Civilians tried to fight back but got run over by Yeltsins tanks.
The dismantling of the USSR was almost a decade in the making. Andropov made the dumb decision to bring back actual exiled traitors like Yakovlev for the experience living overseas for possible ideas of reforms, Andropov was smart enough to keep them at arms length, but he kicked the bucket immediately, and the inexperienced, borderline retarded Gorbachev came in and who were the group that quickly became dominated his entire policy development? The Yakovlev "Leningrad Law Development" group.
Perestroika and Glasnost were designed to quite literally destroy the Soviet economy and society, under Glasnost, all media was handed literally over to Anti-Government/Anti-Communist elements under the name of "transparency" and "Criticize everything", Cooperative owners and heads of production departments quickly morphed into Oligarchs, and worked with organized crime and ""Reformist"" elements to create mass artifical shortages, ships were left in ports, trains cargo left at good stations to rot, when loyal elements of the Government sent in students and workers to try get the goods unloaded and out, they were beaten up by Bratva. This happened all through the 80s and 90s.
Then Gorbachev let the Baltics go and it was then a Nationalist feeding frenzy. Gorbachev being a retard, outmanuvered by Yeltsin and Gaidar and the Communist Party was literally BANNED, even though the USSR had not even been "dismantled", it wasn't that long until the entire country fell apart.
Also the Soviet paternalistic attitude worked against it. People were taught to be good Communists, they were taught to follow daddy-Government, and Gorbachev and Yeltsin told them to jump off a cliff.