Excellent article.

I've always thought it was Mikhail Gorbachev, not Boris Yeltsin, who should have been seen as the one who stopped the coup. Yeltsin just struck meaningless, risk-free poses on a tank- Gorbachev- who had ended repression in the USSR; who pulled the Red Army out of the Warsaw Pact countries, allowing the people of those countries to overthrow the Stalinist dinosaur states; who apologized to and met with dissident Left heroes like Alexander Dubcek for crushing their reform/democratization agendas; who rehabilitated the unjustly persecuted within the USSR- refused, even while held hostage by the coup plotters, who were threatening to execute his entire family, to turn over power to the neo-Stalinist cabal

If Gorbachev had caved in to the plotters, nothing Yeltsin did on that tank would have made any difference- he'd have been on a flight to exile in the West within hours, destined for a comfortable, profitable life on the right-wing speaking circuit, and there would never even have been the possibility of a democratic, humane Russia that existed for a few years in the 1990s.

Instead, "the West" backed Yeltsin, while immediately undermining him by painting the man as nothing but a drunken buffoon- he was sometimes depicted as a kind of Slavic W.C. Fields in Western editorial cartoons in his era- and denying him, as the West had previously denied Gorbachev, normal trade relations and any chance of a prosperous, stable economy of the sort which would have made the creation of a democratic Russia a sustainable project.

A good chunk of the West were actually glad to see Putin come to power in 1998- they seem to have actually preferred Russia to end up with a "strongman" than a democrat, with an aggressive leader- who the West believed they could "manage" at that point, for some bizarre reason- to a democratic Russian head of state who was focused on giving his country a peaceful, prosperous, non-repressive future.