Free Black Sea by Neal Ascherson

Leningrad, challenging the will of the plot leaders to slaughter them, broke their nerve.
    The front line of the Moscow resistance was a chain of women holding hands. They made a cordon across the far end of the Kalinin Bridge, looking up the dark boulevard along which the tanks would come. Every few minutes, somewhere in the distance, tank engines rumbled and bellowed and then fell quiet again. Behind the women, who were both young and old, stood an anxious support group of husbands, lovers and brothers with flasks of tea, transistor radios and cigarettes. When I asked the women why they stood there, and why they were not afraid, they answered: 'Because we are mothers.'
    Afterwards, when it was over, a Russian friend of mine who had been at the barricades said simply, 'A handful of good, brave people saved Russia.' I still believe that she was right. The defenders stood around the White House of the Russian parliament and around Boris Yeltsin for two rainy days and nights. On the third morning, the sun came out and the plotters ran away.
    The succeeding years have shown that this was not the end of what the good and brave handful called 'fascism'. The monster returned again in October 1993. An alliance of Russian nationalists and neo-Communists, sworn to avenge the 'betrayal' of the old Soviet imperium, tried to launch another coup d'etat from the White House itself. This time, the parliament and its defenders were bombarded into submission by the same tank divisions which had refused to open fire in August 1991. But Russia has not heard the last of the plotters, and Yeltsin himself, who had shown such courage and such sureness of leadership in 1991, soon degenerated into one of those erratic tsars — now sunk in apathy and now suddenly lashing out with absurd violence - who have so often misgoverned Russia.
    All that is true. And yet, in one important way, the defeat of the Yanayev putsch in 1991 was irreversible. The peasants, the industrial workers, the soldiers had all rebelled in the past. But now, for the first time in Russian history, the liberal-minded middle-class minority had come out into the street, built their own barricades and faced the guns in the name of freedom.
    The coup against Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and his Perestroika failed, but its consequences destroyed both man and policy. Gorbachev never regained the initiative from Yeltsin and was thrust aside; Party-led perestroika was replaced by far more ambitious designs for the introduction of market capitalism and plural democracy. Within days, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was suspended and the Central Committee building on Staraya Ploshchad was sealed off. The Party was not yet dead, but its great head had been cut off and its limbs had been paralysed. It never thought or moved again.
    A few months later, the Soviet Union itself dissolved and the nineteenth-century empire of the Russian tsars fell to pieces, and even the eighteenth-century conquests of Catherine the Great — her glorious province of 'New Russia' curving all around the northern shore of the Black Sea — were almost all lost. Ukraine, which had incorporated Crimea since 1954, now became an independent state, following the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Russia's broad windows to western seas, won and widened at such cost over so many years, closed to a chink. On the Baltic, Russia lost the ports of Klaipeda, Riga and Tallinn and kept only Kaliningrad (Königsberg) and St Petersburg itself. On the Black Sea - Krasnov's 'blue sea, the fairy-story of Russia's children' - Russia now peered out only through Novorossisk on the Kuban coast, and through the shallow, silting harbours of the Sea of Azov. The port-city of Odessa, the new harbour at Ilichevsk, the shipyards at Nikolaev, the ports of Balaklava, Feodosia and Kerch all passed out of Moscow's control. So, above all, did the naval base of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, in Crimea.
    But there is a