A protest by Communist supporters marked the start of commemorations Saturday of the 15th anniversary of the day Boris Yeltsin climbed on to a tank to face down a coup aimed at saving the Soviet Union - an event that many Russians now view with ambivalence.
About 100 Communist party supporters, most of them elderly and many waving red flags, gathered on Red Square to denounce the Soviet Union's collapse and to voice their regret at the failure of the coup of August 19, 1991.
"The coup leaders were too weak. They didn't go all the way," said an editor of a Communist internet site, Vilory Berezin, as demonstrators waved placards and were photographed by passing tourists.
One placard read "Capitalism is the godfather of terrorism and extremism", another: "1991-2006: from great power to national shame". The anniversary of the coup, whose failure led to the re-birth of independent Russia, is a time of regret for some, not least perhaps President Vladimir Putin, who has called the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union the "biggest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century.
For the Communist party, reformed as a nationalist centre-left party, the anniversary marks a "betrayal" by the Soviet Union's last leader Mikhail Gorbachev, one that had "monstrous" economic consequences, said senior party leader Ivan Melnikov earlier.
But the liberal Union of Rightist Forces takes a different view. It planned celebrations, including a demonstration later Saturday, of the "15th anniversary of our democratic revolution and the birth of a new, free Russia," the party's Internet site said.
Gorbachev was holidaying in Crimea in August 1991 when he was placed under house arrest and power was briefly seized by a group of Communist hard-liners calling themselves the State Committee for a State of Emergency, or GKChP, who were furious at his policies of "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (restructuring).
Tanks rolled through the streets of Moscow that August 19, but they were soon surrounded by tens of thousands of Muscovites.
Yeltsin, who had just been elected president of the Russian republic, became the central figure among the anti-coup forces when he climbed atop a tank and called on fellow citizens to rally against the coup - not in the name of the Soviet Union, but in the name of Russia.
Yeltsin is to head Tuesday to the ex-Soviet state of Latvia, now a member of the European Union and the Nato military alliance, to receive a state honour for his role in Latvia's re-birth after its occupation by the Soviet Union - a rare friendly gesture between two neighbours that have long been at odds. But those first confused months of independence are now a distant memory for many Russians as their country enjoys the fruits of oil wealth and tries to put behind it the hardships of the 1990s and two devastating wars in Chechnya.
In a poll this week by the independent Levada Center, GKChP won slightly more retrospective support (13 percent) than Yeltsin and his supporters (12 percent).
Just as telling is that the majority of the 1,600 people polled (52 percent) said they would not take sides. Those who expressed an opinion mostly saw the coup and its defeat as a simple power struggle among ruling elites.
That "time is passing, and people are forgetting what truly happened, as though their memories have lost the thread," said Gennady Burbulis, once a key coup opponent and now a member of Russia's parliament, in the newspaper Gazeta.