So he was, for now. The perils of Bloody Sunday, when an unprepared government nearly lost its grip on power, were blown away in a one-sided shoot-out on Monday. With the rout of his enemies in Moscow, and with the virtual collapse of Russia’s national political institutions, Yeltsin was left looking like a dictator, albeit a relatively benign one. “Communism hasn’t won, but democracy hasn’t won, either,” complained a Russian human-rights activist. Yeltsin himself pledged allegiance to democracy. Two days after the fighting ended, he told the nation: “The principal lesson is that democracy must be reliably defended. The state must use force to counter the threat of violence, the threat to the life and safety of citizens.” Parliament started the fight, giving Yeltsin an excuse indeed, an urgent need-to lash back. But in putting down the rebels, Yeltsin circumscribed the democracy he was trying to save. And until a legitimate system of government can be created, he and his supporters in the army are all that holds Russia together.
And exactly what did Yeltsin win? Each political upheaval of recent years has left the central government weaker and less credible. The men in the Kremlin look more and more like ineffective buffoons. Now the government, what is left of it, has hit a new low. The inability of Yeltsin and his rivals to work out a compromise dragged the capital into what Russians fear more than almost anything: civil war. The clumsy coup against Mikhail Gorbachev two years ago caused only three deaths, and those were keenly mourned. Last week 178 people died in pitched battles, the city government said, and 800 or more were wounded. Russians watched in horror and disgust as Russian tanks fired on the Russian Parliament.
The battle that nearly brought the government down began before 3 p.m., when a crowd of perhaps 10,000 anti-Yeltsin demonstrators broke through a series of police lines along Moscow’s inner ring road. Eventually they punched through the security forces that had sealed of the White House. The lawmakers, who had been holed up inside for nearly two weeks, were euphoric, sensing victory. Aleksandr Rutskoi, Yeltsin’s vice president and Parliament’s choice to replace him, went out onto a balcony and urged “combat-ready young men to…storm the mayor’s office across the street and the Ostankino television center and capture them.” The “acting president” warned the government forces in the street below: “You have only seconds to change sides and defect to the people.”
Parliamentary forces quickly occupied part of the mayor’s high-rise office building next door. Another group of several thousand protesters, armed with assault rifles, clubs and metal bars, stormed up to the radio-TV complex at Ostankino, six miles to the northeast. Entry was blocked by police and elite Spetsnaz commandos, who had arrived only five minutes before. The rebels crashed two trucks into the front of the building and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the door. A fierce fire fight ensued. Television broadcasts were interrupted for about half an hour until they were resumed from another location. Back at the White House, Parliament leader Russian Khasbulatov erroneously told the legislators: “Ostankino has been taken.” To thunderous cheers, be added: “Today we must seize the Kremlin.”
Much later, after the fighting was over, some of Yeltsin’s critics charged that he deliberately allowed the Sunday demonstrations to get out of hand to give himself an excuse for military action against Parliament. And then, they said, Yeltsin used more force than was necessary to clean out the White House. “This was a shameful bullfight,” said a senior official at the Defense Ministry. “The only reason for so much bloodshed was that Yeltsin wanted to show everybody that the Parliament was finished.”
The evidence suggested, however, that the rebels got as far as they did on Sunday because Yeltsin’s regime was utterly inept. “We did not prepare for a war,” Yeltsin admitted later. When it came, the Kremlin was almost empty, with only a weekend staff on hand. “If [the rebels] had come to the Kremlin instead of to Ostankino, it would have been very dangerous,” said Yuri Baturin, a Yeltsin aide who was working that afternoon in his office. “We had no special security at the Kremlin at all.”
Sergei Parkhomenko, a respected journalist for the newspaper Sevodnya, reported from the Kremlin that Yeltsin’s advisers wasted time arguing about who was to blame for the debacle-and who had believed in the possibility of peaceable compromise. “So what are you going to do now, you peacenik, you?” one shouted into a phone. “Me? I’m a peacenik? Peacenik yourself!” Yeltsin did not arrive from his country home until 6:15 p.m., after rebel forces had gone into action. “The president went up to his office with a measured step–and disappeared,” Parkhomenko wrote in a story that was suppressed for two days by official censorship of even friendly newspapers.
Meanwhile, the armed forces stalled, waiting for assurances from Yeltsin. “The army wanted to know that the political leadership would back them and take responsibility for [using force],” said presidential adviser Andranik Migranyan. Gen. Pavel Grachev, the defense minister, said he issued orders at 5 p.m. for military units to move into Moscow. They took hours to show up. Grachev later explained, a bit lamely, that tank units were not originally called up because he was afraid they might get into accidents with Sunday drivers returning from their dachas.
Yeltsin got more unquestioning support from Bill Clinton. On Sunday Clinton said Yeltsin had “bent over backwards” to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. Washington had been surprised by the strength of the rebel attack. But it would have supported Yeltsin even if his response had been more violent than it was, U.S. officials said later.
Early on Monday the rebels in the White House began to realize that their “October Revolution” was headed for the ash heap of history. At 7 a.m. government tanks began to bombard the building. The violence of the attack astonished the rebels. “I’ve known Yeltsin a long time,” Khasbulatov said of his former ally, “but I never expected this.” With snipers peppering the streets and tanks pounding the building, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov negotiated surrender terms. Ivan Rybkin, a hard-line communist, walked out of the building at precisely 5:20. “I remember that because a friend of mine asked me what time it was and then stopped to set his watch,” he said later. “I couldn’t believe it. We were right out there in the war zone, with sniper fire everywhere, and he stopped to wind his watch.” The rebels walked to waiting buses. Most were driven home. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were taken to prison, where they were granted smoking privileges,
Now Yeltsin must put the country back together. Elections are supposed to be held in December for a new Parliament. But it wasn’t clear how the upper house would be composed; so far Yeltsin had only scheduled elections for a lower chamber, the State Duma. It also had not been decided whether Yeltsin’s proposed new constitution, which calls for strong presidential rule, would be put to the legislature for ratification, or to a national referendum. Yeltsin has promised to hold presidential elections next June. Along the way, he will have to attempt a quick fix of the collapsing Russian economy. He will have to figure out how to reward the army for its support. Adviser Migranyan says recovery “will depend on how effectively Yeltsin can strengthen political institutions. The problem is that now there are none no political parties and no popular base for his policies. So the role of the armed forces will increase in society.”
Yeltsin will pay for his triumph as long as he remains in power, with concessions to the military and regional bosses who came to his aid at the key moment. He has often been described as a politician who thrives on crisis but then fritters away the advantage he has so dramatically gained. Now the victorious warrior will have to show that he can make peace work. He will have to resist the temptation to resort again to undemocratic methods–to become “Boris the Terrible,” as Dimitri Simes, an American expert on Russia, puts it. Most of all Yeltsin will have to demonstrate, for the first time in his career, that he can transform rhetoric into sound policy, and policy into solid accomplishment.
