I don't know what you have planned for your annual attention to the GKChP episode, 18-21 Aug 1991, but if you want to provoke some reactions, look at my The Collapse of the Soviet Military (Yale UP, 1998), Chapter 14, "The August Crisis." It's a contrarian analysis. Here is how it opens:

THE AUGUST CRISIS

"Was there a "Kornilov plot" [in August 1917]? Almost certainly not. All the available evidence, rather, points toa "Kerensky plot" engineered to discredit the general [Kor nilov]"

The so-called State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR (GKChP) opened the last act in the drama of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The generals might have saved it,but they did not. Failing to change the course of history by acting collectively to storm the White House, the changed the course of history by acting individually to open the doors of power to Yeltsin.

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In the conclusion, I show that the coup was successful, and Yeltsin led it. I have a lot of circumstantial evidence (including a bootleg copy of the procuracy report of investigation that implies strongly that Gorbachev aided and abetted the whole affair because he did not favoring letting even the Baltic republics secede but did not want the blame for a military crackdown to stop the secession as well as the new Union Treaty. He was far to clever to leave documentary evidence, but the signature of his actions is precisely the same as in Georgia in April 1989 and Azerbaidjan in 1990 and Lituania in January 1991.

I have had numerous private reactions from Russians but never in writing, and most find my hypothesis entirely plausible. American and British students never read anything written in the West but their own stuff, so other than kudos from the AAASS Shulman Prize committee and some good reviews, no one in the West has picked up my gauntlet.