19 August: Boris Yeltsin speaks outside the White House in Moscow. CC-A 4.0 / ITAR-TASS. Some rights reserved.
The friends who spent the night at my apartment on 18 August, 1991 woke up in dribs and drabs the next day — lazily beating back the collective hangover with coffee. We were in our early 20s, most of us were about to graduate from Novosibirsk state university, and the world was changing all around us. Life was exciting in a way it hadn’t been before. We read a lot and talked nonstop.
