Just finished David Remnick's"Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Union."
It concludes with the trial of the survivors of the plotters of the coup which tried to oust Gorbachev and which was thwarted by Yeltsin and the Moscow people. The trial, plus the access to the archives which the prosecutors had, showed the plotters to be rather banal.
I suspect this is often the case in history. If you were the fly on the wall getting a real time read on the deliberations and decision making you'd be amazed at how haphazard and ordinary the proceedings were. This conviction of mine is related to my belief in "Murphy's Law".
