emergency powers.
