What Really Happened in Moscow, October 1993
By Bill Dores, Workers World
Shortly after his tanks set Russia’s Parliament House ablaze, President Boris Yeltsin called up Bill Clinton. According to a White House spokesperson, Yeltsin “reassured” the U.S. president that “an obstacle to reform and democracy has been removed.”
Most of Russia’s elected legislators were in prison. Newspapers that disagreed with Yeltsin were banned. So were most of the country’s political parties. Hundreds of protesters had been shot; thousands were arrested. And Yeltsin was preparing to ban the Constitutional Court.
Clinton was pleased. Russia, he declared at a press conference, is “on the path to democracy.”
BEHIND THE HEADLINES
The corporate U.S. news media joined with Clinton in trying to justify Yeltsin’s Hitler-like measures. With little variation in language, their headlines and sound bites hailed this reign of terror as a “defense of democracy.” Time magazine called those opposed to Yeltsin “a drunken mob of hardliners.” The New York Times one-upped them with “a noxious crowd of thugs.”
It turns out on closer look that the “armed thugs” were tens of thousands of workers whose lives are being shattered by Yeltsin’s capitalist “reforms.” The proof of this can actually be found tucked away in the capitalist newspapers themselves.
For instance, there was Olga Yes kina, a 46-year-old engineer, who told New York Newsday (Sept. 26) she was there because: “Once a young person in our country could pick any road he chose. Once the elderly always had their own homes. Now we have lost all of this. The youth have lost their future, and the elderly have lost everything.”
Dmitri Dolgikh, an oil-field worker from Siberia, flew to Moscow to demonstrate against Yeltsin. Interviewed in his hospital bed after being shot by Yeltsin’s troops, Dolgikh told the Washington Post (Oct. 6): “I’m against capitalism now that I’ve seen it.”
Russia’s elected Parliament wouldn’t agree to Yeltsin’s plans to rapidly turn state-owned industry over to Western investors. So Yeltsin “abolished” the Parliament. He cut off Parliament House’s heat, water and electricity and surrounded it with troops. When thousands of workers, many of them elderly retirees, protested Yeltsin’s actions, they were brutally assaulted by the real armed thugs—the OMON riot police.
EARLIER BLOODY CLASHES
Writing in the Oct. 10 European, Moscow-based reporter Vitali Vitaliev said, “For some reason the clashes of Yeltsin’s OMON with the still peaceful anti-Yeltsin protesters in Moscow on Sept. 30 [three days before the events at the White House] went largely unreported in the West. The scuffles were at the Barrikadnaya and Pushkinskaya metro stations, quite a distance from Parliament House.”
Describing live reports on Moscow radio, Vitaliev told how “OMON daredevils were picking up the weakest and oldest in the crowd and beating them up. ‘What are they doing?’ the reporter was screaming. ‘An OMON thug has just rushed at an elderly woman on the escalator and broken her leg!’ The chairman of the Cheryomushkinsky district council, who was passing, was pushed to the ground and kicked unconscious by OMON men.”
On Oct. 3, after days of such outrages, tens of thousands of workers armed only with sticks responded to a call by Labor Russia and other communist organizations and marched on the Parliament building. They put Yeltsin’s goons to flight. They then marched to the central TV station, which had barred anti-Yeltsin views, and demanded to be allowed on the air. Yeltsin’s forces opened fire on the marchers, killing dozens.
Said oil worker Dolgikh, “When we were across the street, the shooting started. I thought they were shooting in the air, but it was at the people. In the first volley I was hit. The bullet penetrated my intestines.”
The massacre at the TV tower began a reign of terror. Early on Oct.4 Yeltsin’s tanks opened fire on Parliament House. They kept firing for hours, although the legislators ordered their meagerly armed defenders not to shoot back. The Oct. 5 Moscow Tribunes, English-language pro-Yeltsin daily, reported that Yeltsin’s troops were shooting “in all directions” and that a number of civilians were hit.
Russia’s largest newspaper, the pro-Yeltsin daily Izvestia, admitted in an Oct. 6 headline, “Troops Near the White House Shot Everything That Moved.” At least 190 people were killed, almost all of them anti-Yeltsin protesters. Some 1,500 arrested anti-Yeltsin protesters “underwent ‘filtration’ on the field of Malaya Sports Arena,” the European reported. The majority of Moscow’s City Council was arrested.
During the next few days the Yeltsin regime banned Pravda, Sovietskaya Rossiya, Molnya and other opposition newspapers. It banned Russia’s largest political party, the 600,000-member Communist Party of the Russian Federation, along with the Russian Communist Workers Party, Labor Russia, the Union of Communist Parties of the Soviet Union, the National Salvation Front and parliamentary leader Aleksandr Rutskoi’s Party of Free Russia.
FASCIST-STYLE WITCHHUNT
A witch-hunt was launched in the search for opposition leaders, especially Victor Anpilov of Labor Russia and the Russian Communist Workers Party. Anpilov was arrested near Tula on Oct. 7. Charges against the parliamentary and working-class leaders are pending, and will probably be serious.
Clinton, Yeltsin and the bankers and businessmen behind them may hope that by crushing Parliament they have cleared the way for the wholesale takeover of Russia by U.S. corporations. But there is a much bigger obstacle in their way: Russia’s multinational working class. And it is just beginning to fight.
In its article on Dolgikh, the Washington Post wrote, “The battle in Moscow’s streets this week was won by Yeltsin and his army. But if Dolgikh is any indication, the vanquished may rise again to fight another day.
“‘I don’t think this was a fatal blow’ to the anti-Yeltsin forces, he said of the battle at the Parliament building. He said that as soon as bread prices rise, which is expected to occur in the coming weeks, the anti-Yeltsin forces will see their numbers multiply.”
