Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

mingling with the rush hour, Red Army armored personnel carriers on the streets of Moscow this morning, heading

to the Kremlin.

They first moved in at 4 a.m., the first sign of the coup d'etat that removed Mikhail Gorbachev

from power.

25 summers ago, in August of 1991, I had been a foreign correspondent in Moscow for nearly four years for the Washington

Post.

Michel Gorbachev, as the head of the Soviet Union, had gone about dismantling the old

communist ideology and state control over everything from the economy to poetry.

And the old guard was increasingly furious. There had been rumors of a coup for

months, and finally, on August 19th, it happened. Tanks in Moscow, Gorbachev under house arrest,

and without exaggeration, the fate of the world as we'd known it for decades hung in the balance.

President Bush calls the coup a disturbing development, which could have serious consequences on relations with the Soviet Union.

Experts say the stage is now set for civil war.

But when it was all said and done, the coup failed, almost comically, colossally, more Marx brothers than Dostoevsky.

It was over in just three days, and that was the last gasp of old Soviet power.

By the end of the year, the Soviet Union itself was no more.

And for my money, the failed coup of 1991 was maybe the most important event of the post-war

era. It resonates even today. Many Russians, Vladimir Putin among them, see the fall of the

Soviet Union not as the beginning of some new democratic age, but as a tragedy, a loss of

greatness and power. And today we're going to talk with people inside

Russia and here in the United States about that coup and how it echoes today, even in our

...