Twenty years ago the putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev failed and changed the world. To mount and then botch a coup d’etat like this amounted to an act of collective suicide by the Soviet hard-liners. That made it the swan song (to the tune of Swan Lake broadcast on Channel One television) of the Soviet security establishment. Although the nominal leader of the eight-man emergency committee that tried to topple Mikhail Gorbachev was Vice President Gennady Yanayev, its strongmen were the three pillars of the security-defense establishment: Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, Interior Minister Boris Pugo and KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. Power was slipping from under them and they knew it. Fortunately for the world, they grasped this much too late.
Boris Yeltsin defanged this establishment, but he did not dismantle it. The KGB was renamed (several times) but never purged and its career officers continued to work there. But the world in which they operate had changed forever.
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