Witness to Yeltsin's coup.

• Author: Kagarlitsky, Boris
• Position: Boris Yeltsin; Parliament siege of Sept.-Oct. 1993

On Sunday, October 3, I was visiting my family at our summer house outside Moscow. When I returned to the city at about 8:00 P.M., shots were being fired around the Ostankino television station. Channels 1 and 4 were off the air, and channel 2 was showing images of flowers. I found the building of the Krasnopresnensky District Soviet, which had been the meeting place for deputies of the Russian Parliament and Moscow City Soviet, virtually deserted.

With Vladimir Kondratov, a Moscow deputy, and Alexander Segal, the press secretary of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, I set out for the Russian Parliament building, the "White House," hoping that we might learn something there about what was going on. Downtown Moscow presented a bizarre sight. A crowd of unarmed people milled around the Parliament building, discussing the latest news. Suddenly, trucks full of agitated people appeared out of nowhere, demanding arms. They told of dozens killed and wounded at Ostankino, and asked for help. Obtaining neither arms nor help, they drove away again.

The White House itself was in incredible disarray. There was no electricity, no light. Elevators were not running. When we climbed the stairs to an upper floor, we encountered General Albert Makashov, who later would be labeled by Boris Yeltsin's official press as one of the chief instigators of the "carefully planned and prepared mutiny." The general was running down a corridor, buttoning his bullet-proof vest and shouting, "I've got no arms! I've got no men! There will be no help! Go and establish Soviet power by yourselves!"

To be fair about it, I should mention that similar confusion prevailed at Yeltsin's headquarters in the Kremlin. Sergey Parkhomenko, a correspondent for the pro-government newspaper Segodnia (Today) who was in the Kremlin that evening, found members of the government in a state of panic. Yeltsin was not at all in control; he kept asking those around him what was happening. As Parkhomenko wrote, it looked like a mad-house. However, after a little while the gray eminences of the Yeltsin regime, Gennady Burbulis and Mikhail Poltoranin, arrived at the Kremlin and took charge. They quickly restored order among the distracted members of the government. It seemed clear that these two were the real authors of the script of the "decisive battle" of October 3 and 4 - the very script that was now being played out in all its glory. It was a script that held a small, unpleasant role for me.

When they elected their new parliament in the spring of 1990, the citizens of Russia believed they were laying the foundation for democratic reforms. And the newly elected deputies, when they chose Yeltsin to be chairman of the Supreme Soviet, regarded him as capable of consolidating the country and securing a smooth and painless transition to a new society. The following three years of hopes, illusions, disappointments, and conflicts resulted in the bloodbath of October 4, when tanks, acting on Yeltsin's orders, fired at the very parliament that had brought him to power.

These events, however tragic, were not unexpected. Yeltsin had never concealed his striving for absolute power and his scorn for the constitution he had sworn to uphold. The economic reforms he had proclaimed in Russia were, from the very beginning, incompatible with democracy. Having borrowed the economic theories of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet and his Argentine and Uruguayan colleagues, Russian reformers were bound to follow their political methods as well.

The new class of Russian nouveau riche, which sprang up like mushrooms after a rain, quickly gained control of all the levers of economic and political power. Former Communist apparatchiks joined forces with corrupted officials, mafia bosses, and young wheeler-dealers. They were interested only in dollars. During two years of "reforms," they made their fortunes from the takeover of state property and its sellout to foreign companies, without investing a single cent in Russian industry.

The drain of capital into developed Western countries turned into a national disaster. Exchange bureaus dealing in dollars, expensive stores, and fashionable restaurants popped up on every corner. At the same time, industry collapsed, modern technological research stopped, publishing houses closed, and university scientific programs were canceled.

Members of the new ruling class had no respect for the people of their own country, seeing in them only material for their machinations. The liberal culture of this lumpen-bourgeoisie consisted of demands for absolute free trade and of belief in the effectiveness of absolute corruption. The conspicuously luxurious lifestyle of the new rich against the background of the catastrophic pauperization of the masses was a sort of challenge: The "plebeians"...