Page 31 - bneMag February 2021_20210202

bne February 2021 Cover story I 31
the White House started shooting back, but used the tunnels under the building to take up positions on the rooves of
the surrounding buildings and began indiscriminately to shoot anyone on the street. At the same time, Lebed’s snipers took up position on top of the “Heineken building” on the opposite bank and shot back, also targeting pedestrians.
The buildings around the White House get their nicknames from the huge advertising billboards on their rooves and at the time the Heineken was home to the many German diplomats who worked at the embassy further down
the embankment and up the hill at Mosfimovskaya. Behind the Heineken building is the “Kutzovsky ghetto”, where most of the international news bureaus were housed in Soviet times and are still housed there today.
A friend of mine, Akhim Luther, lived in the Gazprom building that is next door to the White House on the same side of the river. A young German entrepreneur who had come to Moscow very early on to represent his father’s electronics firm, he went on to his balcony that overlooks the White House to see what was going on. However, as soon as he appeared
a storm of bullets and machine gun fire poured through his window as the White House defenders clearly thought he was a sniper. He threw himself back inside the room and crawled away to the back rooms of his apartment.
A pair of young British para-legals were less lucky. They went up to the roof
of their building on the other side of the White House from the Gazprom building, also to get a better look, but one was hit by a sniper bullet and she only survived thanks to an emergency blood transfusion after the Russian staff at her office took her to hospital and donated the blood that saved her life.
Aftermath
The fighting went on for about three days. A curfew was imposed at sundown and it was still dangerous to go anywhere near the White House. The snipers spread up the Novy Arbat and for years afterwards the upper floors of the building on the corner of Novy Arbat
and the Garden Ring road, the main ring road in Moscow, was pockmarked with bullet holes from a sniper battle, until it was finally repaired in the boom years of the noughties.
But bizarrely life in the rest of the
city carried on as normal. Down on Tverskaya, the Oxford Street of Moscow, the shops and cafes were open and people went about their business
as normal, although the occasional explosion could be heard in the distance.
The night of October 4 we went to Bely Tarakan (White Cockroach), a very
cool private bar set up by a bunch of impoverished actors from one of the theatres for people to hang out and drink cheaply. Although the actors couldn't make any money from the theatres
they made a nice income from the bar and went on to open a string of famous bars, including Krisis Genre, Vermel, Bedny Ludy and, most famous of all, Propaganda, which is still going.
Rumours were flying at Bely Tarakan: the government had fallen; the borders were closed; Yeltsin had fled; Rutskoi had been arrested. No one knew what was happening. The morning felt like
a long while away and the next day was a completely unknown entity. It was exhilarating in a way, but more than that it made me realise I had never faced
a day where I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next and couldn't even guess. Our friends in the bar didn't seem too phased. Their life was already hard, so political chaos didn't really make any difference to them.
In the end it was all over fairly quickly. Successfully keeping Rutskoi’s people out of Ostankino meant the insurrection died out fairly fast. The ringleaders
of the White House’s occupation
were quickly arrested, but they were amnestied within a year once Yeltsin had consolidated his position, and Khasbulatov went back back to teaching.
The main result was Yeltsin changed the constitution in December, giving the president vastly increased powers. But even that didn't bring his showdowns with the Duma to an end and as time
passed he became increasingly erratic. The government remained in constant budget crisis, which led to the notorious loans-for-shares privatisations in 1995-96 and Yeltsin suffered some
sort of heart attack between the first
and second round of the presidential elections in 1996, disappearing from the stage entirely in the run-up to the second vote. Russia’s economy then crashed in 1998 thanks to the spill-over effects of
a currency crisis in Asia the year before.
It wasn't until Putin took over in 2000 that things really started to change. The “economic Putin” put through
a raft of reforms, including a flat rate tax for individuals and companies that set the stage for a boom. The “politi-
cal Putin” finally made use of those extended presidential powers and rapidly crushed the oligarchs, removed the corrupt governors from the upper house of parliament, took direct control of the media and began a long campaign to tighten his control.
Ironically Russia flourished. GDP growth in 2000 was almost 10% despite the predictions of a return to hyperinflation and widespread poverty. Putin’s recovery has been attributed to oil, but the oil prices didn't start rising from a low of $15 in 2000 for several years, but when they did the economy boomed.
In the West Yeltsin is hailed as a democrat and a blessing, while Putin is demonised as an autocratic demagogue, but the Russians that lived through the events of 1993 and the following years see it the other way round: Yeltsin’s era was full of chaos, conflict, poverty and misery, whereas Putin’s era has been about stability, a return to prosperity and the creation of a more or less normal life. Russia got back some of its dignity under Putin, whereas under Yeltsin it was robbed by the oligarch and crushed by the advice of the international finanical institutiotns. But the real irony is that Yeltsin’s attempt to dissolve Parliament and his use of force was clearly illegal under the Russian Constitution and was a constitutional coup that answered Rutskoi’s attempt at a coup d'état, while Putin is a stickler for sticking at least to the letter, if not the spirit, of the law.
www.bne.eu