Next, the cabal convened a hasty televised press conference to introduce themselves as the saviors of communism and the union. It was a disaster. They were wrinkled, sclerotic old men, unpleasant, nasty, and afraid. And it showed. Their hands trembled, their voices quivered and shook, no facial expression registered above a fierce scowl.

Never before had they smiled at their people: why start now?

Worst of all, they appeared disorganized, feeble, nervous, and ancient-as impressions go, at that precarious, decisive moment, the wrong one to convey to a fractious, anxious nation.

To say it was a glorious gift to Boris Yeltsin, a born opportunist and addicted rabble-rouser, would be an understatement. He rallied a band of fellow flamethrowers and issued a call for all Russians to join together and battle for their freedom. A large, unruly mob flocked to the Russian Congress building, heckling and chanting and daring the men who led the coup to do something about them. The cabal had been supremely confident their good citizens would respond in the best Soviet tradition-like scared, obedient sheep. The combative show of opposition caught the old boys totally by surprise.

Half argued strenuously to slaughter the whole bunch and hang their bodies from lampposts. A fine example, a paternal warning and long overdue, too. That wet noodle Gorby had been a sorry mollycoddler. The nation had grown soft and spoiled, they insisted; a good massacre was exactly the paternal medicine needed to whip it back in shape. The more dead wimps the better.

The other half wondered if a bloody spectacle might incite a larger rebellion. They weren't morally opposed by any means. In Lenin's hallowed words, as one of them kept repeating, as if anybody needed to hear it, omelets required broken eggs. But the nation had grown a little moody toward tyrants, they cautioned. The wrong move at this brittle time and they, too, might end up swinging on lampposts. Ignore the mob, they argued; in a day or two, at the outside, the crowd would grow bored and hungry and melt into the night.

Agreement proved impossible. Kill them or ignore them? Stomp them like rodents or wait them out? The old men were cleanly divided in their opinions, so they sat and squabbled in their gilded Kremlin offices, brawling and cursing one another, drinking heavily, collectively overwhelmed by the power they had stolen.

For two sleepless days the world held its breath and watched. Boris's protestors turned rowdier and more daring by the hour. They constructed signs. They howled protest chants and hurled nasty taunts at the security guards sent to control them. They erected camps, stockpiled food, heckled and sang, and prepared to stay for the duration; the coup leaders argued more tumultuously and drank more heavily.

Despite serious attempts to scare away the press, a small pesky army of reporters had infiltrated the mob and was broadcasting the whole infuriating standoff via satellite, smuggling out photographs and earning Pulitzers by the carton. The whole mess was on display, in living color for the entire globe to see.

Yeltsin adored the spotlight, and was almost giddy at having all the world as his stage. Televisions were kept on in the Kremlin offices 24/7. The old boys were forced to sit and watch as Boris-miraculously sober for once-pranced repeatedly in front of the cameras, calling them all has-beens and wannabe tyrants, threatening to run them out of town. That clown was thumbing his nose and shooting the bird at them.

For an empire in which terror was oxygen, it was humiliating; worse, it was dangerous.

On the third day the old men had had enough. They ordered the tanks to move, scatter the rabble, and crush ol' Boris. But after three hapless protestors were mowed down, the army lost its stomach. As miscalculations go, it was a horrible one. Should've sent in the ruffians from the KGB, they realized, a little sad, a little late. Need a few bones snapped, a little blood spilled, the boys from the Lubyanka were only too happy to oblige. Soldiers, on the other hand, had no appetite for flattening their own defenseless citizens. A handful of disgusted generals threw their support behind Yeltsin. A full stampede ensued.

The coup leaders were marched off in handcuffs, tired, defeated, disgruntled old men who had bungled their last chance. And Yeltsin, caught in the flush of victory, sprinted to the cameras and declared a ban on the Communist Party: a bold gesture, the last rite for a rotten old system that had run its course. The crowd roared its approval. It was also insane, and shortly thereafter was followed by an equally shortsighted act: the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union.

With a few swipes of ink the immense empire fractured into more than a dozen different nations.

For seventy years, communism had been the ingrained order-the legal system, the governing system, the economic apparatus of the world's largest nation. Lazy, wonderfully corrupt, and spitefully inefficient as they were, its millions of servants and functionaries were the veins and arteries that braided the country together. They kept it functioning. They doled out the food and miserly paychecks, assigned housing, mismanaged the factories and farms, maintained public order, distributed goods and services, kept the trains running. A terrible, horribly flawed system, for sure. Nonetheless, it was, at least, a system.

Yeltsin had given little serious thought to what would replace it, or them. A few vague notions about democracy and a thriving free market rattled around his brain, nothing more. Apparently he assumed they would sprout helter-skelter from the fertile vacuum he created.

Worse, it quickly became apparent that Yeltsin, so brilliant at blasting the system to pieces, was clueless about gluing the wreckage back together. He was a revolutionary, a radical, a demolitionist extraordinaire. Like most of the breed, he had no talent for what came after the big bang.

But Alex Konevitch definitely did. By this point, Alex already had built a massive construction business, a sprawling network of brokerage houses to administer an arbitrage business that began with construction materials and swelled to the whole range of national commodities, and a Russian exchange bank to manage the exploding finances of his hungry businesses. Amazingly, every bit of it was accomplished under the repressive nose of the communist apparatus. Dodging the KGB and working in the shadows, somehow he had self-mastered the alchemy of finance and banking, of international business.

The nation was not at all prepared for its overnight lunge into capitalism. But Alex was not only ready he was hungry.

With killer instinct, he rushed in and applied for a license to exchange foreign currency. The existing licenses had been granted by the government of the Soviet Union; whatever permissions or licenses had been endowed by that bad memory were insolvent, not worth spit. Anyway, the spirit of the day was to privatize everything, to disassemble the suffocating state bureaucracy, to mimic the West.

After a swift investigation, it turned out Alex's banks were the only functioning institutions with adequate experience and trained executives, and with ample security to safeguard what promised to be billions in transactions. Not only was the license granted, Alex ended up with a monopoly-every dollar, every yen, every franc that came or left Russia moved through his exchange bank. Cash flooded through his vaults. Trainloads from every direction, from Western companies scrambling to set up businesses in the newly capitalist country, and from wealthy Russians pushing cash out, trying to dodge the tax collector and hide their illicit fortunes overseas.

Millions of fearful Russians lined up at the doors to park their savings in Alex's bank, which happily exchanged their shrinking rubles for stable dollars or yen or deutsche marks, whatever currency their heart desired, and let them ride out the storm.