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of his life understood the significance of what he saw.
    The Revolution ran its course, as the English and French Revolutions had done in their own centuries, and by the summer of 1991 it was an old and frail thing. Many say that the Revolution was already long dead: that it perished when Lenin substituted the Bolshevik Party for direct workers' power, or when Stalin began his economic acceleration by terror in 1928. But it seems to me that, while Mikhail Gorbachev still sat in the Kremlin and dreamed of a clean, modern Leninism which might transform the Soviet Union into a socialist democracy, the last embers were still warm in the ashes. In the summer of 1991, suddenly and finally, these embers were kicked apart and the fire went out. The Russian Revolution — not as a project but as a phenomenon, as a shape drawn on the paper of time - was completed.
    That end was signalled to me by a light in Crimean darkness, a light which I did not understand at the time and recognised only in the days and months which followed. This light glittered at me for no longer than a few seconds. I saw it through the window of a coach making its way back along the corniche highway from Sevastopol to Yalta, after a long day spent in the Greek ruins of Chersonesus. I was the only passenger still awake. Around me slept Italian, French, Catalan and American savants, rolling a little in their seats as the coach began its climb up to the road tunnel which penetrates the range of mountains above Cape Sarich. The moon had set. The Black Sea was invisible, but the white wall of the mountains still glowed above us to the left. Somewhere below us lay the little resort of Foros, where Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and his family were taking their summer holiday in a villa kept for the sole use of the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
    At the Foros turnoff, there was a confusion of lights. An ambulance was waiting at the crossroads, its blue roof-beacon throbbing and its headlights on. But there was no accident to be seen, no broken car or victim. For an instant, as we swept by, I saw men standing about and waiting. As the darkness returned, I wondered for a moment what was going on. It was the night of 18 August 1991.
    What I had seen was the conspirators' candle, the spark carried through the night by men who supposed that they were reviving the Revolution and saving the Soviet Union. Instead, they lit a fire which destroyed everything they honoured. Five months later, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - the Tarty of Lenin' - had been abolished, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had collapsed and even the continental empire of the tsars which underlay the Soviet Union had been reduced to a Russia with only little windows — a few miles of shore - opening on the Baltic and the Black Sea. At first, for a day or so after the plotters had captured Gorbachev at Foros, the flame of the conspiracy seemed to burn high and straight, and the terrified land was quiet. But then a very few men and women gathered in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad, raising their bare hands against tanks. They blew the flame back over the conspirators, until it consumed not only the plotters themselves but all the dried-out palaces and prisons and fortresses of the Revolution behind them.
     
     
    In Yalta, next morning, the hotel staff and the coach driver and the Ukrainian interpreter all evaded our eyes. The television in the foyer, which had been working the day before, was now out of order.
    Puzzled, we boarded the coach to visit Bakhchiserai, the old capital of the Crimean Tatars, and after a few miles on the road our guides told us. Mr Gorbachev had been taken suddenly ill. A Committee of National Salvation had been established to exercise his powers; it included Gennadi Yanayev, the Vice-President, Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, and General Dimitri Yazov, minister of defence. A proclamation had been issued, stressing certain