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Very true. I would certainly be wary of people bearing umbrellas were I him. But at some point he had two choices: 1) continue the coup and almost certainly die within a week; 2) negotiate and create a chance, small though it might be, to eventually die of natural causes.
I was using "marching on" in the sense of a military advance, not a protest march. And I said nothing about plausible deniability; that would be dumb. The only way to get people to come out in favor of your coup is to make it clear that a coup is exactly what is happening. No one is going to stick their neck out for a coup that might not be happening.
Basically, what happened is exactly what one would expect to happen in the case of an unsuccessful attempted coup that fails in its earliest stages.
Please. This is the Bulgarian MO. KGB were never that subtle.
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