"In Moscow, the result was power shifting from Gorbachev’s Kremlin to the headquarters of the formerly somnolent Russian republic in its ‘White House’ on the Moscow River. Here a new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was a boisterous, bibulous throwback to past Moscow rulers. He resisted a coup attempt in August 1991 by KGB hardliners, when Gorbachev was briefly absent by the Black Sea. By December, the Warsaw Pact regimes were going their own way and so was Russia itself. A weakened Gorbachev was finally forced to sign the formal dismantling of the USSR. It meant his own downfall and Yeltsin (1991–9) moving into the Kremlin. On New Year’s Day 1992, the hammer-and-sickle that had graced the fortress battlements for sixty-eight years was hauled down, and the tsarist tricolour rose in its place."