The Georgian historian, C.G. Kodadze, described that first morning from the point of view of the Gulag Regiments.
In my regiment, and I imagine in most others, too, we had experienced several distinct changes in mood since setting off from the camp at Pavlovsky. To this day I believe that the original intentions of the men were simply to return home. There was this fierce underlying suspicion of the authorities’ intentions, and there is no doubt that the regiments were prepared to fight rather than return to Siberia.
But until that first attack upon us by the militia unit at Balashiki I don’t believe any of the regiments, except perhaps the Latvians and Estonians, whose bitterness exceeded all others, in any way intended what followed.
During that first night, from Balashiki to the Moscow Ring Road, we were attacked incessantly by militia units using gas and even mortars. And all the rage and desperation of the last years of camp life exploded within us. The Baltic Regiments, as so often, acted first. It was they who set up the first battery of German 88 guns in Ismaylovsky Park and began to shell the city. After that battery was attacked and destroyed by Soviet fighter planes, the Balts located the other guns among apartment blocks and warehouses, where it was impossible to strike at them from the air. In their furious determination to inflict as much damage on the Russian capital as possible the Baltic gunners fired throughout the next morning and early afternoon until the last shell was spent.
But by then the armament of the other Gulag Regiments had received the addition of captured militia mortars and gun-carrying personnel vehicles, and in every street in the Reutov District where my unit, the 5th (Georgian) Gulag Regiment was fighting, you could see a mortar team shelling the militia units to our front.
Probably very few among us stopped to ask ourselves why regular Soviet Army units were not being used by the authorities, but at that time we had no knowledge of the Armed Forces’ reinforcement problems nor indeed of the widespread rebellion against the mobilization order in our hometowns. We did know, however, that a unit of an Azerbaijanian National Division had been marched up from south Moscow but had refused to join the battle when it saw that it was expected to fight other Azerbaijanians.
We had no commander, or command organization. But there is no doubt that the ferocious hatred of the Balts spearheaded the attack on the capital, and in that sense most of the Gulag Regiments were indeed following a single objective…
And now a new element began to enter the situation. In the eastern suburbs through which the Gulag Regiments had already passed, those people who had remained in their homes began to emerge. At Balashiki, which had seen the first clash, the streets were littered with smoking hulks of vehicles, shop windows were shattered, warehouses burning. Most important of all, there was no visible authority, no militia. At first the people of the district drifted through the streets. Some, furtively, began to rob the bodies of militiamen shot down in the alleys. Then bolder spirits entered wrecked Party offices and began carrying out television sets and the contents of well-stocked canteen refrigerators. The Balashiki Party special store, unknown all these years to the people in the district, was discovered and looted before being burned. It was here in Balashiki that the first Party members were hanged.
Kuntsevo, in the so far unaffected west of the city, the scene of the disturbances on the day of President Romanovsky’s funeral, woke that morning to find that the local militia had been drafted into the clashes in the east suburbs. Within hours the old pattern reasserted itself. Street fires were built and food and vodka brought out. Pianos were carried into the cold morning air and dancing began beneath the squalid stilted blocks of flats. Arguments and fights became frequent as the vodka flowed. By midmorning the first Party offices had been ransacked. By the afternoon the militia headquarters was on fire and fuel tanks were exploding in the blazing bus station.
In others of the new districts, too, the smoke pall which hung over the center of the city, the rolling sound of heavy gunfire and the virtual absence of militia forces began to infect the populace. Urban peasants that many of them still were, they began to march on Party offices to drag out filing cases and hack them open and burn their contents. Like the peasantry of the French Revolution they had an atavistic dread of the contractual power of the written word.
By now the ferment in the Soviet Union was matched by a ferment in the West. To accounts of the international crises of the Soviet Union in Transylvania and the Chinese border were added press stories of rioting around the Moscow main stations and the towns of the north. Reports now flowing in from the capitals of the Central Asian and Transcaucasian autonomous republics described massive demonstrations to welcome home returning members of the Penal Brigades. In some cases unconfirmed reports from the southern autonomous republics spoke of fighting breaking out between Russian regular Army units and formations of the National Divisions.
Great shuddering shocks were passing through the Soviet Union. The world looked on in trepidation. There were even rumors that Semyon Kuba had been arrested by the Army.
Then on the morning of December 21st, in a special appeal to the United Nations, Mikoyan’s Armenia declared its independence. Former First Secretary Mikoyan announced that he had agreed to a request to form a provisional government.
Within three hours a similar announcement was made from Tbilisi, the capital of the Georgian S.S.R. During the day, Azerbaijan and all four Central Asian Republics east of the Caspian followed suit. Only Kazakhstan, with its nearly fifty percent Russian population and its huge common border with the Russian Federal Republic, remained silent.
The Ukrainian delegate to the United Nations in his first act independent of the Soviet Union called for an emergency session. From governments throughout the world came floods of condemnation or approval. Cuban and Vietnamese radio stations ran hours of confused abuse of the declarations of independence. Chile recognized all new states immediately, as did much of South America. The United States consulted with its European allies and announced that no decisions had been taken in view of the uncertainties in the southern autonomous republics of the Soviet Union. The very use of the old title implied a cautious refusal to recognize the new Transcaucasian and Central Asian Federations formed within nine hours of Mikoyan’s first announcement.
Chapter Forty-Six
In the late afternoon Bubo’s mounted units fell upon the northern suburbs of Moscow with the fury of the Tatar horde. They had no plan, no object but to loot and pillage and destroy. Throughout the afternoon around the Kazan Station and across the Sardovoye Koltso clattering hooves pursued screaming citizens. Men were torn from official buildings and shot in lines on the sidewalk; vehicles were burned; no one in uniform escaped the noose hanging from a lamp-bracket or a street sign.
Beyond revenge, Bubo saw a massive act of provocation, an invitation to the workers of Moscow to rise against his own Huns and against the system which had first created them and then failed to protect Moscow from their vengeance.
His hatred was no longer containable. It was a hatred of the Soviets, of the Russians and of all those who had remained silent while the prison trains rattled through their lives, and, once safely out of sight, began again to excuse the failings and praise the achievements of a system which had brought unequaled misery to mankind.
All afternoon he fought, urged his horsemen on. Joined by great mobs of unarmed penals they burned this northeast corner of the hated city into an inferno of collapsing buildings.