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errors and distortions in the application of perestroika. They thought that a state of emergency existed, at least in the Russian Republic if not in Ukraine (to which Crimea belonged).
    Now I remembered the ambulance guarding the crossroads at Foros and the men standing about. Illness? Nobody among us believed that. But everybody in the coach, and everyone we were to meet that day, believed in the force of what had happened, and to that they knelt down in homage, whatever their private emotions might be. The interval of liberty, that faltering experiment in openness and democracy called glasnost, was over. Nobody in Crimea, neither the officials in the provincial capital of Simferopol nor the holiday crowds at Yalta setting out on their morning pilgrimage to the shingle beaches, supposed that the coup might be reversed or resisted. The Crimean newspapers contained only the rambling proclamations of the Committee, without comment. On the coach, the radio by the driver was out of order too.
    I sat back and reflected. Would the airports be closed? We were delegates from the World Congress of Byzantinologists which had just taken place in Moscow, and we were near the end of a post-Congress tour of historic sites in Crimea. The biggest group on the coach was Genoese - historians, archivists and journalists. They had come with their families to see the ruins of their city's mediaeval trading empire along the northern Black Sea shore. Now they grew animated, then uproarious. To live through genuine barbarian upheavals on the fringe of the known world seemed to them another way of following in their ancestors' footsteps.
    The coach ran through the little beach resort of Alushta and turned inland towards the mountain pass leading to Simferopol. I tried to imagine the panic in the world outside, the cancelled lunches and emergency conclaves at nato in Brussels, the solemn crowds which would be gathering in the Baltic capitals to resist with songs and sticks the return of the Soviet tank armies. There might, I thought, be a few demonstrations in Russian cities; some devoted boy might try to burn himself alive in Red Square. But the putsch -as an act of force - seemed to me decisive. I had seen something like it ten years before, in 1981, when martial law was declared in Communist Poland. That blow had proved irresistible. So, I assumed, would this one.
    At that moment in the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union still overshadowed the whole of northern Eurasia from the Pacific to the Baltic. The outside world still believed almost blindly in the reforming genius of Mikhail Gorbachev, and few foreigners as yet understood, or even wanted to understand, that Gorbachev's ambitious programme oiperestroika structural reform had come to nothing. They could not grasp that his personal following among the ruling oligarchy of the Soviet Union had leaked away during the previous year, nor that the Communist Party - the only effective executive instrument in the land - was now refusing to go further with the political changes which were dismantling its own monopoly of power, nor that the military and police commanders had begun to disobey their orders and act on their own initiative, nor that Gorbachev was no longer respected or even liked by the Russian people.
    It was only because I had spent the previous week talking to Russian friends and foreign journalists in Moscow that I had begun to realise how serious Gorbachev's failure was. The phase of reformed, liberalised Communism was over. And the illusion that plural democracy and free-market economy could be simply ordered into existence by the Kremlin - that had collapsed too. But at the same time I knew that this putsch in Moscow could solve nothing. The way ahead was blocked, certainly. And yet the way back offered by Gennadi Yanayev and his fellow-conspirators — a reversion to police tyranny and imperial reconquest — also led nowhere. In the longer term, the plotters had only ensured an even