For months, Soviet hard-liners had been urging Gorbachev, unsuccessfully, to impose emergency rule. Now they would impose it themselves. On Sunday, August 18, as Gorbachev's vacation was ending, a delegation arrived in the Crimea and demanded he declare emergency rule. He refused and was put under house arrest. Gorbachev's phone was cut off, while Soviet naval vessels maneuvered menacingly near the shore.

The next day, Moscow awoke to the sound of tanks and the news that Gorbachev was ill and that an "Emergency Committee" had taken over. Vice President Gennadi Yanayev had assumed the presidency.

But the coup had not succeeded in seizing power outright. Soldiers and other civil servants were refusing to obey the Emergency Committee. Gorbachev's insistence on moving to democracy was paying off. Boris Yeltsin, usually at odds with Gorbachev, this time defended him. As Muscovites began to gather at Russia's seat of parliament, the White House, Yeltsin denounced the coup and prepared to resist. As night fell, fears grew that desparate committee members might order an attack on the White House and its defenders.

On the night of August 20, the first blood was spilled -- three young men were killed by armored personnel carriers moving toward the White House in support of the coup. But the committee didn't have the stomach for an overthrow -- and at 3 a.m., one of the plotters, KGB Chairman Vladimir Kruichkov, called Yeltsin in the White House and admitted defeat. Yeltsin sent a plane to bring Gorbachev back to Moscow. He arrived early on August 22 and announced, "I have come back ... to another country, and I myself am a different man now." But far more had changed than Gorbachev realized.
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