MOSCOW, OCTOBER 1993: when tank shells settled Russia’s political crisis
Tanks on a bridge opposite the Moscow White House, 4 October 1993 © James Rodgers
THAT DAY CENTRAL MOSCOW BECAME A WAR ZONE, tanks parked where taxis more commonly sped across the Moscow river towards the city centre. Now those tanks were firing on the building that had housed the Russian parliament–and doing so on the orders of President Boris Yeltsin. Shells flew over the spot where two years earlier he had himself stood on a tank to defy leaders of a coup who aimed to restore a more severe form of Soviet communism.
They failed. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Some of its institutions endured, though–and it was with deputies elected in the late Soviet period that Yeltsin became locked in increasingly bitter political conflict in the summer and early fall of 1993.
During the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd October, that political conflict escalated to gun battles in the streets of Moscow. By Monday morning, tanks were firing on the parliament building. By Monday afternoon, there was a bizarre twist on modern urban warfare as spectator sport. Muscovites strolled in the autumn sunshine watching their warring elites battle each other to decide who ruled Russia.
Having spent the night in the offices of Reuters television where I was working then as a producer for the breakfast news programme on ITV, then, as now, Britain’s main commercial TV channel, I got home in the late morning. I had spent the night at the office so as not to be far from computer connexions (those were different technological times) and also for safety. Knowing I would need to work again the next night, I went home by daylight–once I thought it was safe to walk back through backstreets sheltered from the fighting–to get a few hours’ rest.
Of course I could not sleep. I dozed on a sofa that I hoped was safely distant from the windows, occasionally moving cautiously towards the other side of the room too look out. As the day wore on, the shells did their damage, and the upper floors of the bright white building began to burn black. By the end of the day, the defenders of the building had fled or been killed or captured. The exact number of deaths will never be known, but it is generally agreed to have been more than 100, including Rory Peck, a British cameraman whom I had known as a member of the Moscow press corps.
The next morning, the ‘White House’ resembled a colossal tooth stricken by spreading decay–a symbol of a disease that had started to infect the Russian body politic.
The Moscow ‘White House’, 5 October 1993 © James Rodgers
Thirty years on, these events are rarely spoken off: passed off in the West, perhaps, as a regrettable consequence of the massive political change Russia had experienced from the mid-1980s onwards.
Yet this was the worst political violence in Moscow since Russia’s revolutionary year of 1917, and was much more than an aftershock of the political earthquake that had brought down Soviet power.
Yeltsin’s courage in 1991 was not in doubt, but he might also have gambled then that his enemies–whom he knew, he too had come from within the party system–would not dare to use force to crush the protesters protecting the building. They did not, and their coup failed. Two years later, he showed no such reluctance, and he hung on to power.
Yet this was not the end of the transformation from Soviet communism to democracy and liberal capitalism. It was the beginning of a willingness on the part of Russia’s post-Soviet leaders to use violence to control Russia: a willingness unleashed with terrifying effect on rebellious Chechnya a little over a year later. When that second conflict flared again in 1999, Moscow’s hard line was led by a new figure heading for the summit of Russian power: Vladimir Putin.
Putin’s time in the Kremlin is usually seen as a departure from the freedoms of the Yeltsin years, but Moscow’s bloody long weekend of early October 1993 reminds us there was continuity as well as change.
All text and pictures © James Rodgers.
On Friday 6th October I will be at Henley Literary festival, talking about my book Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin . Details here .