In August 1991, Mr. [Valentin Pavlov] and other Soviet hard-liners, calling themselves the State Emergency Committee, announced that [Mikhail Gorbachev] was ill and isolated the reformist Soviet leader at a Black Sea resort. Looking glum and nervous, eight of them sat together at a news conference to tell the nation that their committee was in charge.

One coup plotter committed suicide. Mr. Pavlov and the others were sentenced to prison but were released in 1993 and granted amnesty by parliament in 1994. Mr. Pavlov went on to head a commercial bank and later turned to economic research, taking leadership posts at several academies and institutes. He became a vice president of both the Free Economic Society of Russia and the International Management Academy.