That afternoon Gorbachev held a press conference in which he said, “I have come back to a different country.” He said that there had been an attempt to return the country to a totalitarian state and it had failed. At some point, Gorbachev had started using the word “totalitarian” to describe the regime that now seemed, finally, to have toppled. With that out of the way, he said, he would now press ahead with a new union treaty. He had already appointed ministers to replace the rebels in the Soviet government.
