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At 5 p.m. Monday the conspirators finally called a press conference to introduce themselves. Their performance was a disaster. Far from coming across as a take-charge group, they appeared nervous and half apologetic. They gave a preposterous excuse for assuming authority (Gorbachev was too tired and ill to retain command); stressed that the coup was a constitutional devolution of authority to Yanayev, although it clearly was not; and proclaimed a highly dubious devotion to continued reform. Junta member Vasili Starodubtsev sniffled continually, and Yanayev seemed twitchy. As Gorbachev later commented, "They said I was sick, but they were the ones whose hands were shaking."
Gorbachev apparently was listening if not watching. His security guards stayed with him at the Foros dacha, scrounged up some old radio receivers that had been forgotten but not discarded, and set up a jury-rigged antenna so they could monitor foreign radio coverage of the coup. Gorbachev later praised the reporting of the British Broadcasting Corp., Radio Liberty and Voice of America -- without seeming to recognize the irony that all three networks had been jammed by the Soviet government not so very long ago. Though he said he had been subjected to intense "psychological pressure," this apparently consisted of isolation rather than any actual interference with his activities. The President spent part of his time drafting an angry condemnation of the coup, and was so incensed at the reports of his illness that he made four videotapes of himself (he did not say how he got hold of a camera) to prove he was not sick at all. Fearing that the worst might happen to him, he also recorded his last will and testament. Gorbachev's wife Raisa was apparently quite shaken by the experience. She was later reported to have suffered some paralysis of her left hand and was said to be receiving medical treatment.
In the outside world, the tide was beginning to turn. By Tuesday morning the Western powers had got their act together and unanimously, though separately, proclaimed a clear line: no normal relations with the Soviet Union until legitimate authority was restored, and a quick and indefinite cutoff of most of the economic aid that the U.S.S.R. desperately needs.
Coal miners in Siberia and the far north left their pits. Resolutions condemning the Emergency Committee were passed in communities from Sakhalin Island in the far east to Petrozavodsk, near the border with Finland. In Leningrad tens of thousands gathered in front of the Winter Palace, which Lenin's forces had stormed to begin the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
In Moscow resistance organizers had fanned out across the city Monday night to post leaflets in subway stations calling for a mass demonstration at noon Tuesday. From a second-floor balcony of the Russian republic building, speaker after speaker led a throng of up to 150,000 Muscovites in chants of "We will win!" Shouted Yeltsin: "We will hold out as long as we have to, to remove this junta from power." Bush telephoned on Tuesday morning to encourage that ( determination by making it clear that the putschists would get no foreign support.