A decade after a coup threatened to crush liberal reform in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev believes the putsch was a last, desperate throw of the dice by power-hungry men facing political oblivion.

But he admitted that his own failure to push the pace of change had helped make possible a crisis which led to the eventual death of his reform plans and the dissolution of the USSR.

"After free elections the hardliners realised that democracy did not suit them, that glasnost did not suit them, that free speech did not suit them," Gorbachev said in an interview in southern Russia.

"These people were part of a nomenklatura born in a closed world, in darkness, where they used cloak-and-dagger tactics. Suddenly they had to report to the people about what they did, and they started to lose their positions."

Many of the old guard feared Gorbachev's reforms would lead to full democracy, the break-up of the Communist Party, a market economy and transformation of the highly centralised Soviet Union into a more egalitarian federation.

While Gorbachev was at his official summer residence at Foros, above the Black Sea, an eight-man Emergency Committee convened in Moscow. They said Gorbachev had been taken ill and was incapable of performing his duties. All communication links to the dacha in Foros were severed, and reinforced guards suddenly appeared in the hills above Gorbachev, his wife, Raisa, and their children.

Gorbachev recalled: "They were 2 1/2 very tough days. Minutes passed like hours, and everything was on edge. But I was absolutely calm. It's maybe a quality of mine. I told Raisa that things were getting very dangerous, and that anything could happen, that they might harm her as well as me.

"But though I knew anything could happen to us, I could not back down no matter what happened."

Gorbachev's daughter, Irina, took their pocket radio out into the dacha's grounds and picked up a weak signal from the BBC's World Service, reporting that the Emergency Committee had said her father was too ill to carry on his work.

"After I heard that, from dawn to dusk I walked around the garden, so that people could see me from the sea or from the hills," he said. When the news came through that a delegation from Moscow might be flying to Foros to check on Gorbachev's health, Raisa feared the worst.

"She was in a panic, and began looking for somewhere to hide me. But she was in such a state she lost the power of speech and her arm slumped down by her side in a sort of fit."

Raisa, an elegant, self-assured presence at Gorbachev's side from their days at Moscow State University until her death from leukaemia in 1999, recovered her speech but was not fully healthy for two years after the events of August 1991.

"The plotters couldn't succeed in an open political battle, it was clear they were losing and so they suddenly resorted to this adventurism, disregarding everything except self-interest," Gorbachev said. "I regard them as traitors, absolutely."

The opposition of Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin, who proclaimed his defence of democracy from on top of a tank sent to crush him, was also a key factor in the coup fizzling out.

When Gorbachev returned to Moscow, he found Yeltsin in the ascendant and bent on dissolving the party and the Soviet Union.

"Yeltsin is obsessed with power. He's not a democrat but an autocrat," Gorbachev said, recalling how Yeltsin craved the trappings of Kremlin power enjoyed by Gorbachev.

"He was imagining for days, weeks, how the presidential flag should look. He was thinking of swathing the Kremlin in gold when the country was in poverty. Damn it, only a king could act that way. But that was power for him, and that's why Gorbachev was just another obstacle in his way."

Four months after the coup the Soviet Union was dead, Gorbachev was out of a job and his programme of gradual reform was replaced by Yeltsin's free-market shock therapy and a drive to concentrate power in his own hands. Gorbachev said he should have reformed the Communist Party more quickly, thus denying hardliners a chance to mount the coup and neutralising radical reformists' calls for rapid change.

"Undoubtedly, I saw that we were late reforming the party. From being the initiator and engine of reform, the party became a brake on reform," Gorbachev said. "And the USSR could not have survived in that form, but it didn't have to be destroyed.

"As a politician you should be ready for anything, defeats and victories. But the fact that perestroika was wrecked and a different strategy took its place, of course, I regret that."

Speaking during a low-key meeting of his Social Democratic party in the city of Rostov, Gorbachev said he prefers his current life to the days of superpower summits and state visits.

Looking tanned and full of energy at 70, he says he is happy travelling the world for his environmental work or studying the problems of globalisation, but will always return to Russia, and to politics.

"Yeltsin really wanted me to leave, but I said `Don't hold your breath'. I'm deeply linked to my country. I opened up a whole new path to it, a new epoch.

"I have been in politics for 50 years and occasionally had a hard time living with it. I thought about packing it in so many times. But when it came to making a final decision, I knew there was nothing else for me."