The coup organizers, in other words, tried to will the signaling system back into existence simply by issuing several decrees—and by placing the country’s president under house arrest, which has to rank near the top in the hierarchy of signals—but the social contract could not be resuscitated. The army did not respond to the hard-liners’ signals, but it did not pick up on signals from Yeltsin’s White House either, and did not side with the resistance: it simply did not act.
