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Within the U.S.S.R. many powerful figures who wound up opposing the coup were initially noncommittal, stayed conspicuously out of sight or played highly ambiguous roles. Alexander Dzasokhov, a secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, tried to paint the party as a resolute opponent of the conspirators. "From the very beginning of the coup," he said, the committee secretariat "kept trying to get in touch with the state Emergency Committee and demanded that they see Gorbachev." In fact, though, Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan, says the Central Committee on Monday secretly urged local party organizations to support the junta.
Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh came down with a vaguely defined illness, one of several seeming cases of "coup flu." (Symptoms: cold feet and a weakening of the backbone.) After initially cabling Soviet ambassadors around the world to put a "good face" on the coup, Bessmertnykh climbed out of his sickbed to denounce the plot only after it was falling apart -- too late, as it turned out, to keep from getting fired. General Mikhail Moiseyev, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, was perhaps conveniently on vacation in the Crimea when the coup began. But some of his subordinates claimed he wrote out the orders for the troops to occupy key points in Moscow -- as well as the orders for them to go back to their barracks when the coup was palpably failing.
Even the indomitable Yeltsin reportedly had a moment of irresolution. On Monday morning he hurried to the Russian republic headquarters -- nicknamed the White House because of its marble facade -- and was quickly joined by other coup opponents. One of them, former Soviet Interior Minister Vadim Bakhatin, says they urged Yeltsin to proclaim himself in command of all army and KGB units on Russian republic soil. Bakhatin recounts that Yeltsin was reluctant; he feared that such an order would split the army and perhaps start a bloody civil war. Bakhatin and others, however, convinced Yeltsin that if no one exercising constitutional authority was willing to countermand orders from the junta, the army might eventually if reluctantly invade the White House and arrest them all, and the coup would succeed.
From then on, Yeltsin never wavered. At 12:30 p.m. Monday he clambered atop an armored truck outside the White House to announce the decree assuming command. He denounced the coup as illegal and unconstitutional and called for a general strike to thwart it. In retrospect, that was the first and perhaps the biggest turning point. Yeltsin had made it obvious that the coup would face determined resistance; his appearance helped inspire protest demonstrations throughout the country. At the time, however, its significance was not entirely apparent. No more than about 200 Muscovites had gathered outside the Russian republic building to see and hear his fiery performance. But as word spread, the crowd grew and grew until it eventually numbered in the tens of thousands.