Mikhail Gorbachev

Gorbachev should have seen it coming, or so everyone said. The CIA had heard rumors of a coming coup but couldn't quite get the message across. And when one of Gorbachev's closest advisers, Alexander Yakovlev, tried to warn him of the danger, the Soviet leader brushed it off as paranoia.

But for the lifelong Communist Party man – albeit the one who finally realized salvation lay in the openness of Perestroika and Glasnost – the coup brought uncomfortable truths. Gorbachev had never envisioned the end of Soviet communism, much less the end of the Soviet Union. His reforms were tools he believed he had mastered, processes wholly under his control. The coup proved him wrong.

Gorbachev returned to Moscow beaten. Within days, he gave in to the reality that his people no longer believed in him or the system he still wanted to preserve. In December, on Christmas Eve, he announced his resignation and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and handed the keys to the Kremlin to Boris Yeltsin.

Unemployed and discredited at home, Gorbachev looked to friends in the West for support. After fighting with Yeltsin – who wanted to bar him from traveling outside Russia – he took up the international lecture circuit. He enjoyed the plaudits, including a Nobel Prize, and earned enough to retire comfortably.

But Gorbachev, a workhorse from his farm-boy days, was not through with public life. He ploughed his earnings back into his Gorbachev Foundation, tasked with looking after democratic reforms, and founded the Russian Social Democratic Party. So far, his search for a center-left constituency in Russia's raucous political scene has been fruitless. When he challenged Yeltsin for the presidency in 1996, he garnered less than half a percent of the vote. But he has emerged as a credible crusader for free speech and the welfare of the country's poor and elderly. In fact, a recent poll placed Gorbachev among the five best Russian leaders of all time. Only a few years ago, he would likely have come in last.

Boris Yeltsin

For the man who had always mastered the moment, the coup was the opportunity of a lifetime. Time and again he had upstaged Gorbachev – often on the floor of the Soviet parliament – in a bid to show that he, Yeltsin, should be in charge.

Nothing crystallized that message more than the image of the president of Russia, flag in hand, addressing the masses from atop a tank, adoring faces gazing from all around. And for 48 hours behind the barricades of the Russian White House, he tirelessly berated the old-line Communists who were trying to topple Gorbachev.

But Yeltsin did not climb up on that tank or risk his life at the White House simply to win Gorbachev his job back, and when the Soviet president returned to Moscow, Yeltsin's message was clear: This, Mr. Gorbachev, is no longer your country. Within months, he engineered the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics, leaving himself in charge of Russia and Gorbachev, once again, jobless.

The master of the moment, however, proved to be less skilled at managing the processes of reform. As early economic experiments brought misery to tens of millions of Russians, along with triple-digit inflation, he began his long decline into illness. Sensing weakness, his entourage more than once tried to push him from power, most famously in 1993, when his vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, declared himself president and barricaded himself in the White House. Yeltsin, though, didn't hesitate to use his tanks, and the coup was defeated.

But Yeltsin, too, was beaten. His health failing, he grew to rely more and more on his entourage, which included come of the country's most notoriously corrupt businessmen. It was they who ensured his narrow 1996 victory over the rejuvenated Communists. And it was they who hired and fired the country's numerous prime ministers, some of whom wielded presidential authority as Yeltsin convalesced.

It all came to an end in 1999, when, on New Year's Eve, Yeltsin announced his resignation and handed power to then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who easily won election three months later. By then, the man who had inspired Russians to revolution had convinced them of the futility of reform and replaced Gorbachev as the public's most hated Russian leader.

THE COUP PLOTTERS

In early July, 10 years after they began planning their coup, the remaining GKChP alumni gathered for "a friendly tea with journalists." The only thing they regretted, according to former head of the Soviet Army Valentin Varennikov, was that they "didn't follow the thing through until the end."

A decade on, the plotters are doing surprisingly well for themselves. With the exception of Boris Pugo, the Soviet minister of internal affairs who shot himself rather than face arrest, all are still alive – and in some cases, so are their political careers. Here's a look at a few of them:

Vladimir Kryuchkov

Head of the infamous KGB at the time, Kryuchkov was in many ways the coup's driving force. Accordingly, he was among the first to be arrested. After he got out of prison on a general amnesty for veterans, he wrote a book on his experiences but was forced from public life by ill health. He resurfaced controversially as a guest at Putin's inauguration.

Anatoly Lukyanov

The coup plotters looked to Lukyanov – then chairman of the Supreme Soviet – as their ideological leader. And after his release from prison in 1993, he again took up politics and played a key role in forming the ideology of the Russian Communist Party. The same year, he was elected to the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, where he now chairs the committee on governmental reform.

Vasily Starodubtsev

Chairman of the Soviet Farmers' Union, by 1995 he had re-risen to the highest ranks of the Russian Communist Party. Two years later, he was elected governor of the Tula Region, just south of Moscow, and was re-elected this year, with 72 percent of the vote.

Valentin Varennikov

Head of the Soviet Army, it was Varennikov's inability to control his troops that eventually led to the coup's downfall. Still, he paid few of the consequences, serving now in the State Duma, as a member of the Communist Party of course.

Dmitry Yazov

The Soviet Defense Minister notoriously told generals to ensure law and order, and "As for the rest, you'll learn that from the radio and newspapers." Toward the end of the coup it was rumored he had committed suicide, but he was arrested alive and well – if slightly inebriated – on Aug. 22. But after years of obscurity, he climbed back into the limelight by 2000 as a senior adviser in the Defense Ministry. And now, according to press reports, he has become a key military adviser to Putin – key enough, at least, to be spotted greeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Il on his recent visit to Moscow .

THE OTHERS

Maj. Gen. Alexander Lebed

In Russian political circles, Lebed is not known as the smartest of men. But on Aug. 20, 1991, he made a very smart choice. Under orders to plan the storming of the White House, he quickly assessed the futility of the coup and the immorality of firing on unarmed civilians. Instead, he joined the White House's defense.

Five years later, though, he became one of Yeltsin's greatest nightmares, almost costing him the victory in the 1996 presidential elections. In return for withdrawing from the race at the last minute, Lebed was made national security chief and given the thankless task of securing peace in Chechnya. His peace held only until 1999, but that was long enough for him to get elected governor of the vast, oil-rich Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk.

Yury Luzhkov

Vice mayor of Moscow at the time of the coup, Luzhkov quickly became one of its loudest opponents, winning broad public popularity in the process. As a result, he became Moscow's next mayor, taking control of the country's largest city and one of its largest business empires.

He, too, would turn against Yeltsin, founding the Fatherland Party and unsuccessfully attacking Yeltsin and his entourage in parliamentary and presidential elections. But all that changed earlier this year, when he agreed to merge the Fatherland Party with Putin's Unity Party, a move seen by most political analysts here as part of Putin's crusade against organized opposition.

Alexander Rutskoi

Yeltsin's vice president both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Afghan war veteran was in charge of marshalling his boss' political troops.

But as Yeltsin often did with those he thought were getting too powerful, he fired Rutskoi in September 1993. In retaliation, Rutskoi declared Yeltsin incompetent to serve and said he would take over. He and his supporters then holed up in the White House, only to be bombed out by Yeltsin's tanks.

In April 1994, only two months after being released from prison, Rutskoi formed the Great Power Party, aimed at restoring Russia's lost superpower status and has since allied himself with the re-formed Russian Communist Party.

Eduard Shevardnadze

The Soviet foreign minister – popular at home and in the West for his reformist views – resigned from Gorbachev's government just a few months before the coup, warning of a return to authoritarianism. But when that return came, albeit from unexpected sources, Shevardnadze stood beside Yeltsin and took a role in negotiations that brought a relatively peaceful resolution.

In 1992, re-turned to his native Republic of Georgia, now free from Moscow, and won the presidency. His rule, though, has been less than democratic, as he has used a smoldering separatist movement in Abkhazia as an excuse to ban virtually all opposition. Now ailing, he has announced he will leave office next year, under constitutional term limits.

THE WHITE HOUSE

At the time of the coup, it was headquarters of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, one of 15 constituents of the Soviet Union. It was there that Boris Yeltsin had his offices and there he made his stand, turning the building into a symbol of democracy for Russians and news-watchers worldwide.

But two years later, when Alexander Rutskoi tried to oust Yeltsin, the Russian president did not hesitate to turn his tanks on the building, blackening the top floors and smoking out his opponents. After a multimillion-dollar renovation, the building is now headquarters to Russia's bureaucrats – who number more than they did under the Soviet Union – and a symbol of the corruption and red tape that has paralyzed the country's economy.

THE DACHA AT FOROS

Every Russian loves his dacha – the little home in the woods that provides respite from city life – but Gorbachev's was something special. While most Soviet citizens, and most Russians today, retreat to bare-bones bungalows whose vegetable gardens provide vital sustenance, the Soviet leader was entitled to the most modern of amenities and a beautiful beachfront on the Crimean Peninsula.

After the break-up of the Soviet Union, though, the Crimea – along with the dacha – became part of Ukraine, now an independent country whose border guards scrutinize the passports of their former Russian overlords heading off on vacation. While most in Russia have long forgotten about the dacha, most long for the return of the Crimea, something Ukraine promises will never happen.

(This material was originally published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)