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Some troops sent to menace the Russian republic headquarters turned to defending it instead. By agreement with Yeltsin, Major General Alexander Lebed, a commander of airborne troops, on Tuesday afternoon ordered the tanks and armored personnel carriers from his Tula division parked around the building to turn their turrets around so that they could not fire at Yeltsin's headquarters; no ammunition was distributed to the vehicles' crews. In effect, the tanks and APCs became part of the barricades protecting the building. Some American officials believe that the junta did intend to storm the building but Lebed's virtual defection derailed its plans. Another version, not necessarily contradictory, was that Colonel General Gennadi Shaposhnikov, commander of the Soviet air force, and Lieut. General Pavel Grachev, chief of the airborne troops, flatly refused to order an attack on the White House. That story gained credence at week's end when Shaposhnikov was appointed Defense Minister, with Grachev his chief deputy.
Wednesday morning there was a seemingly ominous flurry of military activity. Soviet troops in Lithuania and Estonia took control of several radio and TV stations; in Moscow paratroopers shut down an independent radio station that had resumed broadcasting the day before. But those actions quickly turned out to be the plotters' last gasp. The failure to storm the White House on Tuesday made clear that the junta would not or could not resort to the serious bloodshed that by then would have been necessary to crush resistance. By Wednesday the plotters evidently concluded that the jig was up, and the coup fell apart with astonishing speed.
At 2:15 p.m., Yeltsin announced to the Russian parliament that some of the conspirators were running to Vnukovo Airport to get out of town. A delegation headed by Yeltsin's vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, chased after them to arrest them. One hour earlier, TASS announced that the Defense Ministry had ordered all troops to clear out of Moscow, and this order was happily obeyed. Bystanders cheered as soldiers, some waving prerevolutionary Russian flags, rode atop armored vehicles on their way back to bases. The order to clear out, in fact, came from Gorbachev. For two days he had demanded that his captors let him phone Moscow again and supply a plane so that he could return to the capital; his requests were ignored. But on Wednesday he was suddenly allowed to use the phone once more. He called General Moiseyev, who by then was back in Moscow, and Moiseyev passed on the order to the Defense Ministry.