but the country's president waved good bye to everybody and headed down south to the crimea to relax in. the crimean peninsula southern serbia president mikhail gorbachev's private residence near the village of forests. both it and scores of surrounding hecht became a prison for the head of state. here he spent several days in what amounted to confinement. but there blew up a site can be seen from all sides you get an almost bird's eye view of it from that mountain the rood leading to the residence can easily be blocked with stones after those events the joke here was that gorbachev's residence must have been deliberately built in this place so that he could be easily cut off from the outside world you've got to work your way out of the. k.g.b. colonel tolstoy was directly involved in the events of those days he's a direct descendant and namesake of the celebrated russian novelist leo tolstoy. before he rose to the rank of colonel he served as a bodyguard on august the eighteenth one nine hundred ninety one top k.g.b. officials ordered him to block all exits from the global trough re

residents in the crimea on the same day mikhail gorbachev. has since become a famous address. to has taken place. and he constitutional action. is based on a tremendous law. that there was little chance of the tape being taken out of the compound on the same day coast guards protecting the residence attempted to establish contact with the president. there's another line of defense into was serving in one of the k.g.b.'s naval units i was not allowed to communicate with the president therefore i asked my wife to write a note in her own handwriting the note said that the sailors were ready to take the president to a place of his choice one of my subordinates took the note to the security guards asking them to hand it over to gorbachev. when he came back they told him that nobody will be allowed to approach the residence and intruders will be shot. all the troops residence was secured from the sea even better than from the land. was one of the security guards there during those days nobody could approach the shore within less than four nautical miles without being spotted by the

on august the eighteenth one nine hundred ninety one even it'd gorbachev at his residence in the crimea which is there in a coffin asked the soviet president to recognize the legality of the coup. we knew what we were going to do during the night totally mauled a coup to somehow be fitted into state of emergency and gorbachev retorted by exclaiming that a state of emergency was bonsa green machine guns and blood in its wake at the core you can i realize that other people as well as my family would suffer no doubt blood would be spilled certainly in such a vast country as ours this country takes time to get worked up when it does you can hardly stop it my belief is the country's modernization without blood. august nineteenth one thousand nine hundred ninety one must go to eleven am i cried holds barred personnel carriers heading for the city center demonstrators climb one of them chanting no to fascism. hundreds of people gather womanish square in central moscow they are ready to oppose the so-called state committee on the state of emergency people who met each other back then joined to

the crimea the city of sevastopol a soviet black sea fleet placed fifty kilometers from global twelve summer residence throughout the coup first rank captain semyonov waited for an order to rescue. but with the defense ministry part of the coup the rescue plan was ignored but they didn't like the first the pockets of resistance were to be suppressed seconds the president was to be found and taken under our protection third the remaining pockets of resistance were to be eliminated and we were to help evacuate the. president i see him. the upshot of it was that naval commanders only sent a telegram to the trough urging him to hold on and that telegram was received by lubavitcher villa an employee of the for us post-office hundreds of telegrams addressed to go bunch of were arriving from all over the soviet union k.g.b. men immediately seized all such mail. those three days oldest eighteenth nineteenth and twentieth were the most disturbing days in my life we had no idea whether we would be allowed to go home and be arrested things were simply left around the course. or was bracing for t

mike's air show which is also a realm for its spectacular performances by russians in crimea pilots. energy giant a shadow on the british government all being accused of trying to play down the scale of a major oil spill off the coast of scotland well than two hundred tonnes of orals thought to have spewed into the sea following in the lead to be the country's worst in over a decade. and india is becoming a global market place for all goods but the oil for cheese are accused of turning up blind dives in the illegal driving business week when living in the slum say setting their own kids is the only way for them to survive. and use up banks will they see sports for us. hello there thanks for watching the sport and this is what is coming up over the next few minutes depleted defense through green will miss key players christian and the for the first leg of their champions league play off against lille plus going home for gas completes his move from the european champions barcelona. and the tennis hardcore season gains momentum we have the latest action from the cincinnati masters. firs

of the country by that time or which of had already been removed and detained in his villa in the crimea with motivated the plotters to overthrow the existing order was the new union treaty designed to decentralize political power within the u.s.s.r. and indirectly within the position of that all powerful communist party little did they know however who attempt would encounter strong resistance from many in the military as well as the general public by that time have begun to save or change as often happens in russia's history when the when these reforms start accumulating from the top. there's a sense of this into society there's obviously the sense there's no way things are going to go back to the way they used to be in order to some control of the russian parliament building committee ordering tanks to roll into moscow. and then considered a political maverick and reformist led russian parliamentarians in opposition to the coup and that's what declaring legal all the decisions in decreased by the state of emergency committee. shortly most of the troops either decided to return to thei

you know when you look at going to charge for me at the moment you know he was he was put into the crimea he was there for a few days he looks like he'd been there he was he was basically put out of business and then he comes back the coup fails but he ends up being the ultimate victim of the coup to try to overthrow him. well that's true but i think a very important fact of the beginning was that gorbachev refused to be intimidated by the people who visited him they wanted him to give the imprimatur of legitimacy to what they were doing but in fact you know as general but any cough complain glittery god which of us on parliamentary expressions took them so and he told them where to go and that was important what was also crucially important was that you had the legitimacy of having been elected president of russia just a couple of months earlier if it wanted to cool or you know earlier it had more chance of success what do you think about that nickel i mean the timing of it all here because the reform efforts weren't really yielding i mean maybe there was hope but the ugly facts on the g