Moscow Coup, 1993, by Yaroslav Leontyev and Peter Ryabov
From MemoryArchive
Who: Yaroslav Leontyev What: Moscow Coup (1993) When: 1993 Where: Moscow, Russia
Moscow in early October 1993 was the scene of a bloody showdown between the authoritarian pro-Western President Boris Yeltsin and his opponents in the Russian parliament, a large section of whom were national-Bolsheviks. In September 1993 President Yeltsin had issued a special decree on presidential rule and the use of a referendum to gain approval for his policies. This was publicly opposed by Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi. When Rutskoi refused to submit his resignation at Yeltsin's request, Yeltsin stripped him of all of his vice-presidential powers. Protests by the Russian parliament and the Chair of the Constitutional Court failed to reinstate Rutskoi's powers although he retained the title of Vice-President. Yeltsin removed Rutskoi as Vice-President on charges of corruption, an action opposed by the parliament. Yeltsin then issued a decree dissolving parliament, which responded by declaring Rutskoi President. Many deputies obeyed Yeltsin's order to disband, but about 100 deputies and several hundred armed supporters led by Rutskoi and speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov occupied the parliament building, also known as the White House. A tense stalemate ensued between government and rebel forces and lasted for several days. It was broken when rebel supporters staged an attack on the mayor's building and Moscow's main television complex. The government responded by shelling the White House and putting down suppressing the rebels. It is estimated that over a hundred people were killed.
A meeting of anarchists and non-Stalinist leftists in Moscow on 1st October 1993 agreed to set up a volunteer medical brigade. During the next four days members of the Volunteer Medical Brigade went about their work, often under fire, in places where the rebels and government troops clashed. This provides a perfect example of constructive self-organization, which is all the more impressive because it emerged in a situation which, from an anarchist point of view, was far from being positive and empowering. It puts a human face to a historical event which is otherwise too easily obscured by the big names and parties.
Yaroslav Leontyev: On 28th September 1993 I went along to a meeting of critically-minded scientists, artists and intellectuals which had been called by deputies of the Moscow City Council and the economics professor A.V. Buzgalin. The speakers expressed their apprehension at the danger of civil war, and in particular the words of Nikolai Gubenko stuck in my mind. The speakers were very mixed, but the general mood could have been summed up in the words of Tolstoy and Korolenko* - "I cannot be silent!" At the meeting I also met the anarchist Damier, members of the Party of Labour, and other people I knew. We arranged to meet again in three days time...
The meeting was held on 1st October in the Dzerzhinski district council building. The opinion which prevailed at the meeting was that the interests of the President and the parliament were alien to socialists and anarchists, but in view of the impending confrontation we were prepared to take a clear non-military stance, the essence of which was to emphasize peace-making. When people later asked us in the Medical Brigade: "Who are you for, the 'Whites' or the 'Reds'?", we answered that we were for the wounded. At the meeting on 1st October none of us could have imagined what carnage was to come...
At the meeting we decided to set up a volunteer medical brigade. As soon as the meeting finished I set off to "Memorial"*2. As it turned out, I arrived there just in time for a meeting of the Legal Rights' Center. I told the members there about our newly founded Volunteer Medical Brigade and the idea met with approval from most of those present.
The next day, Saturday 2nd October, I met up with three other members of the new Medical Brigade near the metro station "Barrikadnaya". The others were Dima Lozovan, Sasha Rzhavskov and Sasha Maysuryan, a member of the alternative Democratic Union. We headed off to the Krasnaya Presnya district council building. There we found out about clashes that had occurred between the OMON riot police and demonstrators at Smolensk Square. We then went to the Garden Ring road*3 - barricades had been erected, and we started setting up our first aid post there. At the moment we were joined by our comrades Peter Ryabov and Olga T., a librarian from the Institute of History.
Peter Ryabov: At three in the afternoon on 2nd October I came out of the metro station "Smolenskaya" and saw several hundred people busily building five barricades on a narrow section of the Garden Ring road - between two cordons of riot police with shields and helmets who were partitioning the road. People who had been there since the morning explained how around noon two mass-meetings of supporters of the Supreme Soviet had been brutally dispersed by the OMON, during which one person had been killed. In response, a hail of stones had descended on the OMON and the barricades had been erected on the road. A significant part of the barricades was made of wooden crates which the rebel supporters had set on fire. Thick clouds of black smoke and tongues of fire rose into the sky and certainly were visible from afar. The weather was splendid, and there was an unusual absence of cars. Silently and sternly the demonstrators dragged more and more objects up to the burning barricades.
"Throw more crates and shelves onto the fire!" one of the rebel supporters said, and added with almost superstitious respect: "Our deputies in the besieged Supreme Soviet will see the fire".
There was no pogrom, rampage, or smashed shop windows - it seems the rebels had only smashed up one American boutique at the entrance to Arbat Street where a rally of over 2,000 people was now taking place. Familiar faces came up to speak at the microphone - Anpilov*4 and Konstantinov. Later, towards evening, there was loud singing of Talkov*5 songs. But on the whole things were fairly quiet - the atmosphere of hysterical schizophrenia which usually prevailed at rallies of the nationalist movements "Democratic Russia" and "Workers' Russia" was absent. Hundreds of people were doing their best to drag iron lattice work, metal pipes and wooden boards out onto the road. They worked briskly but calmly; hardly anyone was drunk. The rebels worked in a well-coordinated and orderly way although no groups of armed national-Bolshevik fighters were to be seen, nor any obvious leaders. The rebels were laconic, as if they were prepared to fight to the bitter end - probably a result of the week of hard clashes with the police and OMON. Although I didn't feel any great attachment to these people at the barricades, I did feel a certain respect for them - in all the years since perestroika I don't think I'd come across any other political event where there was such an air of genuine, serious intent.
Around half past four my comrades from the Medical Brigade arrived, and all together we started organizing our first aid post there. We basically had to start from scratch. None of us had even basic medical training (except for Olga who had studied medicine at the Pedagogical Institute) - there were no doctors among us, no medicines... But very soon the situation improved unexpectedly. Several new comrades came along to join the Medical Brigade that evening, including someone who had at least rudimentary knowledge of medicine, albeit from the forensic side: the lawyer Stas Markelov. People who lived or worked nearby started donating medicine and money for our improvised first aid post. Then we arranged to get water. Dmitri Lozovan was sent off to all the chemists' in the area and came back with dressings and pure alcohol. We raised a white flag with a red cross at our improvised stand, we also put on self-made armbands to show we were from the Medical Brigade. Then we set about carrying water and fuel for a fire and arranging benches for people to sit on. We agreed that Yaroslav Leontyev be the nominal head of the Medical Brigade. We got our fire going and worked out how to withdraw if we found ourselves in the middle of a hot spot.
Alexander Maysuryan got through the police cordon and went up to the ambulances which were parked behind it. He wanted to talk with the medics about cooperation in case things escalated; but strangely the people in the ambulances had police uniforms on beneath their doctor's smocks... "Are you just going to help injured OMON members, or also civilians?" Alexander asked them. They assured him that, if worst came to worst, they would offer medical assistance to both sides. Fortunately, that evening we didn't have to see in practice whether this was truly the case.
The Medical Brigade finally took shape on the Saturday evening when it was joined by the left-wing social-democrat Stas Markelov, the anarchists Nick and Head, Dima T., a student from technical college, and Grisha Vorobyov, a member of the Democratic Union. The next morning the Medical Brigade was given its name: the Maximilian Voloshin Medical Brigade. Maximilian Voloshin was a hermit from the Crimean village of Koktebel who during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) helped the Whites and the Reds in turn. There were people of different persuasions in our Medical Brigade - anarchists, members of the Democratic Union, social democrats, supporters of self-management, "Memorial" members, proponents of extra-parliamentary opposition. All of us refused to support either of the two sides currently struggling for power but didn't want to stand aside passively in view of the intestine strife which was brewing. On the Sunday morning the Medical Brigade was joined by Volodya Savelyev, a member of the Party of Labour, and the anarchist Vadim Damier. Several hours later a range of other people joined, among them Ira F. from the Communist youth organization, the non-party medical assistant Zhenya K. who lived outside of Moscow, the paramedics Aleksey Tavrizov and Sasha Sokolov from the "Memorial" Legal Rights' Center, two paramedics who weren't politically motivated at all, Sergey G. Andrey E.. One of the people who sporadically joined in the work of the Medical Brigade was a pro-Yeltsin doctor who was disgusted at her hero's methods and had now become a staunch Rutskoi supporter. The Medical Brigade was also very mixed in terms of its ethnic composition - Russians, Armenians, Jews and others - and a wide range of ages was represented, from sixteen upwards. Another interesting detail is that about half the members of the Medical Brigade had defended the White House in Moscow in August 1991 - Sasha Sokolov had been in charge of a team of paramedics, Yaroslav Leontyev had been on telephone duty in the White House itself, and Peter Ryabov, Nick Shironin, Markelov and Lozovan had protected on the barricades.
This time most of the members of the Medical Brigade were in good spirits. They expected a fight with the OMON, a baton charge or two, some water-cannon, and perhaps a whiff of 'cheremukha' tear gas, but no-one in their worst dreams could have imagined how much blood was to be shed in Moscow. No-one expected the use of automatic weapons and tanks... A mass-meeting with the humble title "Council of the Peoples of the Soviet Union" was scheduled for the Sunday afternoon.
Peter Ryabov: As I was going up the escalator out of the metro station "Tverskaya" on Sunday 3rd October and holding the rolled-up flag of the Medical Brigade a man came up to me and said encouragingly: "Good on you! You've got to fight for the future!" I realized there had been a misunderstanding. I replied that I wasn't a rebel supporter at all, but rather a member of a medical brigade which offers assistance to victims of the conflict. This didn't put the fellow off. With a weightily ring to his voice he continued: "There are different ways to contribute to the struggle, but we all have the same goal - ...". He paused for a second and then added: "... to crush the Jews!"
"Crushing the Jews" certainly wasn't what I was on about and, scorning his appeal, I made my way to the Medical Brigade's meeting point at the City Council building. There were about a dozen of us and we moved off to October Square. There we saw endless rows of police in bullet-proof vests equipped with helmets, shields and batons. Soon we heard the yells of demonstrators. A large demonstration came up against the solid police cordon. It slowed down for an instant, hesitated, and then it changed direction and gradually started moving off towards the Crimean Bridge. Possibly the authorities had expected and encouraged this course of events - there was only a thin police cordon lining this route. In the huge demonstration there were somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 people. No rebel fighters were to be seen and there was very little in the way of weapons or projectiles. The demonstrators were in good spirits, singing songs, holding placards and flags, mainly red. We didn't particularly want to mix with the demonstrators, so the Medical Brigade followed the demonstration along parallel side streets leading to the Exhibition Hall on Krymsky Val. From there we saw a short battle that ensued on the bridge. A disordered group of frightened police clustered around the ladder at the side of the bridge and hurriedly slid away down it to the massed jeers of the demonstrators. Dozens of huge riot-police shields were thrown from the bridge into the water which was covered with floating autumn leaves. There was a loud bang, probably a round of 'cheremukha' tear gas being fired, but it was quickly dispersed by the breeze. The demonstration moved off again, and we, struck by what we had just seen, ran up to the stunned demonstrators and no less stunned police gathered around the bridge. Stas quickly went up to a police major who had lost consciousness and revived him. Olga bandaged an old woman who had a bad cut on her hand.
Since we had gone up to the bridge we fell quite a way behind the main body of the demonstration and didn't see the ensuing clashes on the Garden Ring road. When we set off following it again we just saw the trail it had left along its way to the White House. At one spot there was a smashed-up bus with broken windows and oil dripping from the engine; at another spot demonstrators were unloading riot-police shields from a badly-dented police car; and then a man came up to us choking from 'cheremukha' tear gas (the police had fired it into the demonstration twice more - again with very little effect). We came across a thick layer of foam on the road where a fire-engine had been smashed up. At one point Yaroslav Leontyev helped prevent the lynching of several police officers. At one spot we found a man dead, he had a hole in his head. What was going in? Was this an uprising? A revolution? A pogrom? An act of provocation by the authorities so as to justify a clamp-down? Neither we, nor the rebel supporters, nor the police really understood what was going on. Stunned by what we had seen, we ran to catch up with the main body of the demonstration which was proceeding to seize the White House.
When we reached the vicinity of the mayor's building the ring of the blockade had already been broken and there was no more shooting, but there were already victims of the fighting, and the ambulances which were there were evidently in no hurry to help the wounded rebel supporters. We quickly set up our first aid post at the trolley-bus stop opposite the mayor's building - we dragged up benches and laid out dressings. Yaroslav and I set off to get water which we needed for drinking, for washing our hands, and for bandaging. We went to the entrances of a residential building and rang one doorbell after another. "We're from a volunteer medical brigade. Will you let us in to get some water for our first aid post?" But the residents didn't want to help, evidently they were paralyzed by fear at what they heard and hid behind the safety of their doors. In the back part of the building we finally found an old man washing his car. He quickly grasped the situation, filled us up a canister and some bottles with the help of his neighbour, and soon we were laden with water and on our way back to the first aid post. And then the unexpected happened: shots rang out. First it was individual shots, then increasingly heavy salvoes of gunfire. It came so abruptly and was quite terrifying. This was no baton-charge by the OMON - now the air was full of bullets and we couldn't tell where they were coming from. We dashed up to our comrades, going in stages, and then together with them, bending over low and squatting, we slid down into the gully below the building and set up the first aid post again there. The shooting would die down for a moment and then start up again. We saw a whole mass of OMON troops and policemen smash through the metal blinds and out of the ground-floor windows of the mayor's building and run away towards Kalininsky Prospekt.
We helped the wounded. Olga, Stas, and the medical assistant-cum-student Zhenya, who had joined us along the way to the mayor's building, gave them first aid. One of the wounded had a broken arm, another had been hit in the leg. From the window of a nearby apartment people yelled to us that someone had been brought to them with a head wound - either from a splinter or a lump of falling plaster. All this was unreal, frightening, staggering - this wasn't the cinema, not a book, not a dream, but the streets of Moscow, today, 3rd October, a sunny autumn Sunday. Shooting, casualties, blood!
