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bne February 2021 Cover Story I 29
The world was mesmerized by justification, and he and his allies were National Unity Party had organised a
attempting to halt the programme. Amongst the many effects of shock therapy was that male life expectancy crashed to 56 years and millions of Russians died early.
In September the war of words escalated to the point where the Duma deputies occupied the White House and tried
to impeach Yeltsin, and Rutskoi was appointed acting president and sacked all the ministers. Yeltsin ordered the Duma dissolved – for which he had no consti- tutional powers – and tried to call for a referendum to ask the people which camp they wanted to back. Russia was thrown into a full-blown constitutional crisis.
I was living in an apartment on Novy Arbat at the time behind the legendary Dom Kinigi bookshop, a short walk from the White House, and we used to wander down every day to see what was going on.
In those days there was no fence around the White House and you could walk round to the courtyard at the back where the bulk of the protesters were hanging out and occasionally a deputy would come out and make a speech. The building was surrounded by a cordon of protesters carrying posters, reminiscent of the 1991 tussle in front of the same building where Yeltsin made his historic speech from
on top of a tank that ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in December of that year. This time round the standoff was a lot more low key and really not much was happening other than the building's occupation by the deputies.
But as September wore on tensions were slowly ratcheting up. First the city government was ordered to turn the water and power off, then a cordon of police arrived and tried to stop pedestrians walking in and out of the grounds, trapping those demonstrators and deputies already inside.
The police were pretty relaxed,
standing around cadging fags off the demonstrators and not enforcing the cordon particularly thoroughly. My press accreditation was good enough to be allowed through the line, and behind the White House the right-wing Russian
scenes of bizarrely clad Trump
supporters breaking into and occupying the Capitol in Washington DC that was widely described as an attempted coup d'état.
Parallels were quickly drawn with the attack on Russia’s White House that was home to the Duma’s executive, the Russian parliament, by the late President Boris Yeltsin.
But apart from the fact that both buildings house parliamentary deputies and the occupation was largely carried out by normal people the parallels stop there.
I had arrived in Moscow a few months earlier and was at the very start of my journalistic career. Only 18 months after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Moscow was a very different city to that of today; dark, run down and thinly supplied by the empty shelves of Soviet- era stores. The depth of the potholes in the roads could take an unsuspecting taxi’s wheel off and the Russians you met on the street could easily identify you as a foreigner because of the quality of your shoes.
The storming of the Capitol was driven by politics as Trump continues to claim the election was falsified – a claim without any evidence and widely derided – but the political argument that led to the occupation of the White House was a much more serious clash between the Duma and the president.
Russia is a republic and the president has considerable powers, but in those days so did the Duma and Yeltsin spent much of his first term in conflict with the Duma deputies led by Ruslan Khasbulatov,
a Chechen professor who was the parliamentary speaker at the time, and Alexander Rutskoi, the vice-president.
Their problem was that at the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) behest, Yeltsin and his prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, had launched
a programme of “shock therapy” that caused hyperinflation and most of industry to collapse. Rutskoi called
it “economic genocide,” with some
home guard-style defence and brought out their Tsarist-era flag, although no weapons were in evidence yet.
Yeltsin’s efforts to break the occupation were going nowhere and the situation had ended in a standoff, somewhat similar to that between the protesters in Minsk and Belarus' self-appointed President Alexander Lukashenko today. Except the protesters in Minsk have specifically said they will not occupy the government buildings, partly because Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was willing to send a special military unit to quell the protests “if necessary” on August 27 and partly because of the memory of what happened next in Moscow in 1993.
Ostankino
By October 3 the tensions had gone up again and now the police had brought in dozens of water trucks that are used to spray the roads in the summer to keep the dust down and circled them wagon- style around the building to make a much more solid barrier. The police
had also started to strictly enforce the cordon but my press pass still allowed me through the lines.
Things were coming to a head and it was becoming increasingly obvious that the police were going to arrive in numbers and break the occupation by force.
That day a large demonstration marched down Novy Arbat to the White House and the police fled. A crowd gathered
in the courtyard and Rutskoi came out on the balcony to address the crowd.
An aide stood next to him and opened a brief case out of which panels of bullet-proof glass folded which he held up in front of Rutskoi in case of snipers.
Rutskoi addressed the crowd (at that point I had no Russian at all) and suddenly there was activity all around me. Men started appearing out of the White House carrying Kalashnikovs and began climbing into a number of MAZ trucks parked in the courtyard, which left in convoy.
We quickly flagged down a gypsy cab and followed the trucks around the Garden Ring and up Prospekt Mira. It
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