Russia marked the 10th anniversary Sunday of a bungled putsch by hard-line Communists which sank a reforming Soviet Union led by Mikhail Gorbachev and ushered in a decade of deeply divisive change.

But fewer than 100 people returned to the former parliament building where Boris Yeltsin, then leader of Soviet Russia, stood atop a tank and galvanized resistance to the coup.

Only one minor government official attended the rally and President Vladimir Putin, who is on holiday, has remained silent about the anniversary and what it means for post-Soviet Russia.

Nothing has been heard from Yeltsin, whose bravura performance was instrumental in foiling the eight-man State Emergency Situation Committee, and led to the political eclipse of Gorbachev.

On his return to Moscow after his release from house arrest in Crimea, Gorbachev, isolated and discredited, was powerless to stop Yeltsin banning the Communist Party.

Within four months, the Soviet Union was dead, Yeltsin had taken command in the Kremlin and Gorbachev was out of a job.

"It was self-interest, nothing more," Gorbachev said on Sunday of the plotters¡¯ motivation. "It was an attempt to replace a healthy head with a sick one."

"The party nomenklatura failed the test of democracy" and could not accept reforms that meant the end of their privileges, he told the Interfax news agency.

Nervous Plotters

The coup began with state radio and television playing music by Chopin and Tchaikovsky, the Soviet Union¡¯s classical harbingers of grave news, as the coup leaders announced Gorbachev was sick and they were taking control.

Tanks entered Moscow, public meetings were banned and pro-reform newspapers were shut down as the plotters sought to snuff out resistance and the effervescent political life which Gorbachev¡¯s changes had brought.

Sunday Gennady Yanayev, Soviet vice-president and a key coup plotter, said the putsch was an attempt to restore order and prevent signature of a treaty giving the Soviet Union¡¯s constituent republics greater powers at Moscow¡¯s expense.

"Our country was in total crisis," he told NTV television. "There was a struggle for power between the forces that wanted to keep the country¡¯s political and social structure and those who wanted the collapse of a great state."

New Iron Curtain Threat

Polls show Russians divided and ambivalent about the coup which, along with the summer holidays, in part explains the low turnout at the White House rally.

A Public Opinion survey showed 28 percent of respondents said they had supported Yeltsin, while 13 percent had backed the coup. But 31 percent said they had supported neither side.

Sergei Yevdokimov, the commander of the first tank regiment to cross onto Yeltsin¡¯s side said Sunday he had no regrets.

"I have never regretted what I did and will not repent of anything," Yevdokimov told Interfax news agency. "If I could go back 10 years, I would do just the same thing again."

The Soviet Union¡¯s demise ushered in radical economic reforms which saw a frightening collapse in living standards, soaring crime, two wars in Chechnya, endemic corruption and the rise of powerful business oligarchs who grabbed control of the commanding heights of the economy for a pittance.

After eight years in power, Yeltsin left office with a tiny rating, democratic institutions weak and millions of Russians nostalgic for the economic stability of the Soviet era.

Nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky told a crowd of about 100 supporters Saturday that it was reformers like Gorbachev and Yeltsin that had stripped Russia of its former glory.

"Even in 1945 our economy was stronger than it is in 2001; the rouble was stronger, there were fewer criminals, all the kids went to school," Zhirinovsky told a crowd waving flags saying: "Emergency Committee members were patriots!"