Jaded hope: Russia 10 years later

Before dawn, radios crackled out the news that a coup was under way. Tanks rolled into Moscow to back the cabal of Communist hardliners who had seized power.

Ten years ago this weekend, the world watched on knife edge as the future of the Soviet Union - the seemingly invincible superpower and police state - unfolded in three dramatic days. A putsch against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policies of liberalization threatened the old guard from the Politburo to the KGB, evoked popular protest from Russians restless for democratic change. People rallied. The coup failed. Four months later, as republics began to break away, the USSR fell apart.

Democracy - or at least a budding Russian version - was born.

But the road since then has been full of painful detours, failed experiments, and fading hopes.

Recent polls show that 4 out of 5 Russians wish the Soviet Union still existed. Weary of chaos, many are rallying behind a leader cut out of the old mold: President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, pledges to restore Russian pride and bring order.

According to recent polls, at the end of June, 72 percent of Russians approved of Putin's work, a rise of 1 percent from the previous month. The number of those disapproving remained the same, at 22 per cent.

Mr. Putin faces daunting challenges: from convincing Western investors that he is serious about reform, to raising living standards for his exhausted people, and stopping a military decline that has decimated Russia's former strength.

In a look back at a decade of dramatic change, seven Russians recall those critical hours in August 1991 and reflect on their lives since then.

When tanks began grinding into Moscow, there was little surprise at the KGB.

"Of course, we all knew a coup was coming," says Konstantin Preobrazhensky, a former KGB Lieutenant Colonel who has since become one of the strongest critics of the agency and its successor, the FSB. "But never in our lives had such an event taken place."

The signs, in fact, were hard to miss - if you were on the inside. New drills had been ordered to learn to "attack civilians in crowds," says Mr. Preobrazhensky. Water cannons were set up for a time around intelligence headquarters, in case protesters tried to storm the building.

Despite the increasing erosion of Big Brother's grip across Soviet society, which Gorbachev had loosened with "perestroika," in the KGB there were "endless ideological checks."

Though little known at the time, there were deep ideological divisions within the KGB. Some 60 percent of the officers were hardliners who supported the coup, estimates Preobrazhensky, whose father was a KGB Vice Chief Commander. Up to one-third had pro-democracy sentiments, and were aware of the changing public mood against them and the state.

For these, it was important to get out of the KGB before the hardliners took over. "We were almost sure the coup would be successful," the agent recalls. "We knew the character of the Russian people was very passive, very obedient to power." Russian tradition meant that purges were likely to follow, starting from within the KGB's own ranks.

Preobrazhensky was "set free," as he describes it, just weeks before the coup.

What few in the KGB realized was the depth of public anger at the communist organs of state power, or that Boris Yeltsin, then president of the Russian Federation, would make such a dramatic plea for support.

The indelible image from that tense period was of the tall Yeltsin, who climbed aboard a tank in front of the White House, Russia's parliament building, and declared:

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