Russia marked the 10th anniversary today of a bungled putsch by hard-line Communists which sank a reforming Soviet Union led by Mr Mikhail Gorbachev and ushered in a decade of deeply divisive change.
But fewer than 100 people returned to the former parliament building where Mr Boris Yeltsin, then leader of Soviet Russia, stood atop a tank and galvanized resistance to the coup.
Only one minor government official attended the rally and President Vladimir Putin, who is on holiday, has remained silent about the anniversary and what it means for post-Soviet Russia.
Nothing has been heard from Mr Yeltsin, whose bravura performance was instrumental in foiling the eight-man State Emergency Situation Committee, and led to the political eclipse of Mr Gorbachev.
On his return to Moscow after his release from house arrest in Crimea, Mr Gorbachev, isolated and discredited, was powerless to stop Mr Yeltsin banning the Communist Party.
Within four months, the Soviet Union was dead, Mr Yeltsin had taken command in the Kremlin and Mr Gorbachev was out of a job.
"It was self-interest, nothing more," the former Soviet leader said today of the plotters' motivation. "It was an attempt to replace a healthy head with a sick one."
"The party nomenklatura failed the test of democracy" and could not accept reforms that meant the end of their privileges, he said.