This is the disgusting truth which is growing clearer every day: if the Soviet Union had bloodily crushed dissent throughout its empire in the late 1980s, Western leaders would still be making pilgrimages to Moscow to flatter and soothe whatever monsters sat in the Kremlin as a result. If Moscow’s leaders wanted to be on good terms with the United States, they should have copied the Chinese Communist Party’s blatant, unapologetic massacre of democrats in Tiananmen Square and methodical crushing of freedom in Hong Kong. If they wanted to be left alone in their dominions, they should have squatted, with their thousands of tanks, in Eastern Germany, and squelched attempts at liberalization in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland. This is not theorizing. We have no need to guess at this. You may watch the leaders of the free world toadying daily to China and to its little brother in despotism, Saudi Arabia, which actually dismembers its dissenters. Why, the Soviets, had they been ready to drown their opponents in blood, might even have browbeaten Western media into calling Moscow “Moskva,” as China has bullied the West into pathetically calling Peking “Beijing.” Freedom was obviously never the issue. You may observe these mighty apostles of freedom tactfully keeping their mouths shut about the suffocation of free speech, thought, and the rule of law in Turkey. There, the swollen despot Erdoğan bundles critics into prison cells and dismantles the last remaining traces of freedom under the law. Nor do they complain about Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus, which has now lasted more than half a century, during which Turkey has belonged to N.A.T.O., an alliance supposedly devoted to liberty and justice.

Foolishly, the Soviet leadership chose instead to engage in an act of historic generosity and repentance. For this, the U.S.S.R. has ever since been severely punished. Led very bravely by Mikhail Gorbachev, its leadership dismantled the apparatus of despotism. It restored freedom of speech and thought, which had been driven from the country nearly seventy years before. It ended the one-party rule of the Communists. Moscow released the European nations that had for decades been its subjects and captives. It likewise loosened its grip on its enormous Central Asian empire. The response of the rich, democratic West was suspicion, vague encouragement, and very little useful help.

This arrangement led rather predictably to squalid chaos and to a revulsion against democracy and law by a disillusioned Russian people. Suspicion turned to hostility, and here we are, more or less at war with the Russian Federation. I apologize for this small explosion of contempt and frustration. I should obviously try harder to be dispassionate. It follows my reading of The August Coup by Robert Service, an excellent, thorough, and thoughtful study of one of the least-examined moments of modern history. This was Soviet Communism’s last desperate attempt to take the Chinese route while it was still—just—a world power.

Service examines the extraordinary moment in August 1991 when what was left of Lenin’s Bolshevik apparatus tried to halt six years of political and economic reforms and return to something like the Red Old Days. I am especially grateful for his book because I lived and worked as a newspaper reporter in Moscow during those crazy but often thrilling times, and have never fully understood what I saw. I doubt I ever will. But I now know that it was a tragedy.

I can tell you what I witnessed. The 1991 coup had two stages, a ruthless massacre in Lithuania in January and a hesitant, drunken, and half-hearted attempt at an armed takeover of the whole U.S.S.R. in August. First was a dark, wintry day and an even darker night in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, in January 1991. This night of murder was, I think, the biggest news story I have covered in half a century as a journalist. Yet it somehow never became the dominant story in the West because another war was underway in Kuwait at the time, as Moscow had calculated. And many people alive then have the vaguest recollection of this filthy episode of state mass murder. Was Gorbachev trying to crush the Baltic states’ attempted breakaway from the U.S.S.R. and put a stop to a liberal policy that had gotten out of control? Many Lithuanians certainly thought so that night: “What do you think of your precious Gorbachev now?” they asked me sourly as I lay supine in the snow while they stood upright, so furious that they were able to ignore the K.G.B. bullets which were pinging and whining all around the city’s T.V. station.

The official verdict, some weeks afterward, was that the dead were killed in traffic accidents. I am here to tell you that this was a false account, but the mere fact that the Soviet state made this claim reveals that its leaders were even then capable of the most outrageous dishonesty. Seven months later I was in Moscow (just back from a working trip to Crimea) when the August coup began at dawn on Monday. Two days before, I had been preparing an article on the Soviet leadership’s luxury homes on the beautiful shoreline near Yalta with my friend, translator, and fixer Igor Monichev. We had gone along the coast road to Foros, where Gorbachev was then staying for his summer vacation. K.G.B. men all but lined the highway. We couldn’t stop, or we’d have been arrested. There were, as I recall, three Soviet warships, low and sinister, lying less than a mile off the steep, picturesque Black Sea coastline, far more than were needed for any good purpose. Igor and I both thought something was up. There was an ominous feeling about. This deepened when we returned to our horrible concrete Yalta hotel, where I heard on a B.B.C. World Service bulletin that Gorbachev’s old friend, the radical reformer Alexander Yakovlev, was predicting a coup d’état by a “Stalinist group” at any moment.

Yakovlev was no fool. I dropped everything and Igor, with his usual efficiency, got me onto a Sunday afternoon flight back to Moscow. By the time I reached the capital, around 5:00 P.M., the coup plotters had already burst in on Gorbachev at Foros and placed him under house arrest, though they had not yet dared to reveal this fact. My Moscow taxi driver lectured me (as such people often did) on how much better life had been under Leonid Brezhnev, when there had always been enough sausage, vodka, and medals, and the U.S.S.R. had been respected around the world. If there was to be a coup, he would no doubt be pleased.

I arrived at my gloomy but majestic Stalin-era flat in time for that evening’s Red Army firework display, held to mark Air Force Day and timed to start, as usual, at 9:00 P.M. Because the clocks had been pushed too far forward in some anti-Stalinist gesture, the fireworks took place in daylight, an oddly disturbing sight as they looked like anti-aircraft fire. In the morning, my radio broadcast the lie that Gorbachev was ill, and in my pre-breakfast confusion, I at first believed this blatant rubbish. Then I went downstairs, in time to see a squadron of Red Army tanks, barrels slanted in the late summer sunshine, grinding down the wide, majestic street on which I lived. They threw up a cloud of dust as their tracks destroyed the surface of the road. It was rather thrilling.

I was, as I had been in Vilnius months before, in a world whose rules I no longer knew. My neighbors, mostly squat, chunky K.G.B. retirees, were overjoyed. They set up a nostalgic picket in the lobby of my block, at which they saluted each other. They even found some red armbands to wear and installed a T.V. set, playing patriotic music at full volume. They had long resented my presence among them and glared at me, with hope in their hearts that I would soon be sent packing. As we all now know, the putsch would collapse within a few days. But it would end up handing the Kremlin to the incoherent, planless drunkard and bully Boris Yeltsin who fooled so many, including me, at the time. Yeltsin had managed to look strong during the crisis, in contrast to the cautious, dismayed, but decent Gorbachev, who had let himself be kidnapped by men he thought were his friends and allies. I can actually say I met and spoke to both of these men (in neither case in formal interviews), which still amazes me. For a while I was beguiled by Yeltsin’s clever populism, one of the worst political mistakes I have made. As the years have marched by, I have concluded that he was a disaster for Russia and the world, for whom too many excuses have been made. But the West found him extremely useful as he allowed the economic rape of his country and its descent into Olympic corruption, and remained complaisant as the Western allies reneged on promises not to expand their power eastward.

By contrast, the milk-drinking unpopulist Gorbachev, who never even cured himself of Leninism, bravely set out to dismantle Lenin’s ghastly state. When I review these events and the wise decision by Soviet officers to refrain from attacking Yeltsin’s headquarters during the August coup, one thing fills my mind. Two years later Yeltsin ordered troops to shell the same building, the Russian White House, when those within it challenged his authority and accused him of unconstitutional actions. Film of the blackened, wounded building went around the world. The West, which nowadays claims to be so concerned for the freedom of the Russian people, did nothing. Worse, it supported Yeltsin.

Service is wonderfully good on the fractious, evil-tempered months which led to the August coup. There were two unceasing struggles, between economic reformers and men who reasonably feared that reform would mean chaos and between Gorbachev’s doomed belief that some sort of union could be saved and Yeltsin’s cunning certainty that the Soviet Empire must be dissolved—leaving him in charge of a new Russia. Nobody knew how to hold what was left of the U.S.S.R. together. Only Stalinism could have done that, and Gorbachev had courageously dismantled almost all the repressive apparatus that still existed. When the plotters tried to recreate Soviet power, their spells and incantations no longer worked. My grizzled old neighbors, remnants of an older Russia already fading into memory, responded to them with moving enthusiasm and relief. Hardly anyone else did. Nobody knew what to do with the economy. Liberalization was necessary but also inevitably disastrous. It meant no more cheap bread, no more cheap vodka. Wages were miserable, but prices were low and did not change, while jobs were secure.

I still have in my possession a Soviet tea glass whose minuscule price, fifteen kopecks, is actually molded into its base. A rather more luxurious item, a Soviet ice bucket, has its (considerable) price of one hundred forty roubles (about two weeks’ pay) stamped into the metal. Nobody expected these things to change. A basic loaf was thirteen kopecks, so cheap that it cost less than pigswill, so farmers bought bread to feed to their hogs. Soviet power offered certainty and stability in every direction in return for quietude about a lunatic system. Who are we now to say that people were not content with that system, in our world where inflation roars and stamps about and there is no such thing as a secure job? The price of a ride on the Moscow Metro was five kopecks from 1961 to 1991. The same coin, a well-worn brass disc, could buy you a glass of sour beer in a squalid bar. Rents were tiny. There were almost no consumer goods. Soviet bank accounts (I had to decide whether to style myself a worker, a peasant, or an intellectual before I could open mine) were stuffed with money because there was nothing to spend it on. All this was ending, yet millions would miss it when it was gone. I recall in the midsummer of 1991, seeing ill-tempered lines of poor Russians around tobacco kiosks, where the state could not even arrange deliveries of cigarettes, the last solace of the poor. What should I care? But I found myself caring a great deal. It was a very bad omen.

A great frozen wave of money, bigger than the Ural Mountains, loomed over the country, threatening disastrous inflation if it ever thawed. And when it did, real wages shriveled, factories shut, and gangsters rushed in to buy up everything of value. Men and women stood on the streets with their possessions displayed on those little fake-veneer tables which were everywhere then. A pair of shoes might sell for enough to buy bread. Other food might be grown on the tiny allotments which (thank Heaven) so many had wisely maintained in the dense birchwoods around the capital. But it was the collapse of a civilization. The plotters, in many cases buffoons, drunks, or sinister secret policemen, were absolutely right about the depth of the crisis. Their only problem was that they had no idea what to do about it or how to implement their measures. They were like children who burst into the cockpit of an aircraft which is already stalled and hurtling to earth and who even so pull at levers and jab at buttons, hoping to save themselves and others. As Service writes, “There was anger everywhere. Living conditions had gone from bad to appalling. Wages had fallen far below needs. There was widespread fear of the possibility of famine by the end of the year. Pride in the strength and status of a superpower had collapsed.” He adds that the plotters “foresaw disaster for the Soviet Union if the wounds of Gorbachev’s policies were not staunched—and they were right.”

Everyone knew this was coming, yet the United States and the other Western nations repeatedly refused to grant Gorbachev the modern Marshall Plan aid he so very much wanted. Worse, while American technology was freely available to the despots in China, Soviet enterprises were barred by regulations dating from 1949 from the sort of access to Western know-how that China enjoyed. You want to know how Putin, then a hollow-faced bureaucrat in a cheap suit, came to swell into the monstrous thing he has now become? You will find the key to it in those years when millions had to forget their past lives of security and certainty and learn to cope with a new economy apparently run by retired pirates. Yet Gorbachev had been refused economic rescue by George H. W. Bush as late as July 1991. He was told he must first rip up the U.S.S.R.’s entire economic system and grant freedom to the Baltic states, conditions Bush must have known could not possibly be met. As Service concludes, by going to the G7 in London to beg for help (and beg he did), Gorbachev “had only proved that there would be no reward for all he had done to end the Cold War.” Nor was there. It is said that no good deed goes unpunished, but this has never been more true than it was for Gorbachev. After what happened to him, who is going to try to be good?