An abyss opened for a moment, and black bats flew out. They filled the air with old nightmares, throwbacks to a style of history that the world had been forgetting. They rolled in tanks and told stolid lies. The world imagined another totalitarian dusk, cold war again, and probably Soviet civil war as well. By act of will and absence of fear, the Russian people accomplished a kind of miracle, the reversal of a thousand years of autocracy.
Evil has great momentum, but the forces of good are inert.
The masses . At first the coup seemed to confirm the norm. Joseph de Maistre wrote in 1811. For the first time, they did not subside into an acceptance of overlords. Instead they turned last week's reactionary coup into a transforming rite of passage, an epochal event that forced even Gorbachev to re-examine his most basic beliefs and resign his post as head of the Communist Party.