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Most successful coup organizers also begin by moving reliable troops into key positions. Yet U.S. intelligence analysts, poring early Monday over satellite pictures taken during the previous two days, detected no evidence of any unusual troop movements. The Soviet plotters used troops and equipment that happened to be on hand in Moscow and other cities and gave the soldiers only the vaguest idea of what they were supposed to be doing. In Moscow some seemed to think they were participating in an odd sort of parade or drill.
Far from being prepared to crush opposition, the troops were obviously under orders to avoid confrontation if possible and above all not to shoot. Citizens shouted "Fascist!" or worse at the troops, scrawled swastikas in the dirt on tanks parked outside the Russian Parliament Building, climbed aboard armored personnel carriers to argue with the commanders and urge them to turn back -- all with impunity. When the coup leaders decreed a curfew from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., the soldiers made no attempt to enforce it.
In Leningrad troops based inside the city stayed in their barracks throughout the coup. Armored assault units headquartered nearby at one point started moving on the old czarist capital, but reformist Mayor Anatoli Sobchak -- another leader the coup conspirators foolishly left at large -- persuaded the tankmen to halt outside the city.
Why were the coup plotters so inept and halfhearted? Simple incompetence might be one answer; several were party or government hacks who had never displayed much imagination or initiative. They may have thought that the economic collapse that had made Gorbachev wildly unpopular, coupled with a long Russian tradition of submissiveness to authority, would win the populace to their side without any need for bloodshed. They may even have been corrupted, so to speak, by the new atmosphere of democracy and legalism -- at least to the extent of feeling a need to give their coup a cloak of constitutionalism, which in turn prevented them from acting with the ruthlessness a successful coup generally requires. Alternatively, some American officials think the plotters were not so much inept as unable to round up enough support to flaunt any more muscle than they did.
There were many indications that an early and decisive use of force might have carried the day. According to British sources, heads of government and foreign ministers of the major Western powers had agreed during a long series of very secret talks on a coordinated policy to oppose any Soviet coup attempt. But though all of them condemned the coup, some initially hinted that they might eventually live with it. On Monday morning Bush asserted that "coups can fail" but at the same time voiced hope that Yanayev too might turn out to be a reformer. French President Francois Mitterrand on Monday night treated the coup as a fait accompli.