It was clear that the deadlock between the president and parliament could not last for long. For many months, both Yeltsin and his opponents in parliament had been struggling for power. Yeltsin commented in his memoirs: “The goal I have set before the government is to make reform irreversible.” But that still remained a goal. In order to make it a reality, he must first remove the obstacle of the Congress. Plans were laid. He intended to occupy the White House on a Sunday when the building was empty and simply announce its dissolution. This element of surprise was foiled when news of the attack filtered through to the Congress. They took immediate steps to blockade themselves in the building, thus beginning the siege of the White House.
Even after the Yeltsin decree of 21 September 1993, the outcome of the struggle over the fate of parliament was not decided. Both sides appealed to the masses. Rutskoi even half-heartedly appealed for strikes. However, as every worker knows, to organise a strike it is not enough to issue an appeal. For two weeks, the deputies just sat in the White House, waiting for the masses to come to their aid. If, instead, they had sent representatives to the factories to rouse the workers, explaining concretely the meaning of Yeltsin’s programme and posing an alternative – even in a caricature Stalinist form – they would have got a response. But they were incapable of explaining the attack on workers’ rights posed by Yeltsin, limiting themselves to appeals to ‘defend the constitution’.
Unused to basing themselves on the masses, they were incapable of appealing in a concrete manner to the working class, and therefore they were incapable of arousing the masses to action, despite the existence of widespread discontent against Yeltsin. This helplessness was no accident. Both sides were terrified that an armed confrontation would spark off the intervention of the masses, with unpredictable consequences. In a situation of such a critical character, energetic and determined action is essential. However, the leaders of Congress showed themselves unprepared. They hesitated, displayed passivity, waited in the White House with no evident plan of action, until Yeltsin cut off the electricity, water and heat.
The real prevailing mood in the masses was ‘a plague on both your houses’, although that was beginning to change towards the end, with a section of the most active workers participating in the demonstrations outside the White House. This was one of the reasons which forced Yeltsin to make an armed assault on parliament. An indication of the hopelessly degenerate and corrupt nature of the bureaucracy was the fact that many of the deputies accepted Yeltsin’s bribe to leave the White House, in exchange for severance pay and being allowed to keep their government apartments! In the end, only about 100 of the ‘hard-liners’ remained.
Despite the inactivity of parliament, it is clear its support was beginning to increase – on the 3rd and 4th of October, tens of thousands of demonstrators broke through police lines to reach the White House. It is probable that Rutskoi and Khasbulatov mistook this for a movement of the masses, and decided to ‘go for broke’. As would-be insurrectionists, they made every mistake in the book. Having foreseen nothing and prepared nothing, they reacted passively to Yeltsin’s initial aggression, but finally panicked, and attempted to seize power without any plan or perspective. There followed the pathetic spectacle of Rutskoi’s frantic telephone calls, after the assault had begun, appealing for the support and intervention of Western ambassadors. This was like appealing to Satan against Beelzebub. The ambassadors of the imperialist powers, reflecting the policies of their governments, backed Yeltsin to the hilt.
Instead of organising a mass movement to overthrow Yeltsin, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov, in effect, attempted to stage a putsch, basing themselves on a minority. Even so, the weakness of Yeltsin’s position was shown by the fact that the rebels came close to succeeding. In the absence of a movement of the masses, the army becomes the key element in the equation at such moments. Yeltsin’s position remained extremely shaky up to the last minute. Yeltsin was in a state of panic. When the president called for troops to storm the parliament building, they remained passive. After the fall of Congress, it emerged that the army chiefs only decided to intervene to save Yeltsin at the very last moment.
This clearly shows the slender support Yeltsin had. The Congress leaders had important points of support in the armed forces, through the Union of Officers. Yet they failed to conduct agitation among junior officers – let alone the ordinary soldiers. They addressed their appeals to the army tops. Most of the generals stayed on the fence till the last moment, waiting to see who would win. Yeltsin could count on the support of only a small minority of hand-picked units. Even the support of these, as has been shown, was not firm. Yet, in the absence of mass participation, the action of a minority of the army and KGB was sufficient to tip the balance in Yeltsin’s favour.
The seriousness of the position was confirmed by Yeltsin himself. “To put it mildly,” he recalled in his memoirs, “the picture was dismal. The army, numbering two and a half million people, could not produce even a thousand soldiers; not even one regiment could be found to come to Moscow and defend the city.” (B. Yeltsin, op. cit., p. 276.) When he entered the meeting at the defence ministry, he recorded:
Overall, I must say the generals’ expressions were grim, and many had lowered their heads. They obviously understood the awkwardness of the situation: the lawful government hung by a thread but the army couldn’t defend it – some soldiers were picking potatoes and others didn’t feel like fighting. (Ibid., p. 277.)
Yeltsin also confirmed in his memoirs the difficulty of getting his elite troops to take control of the White House. He was forced to plead personally with its officers:
Deciding to take the bull by the horns, I barked, “Are you prepared to fulfil the president’s order?” In reply, there was only silence, a terrible, inexplicable silence coming from such an elite presidential military unit. I waited for a minute and no one uttered a word. I finally growled, “Then I’ll put it another way: are you refusing to obey the president’s order?” Again, the response was silence. I cast my eyes over all of them – they were strong, strapping, and handsome fellows. Without saying good-bye, I turned on my heels and strode toward the door, telling Barsukov and Zaitsev, Alpha’s commander, that the order must be obeyed. Subsequently, both Alpha and Vympel (the elite troops) refused to take part in the operation. (Ibid., p. 12.)
Even at the decisive moment, only a small number of ‘loyal’ troops participated in the crushing of parliament. The Daily Express (7/10/93) reported that:
Military chiefs were reluctant to obey orders to shoot at the parliament. The assault force was eventually cobbled together from the army, the interior ministry and sections of the KGB and police.
According to a report of bourgeois economist Alec Nove, only eight officers could be found to lead the assault, for a large amount of money, payable in dollars. Of these, two months later, two had already been killed and the other six were in hiding.
It is only natural that in his memoirs Yeltsin should try to portray himself as an energetic chief in complete command of the situation. But the truth was very different. As rebel forces seized the television centre, Yeltsin appeared to be paralysed. In the decisive moments of the attempted putsch, when the fate of this regime, and all Russia, was in the balance, Yeltsin disappeared. Western press reports describe him as in a state of panic, probably drunk and shouting incoherently at his staff. Hardly the picture of a brilliant conspirator, who succeeded in cornering his enemies by a far-sighted stratagem! For all his bluster and bravado, Yeltsin was always no more than an upstart and a political adventurer. Although equipped with a certain animal cunning, and capable at times of a degree of audacity (often intimately connected with the need to save his own skin), he was devoid of any real understanding or perspective.
The White House was taken and the leaders of the October coup, Khasbulatov, Rutskoi, Makashov and Achalov, were arrested. The deadlock between the two mutually antagonistic forces – the nascent mafia bourgeoisie represented by Yeltsin and the old nomenklatura represented by parliament – had been resolved by the former. The process of capitalist restoration had been given a new powerful stimulus. But even then, the victory of the Yeltsinites had still failed to provide a definitive solution.
Within a matter of a few months, the struggle broke out again with the election of the Duma. A further blow came when both the August 1991 coup-plotters and the leaders of the October 1993 parliamentary rebellion were amnestied without trial by parliament in February 1994. In a wry comment, Yeltsin said:
Now they have all been released, they write poetry, they take part in demonstrations, and they are elected to the state Duma, the new parliament. Their cells in Lefortovo Prison have now been occupied by other people, thereby proving that the power of democracy is, alas, unstable. (Yeltsin, op. cit., p. 102.)
This did not prevent this great ‘democrat’ from immediately banning opposition newspapers, suspending local councils, and outlawing opposition parties. This despite the fact that he already had complete control of the TV and radio. He also sacked regional governors and local councillors and suspended the Constitutional Court. There was not the slightest pretence at ‘democracy’. Yeltsin hoped to move further down the road of a Bonapartist dictatorship, with a pseudo-parliamentary facade. The Duma elections would simply provide him with a parliamentary fig-leaf.
However, the precarious position of Yeltsin was revealed by the elections of December 1993 which followed the crushing of parliament. His victory over parliament was supposed to have settled accounts. It was for this reason that the imperialist powers fell over themselves to support him. The Second International also added its voice to the chorus of support for Yeltsin, while making the obligatory nod in the direction of ‘democracy’.
Yeltsin regarded the new elections as a formality. His sidekick, Gaidar was already organising the victory celebrations. He aimed to get a decisive victory for the reformist parties in order to push through a rapid move towards capitalism. However, the reformist camp turned out to be hopelessly split and impotent – Gaidar, Yavlinsky, Sobchak, Popov and Shakhrai, all put themselves forward in different parties and blocs, each vociferously denouncing the others.
The imperialists were convinced that, after the crushing of the White House, the movement towards capitalism would be plain sailing. The dominant wing of the imperialists continued to press on with the same medicine. The organ of British finance capital, the Financial Times demanded “More shock, more therapy”. After the December 1993 election, it published an editorial entitled ‘No Turning Back for Russia’, demanding that the reform programme be maintained, irrespective of the social costs.