It failed quickly, and Gorbachev was back at his desk within days, but the coup had damaged him fatally. Robert Service, author of The August Coup, is the English-speaking world’s foremost historian of 20th-century Russia and Bolshevism. His biographies of the three major Soviet leaders, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, are outstanding, even in that crowded field. The coup leaders didn’t support either of them: they wanted to go back to a system which would restore as much Soviet power as possible. The coup leaders lost their faith in what they were doing almost immediately, and many of them didn’t have much to begin with.