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Tuesday afternoon brought one telltale indication that the junta was losing what grip it had established. After obediently reporting all the pronouncements of the so-called Emergency Committee and little else, TASS suddenly began interspersing them with reports of the burgeoning resistance. For example, it let Soviet citizens know that Aleksei II, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church and a signer of a December appeal for a law-and-order crackdown, had come out against the coup.
Tension nonetheless built toward a climax Tuesday night. It was obvious that the junta could no longer prevail unless it began using deadly force, starting with an armed assault on Yeltsin's White House. All afternoon and evening, loudspeakers blared warnings that tanks were rolling toward the building and 60 planes filled with paratroopers were preparing for an airborne assault. Thousands of people worked through the night building barricades to deter an attack, supplemented by human chains of unarmed protesters. At the foot of the main staircase, an organizer with a megaphone called, "All courageous men who are willing to defend the building, please come forward!" About 90 men -- the forerunners of many, many more -- formed up in three rows on the stairs. An Orthodox priest in full regalia read the Lord's Prayer to them.
Just before midnight, short bursts of gunfire did echo from nearby streets. It was not, however, the start of an assault but a confused scuffle between tanks and protesters around a trolleybus barricade. Three demonstrators were left dead -- the only casualties in Moscow of the coup.
Otherwise, nothing happened. During the daylight hours Tuesday, Ruslan Khasbulatov, first deputy chairman of the supreme soviet of the Russian Federation and a close Yeltsin adviser, was on the phone to KGB chief Kryuchkov and Defense Minister Yazov. He asked them point-blank if the junta planned to storm the White House. "Yazov did not deny it," he reported. Late Tuesday night and again Wednesday morning, Gennadi Burbulis, another Yeltsin aide, spoke twice more with Kryuchkov. Finally Kryuchkov promised, "You can sleep soundly." There would be no shoot-out.
Why not? Reports within the Soviet Union and from Western intelligence sources differed in detail, but agreed in essence: the armed forces would not carry out any order to attack. One story was that senior army commanders had met secretly Tuesday night and decided they would not storm the White House or countenance any firing at civilians.