Khasbulatov declared Yeltsin’s decree ‘unconstitutional’ and called an emergency session of the parliament to impeach Yeltsin. On the day of the vote, tens of thousands of Muscovites came out on Red Square under Russian flags in support of Yeltsin. Gaidar and his father were at the forefront of the demonstration. On the other side of Red Square a much smaller, but more aggressive, crowd gathered under Soviet red flags. A few hours later, Yeltsin came out to his supporters to announce that the impeachment had failed.
Yeltsin’s popularity was confirmed a month later in a referendum that posed four questions. 1. Do you trust President Yeltsin? 2. Do you approve of his economic policies? 3. Do you consider it necessary to carry out early presidential elections? 4. Do you consider it necessary to hold early parliamentary elections? Television played a crucial role in mobilizing people to support Yeltsin. It ran a relentless advertising campaign in which ordinary people, pop stars and famous actors repeated the answers to the four questions like a chant: da, da, net, da (yes, yes, no, yes).
Just before the vote, the seventy-minutes-long Odin den’ iz zhizni prezidenta (A Day in the Life of the President) was aired – directed and presented by one of the country’s most popular film directors, Eldar Ryazanov – which showed Yeltsin in his intimate family circle. This was a sharp contrast to the image of Yeltsin on a tank in August 1991. Then he was a symbol of a revolution. Now he was a symbol of the peaceful, domesticated, normal life that people longed for and which was being jeopardized by the opposition.
The result of the referendum was better than anyone could have expected. Not only did 58.7 per cent say ‘yes’ to Yeltsin, but 53 per cent also said ‘yes’ to Gaidar’s reforms, despite the loss of savings and rising prices. However hard things were economically, nobody wished to go back to the past. Remarkably, however, Yeltsin failed to capitalize on his victory in the referendum to disband the parliament and to fire his mutinous vice-president. The struggle grew more vicious and personal.
The media resources of the opposition were more limited but not insignificant. Khasbulatov managed to get the state Russia Channel, which was formally under Russia’s Supreme Soviet, to put out the Parlamentskii chas (Parliamentary Hour) – a lengthy anti-Western and anti-Yeltsin diatribe which was broadcast at first weekly and then daily in a prime-time slot. Far more important, though, the nationalists had one of the most charismatic and popular TV showmen on their side: Alexander Nevzorov, who saw the unfolding drama as a continuation of his old battle with the liberals in Vilnius in 1991. By his own admission, Nevzorov experimented with ideas of fascism in Russia and turned his 600 Seconds into the mouthpiece of the red–brown coalition. Attempts to shut it down inevitably led to mass street protests by his fans.
Yeltsin also began to line up his weapons. At the beginning of August he gathered television executives and managers in his office. ‘We have to get ready for the decisive battle which will come in September. August has to be used for artillery preparations, including in the mass media,’ Yeltsin told them.44 He stopped short of revealing any concrete plans, other than to say, ‘We are studying the situation very carefully and are preparing different variants of action, but the action will come.’ A month later, Yeltsin told his aides to draft a decree to disband parliament. He visited an elite military unit, the Dzerzhinsky Division, where he combatively announced the return of Gaidar to the government. Military and television powers were equally important and were intertwined in the upcoming battle.
On 21 September Yeltsin again appeared on television. Collected, clear and charismatic, he made one of the most forceful speeches of his career: ‘Parliament has been seized by a group of persons who [are] pushing Russia towards the abyss. The security of Russia and its peoples is more important than formal obedience to contradictory norms created by the legislature. I must break this disastrous vicious circle… to defend Russia and the world from the catastrophic collapse of Russian statehood and of anarchy with the vast potential of nuclear arms.’ With this, Yeltsin said, he had signed decree number 1,400 dissolving the parliament and calling for early parliamentary elections and a referendum on the constitution.
‘It is a tragic and almost irreparable stupidity,’ Nevzorov dramatically stated in his programme that night, as the blinking clock in the corner counted down the seconds. ‘The usual way of life has been upset for months. Life will become even harder and even more anxious. People are already gathering to defend the White House [the seat of the parliament] and those who have come to realize that the past two years, since August 1991, were shameful and catastrophic… The opposition will not surrender it without a fight.’ The outlawed parliament ‘impeached’ Yeltsin and pronounced Alexander Rutskoi Russia’s president.
Within the next forty-eight hours, a motley crowd of Anpilov’s communists, nationalists and Cossacks started to gather at the White House. Rutskoi distributed firearms, kept inside the White House, among the ‘defenders’, many of whom had fought as mercenaries and regular soldiers on the periphery of the empire. They had started off in the Baltic republics, then moved to a bloody conflict in Moldova and most recently had taken part in a vicious war against Georgia on the side of separatist Abkhazia. They were attracted by the promise of armed action in the heart of Moscow. Among them was Nevzorov who was issued with every possible bit of paper by Rutskoi and Vladislav Achalov, a high-ranking Soviet military commander who had led the anti-Gorbachev coup in 1991 and was now appointed as defence minister by Rutskoi. The picture inside the White House did not inspire Nevzorov with confidence.
Whether Achalov or Rutskoi actually controlled any of the armed men inside the White House was very much in question. In the words of Sergei Parkhomenko, a young liberal journalist for Segodnya (Today) newspaper, the White House looked like a ‘partisan republic’, lacking discipline and cut off from communications. Achalov presided in a vast ministerial office, barricaded by old furniture and surrounded by a dozen telephones, none of which worked, so he had to borrow mobile phones from reporters. Rutskoi paraded a motley crew of 200 volunteers, including a short plump man in a rusty Second World War helmet, a thin unshaved one with a skiing pole for a rifle and an ‘intelligentsia type’ in a hat with a shopping bag in his hands. ‘It was clear that we were not going to get very far with these commanders,’ Nevzorov reflected.45
The only person who looked the part and impressed Nevzorov was Alexander Barkashov, the Hitler-praising leader of the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity who was called to the defence of the White House by Achalov. Barkashov refused to be lumped together with Anpilov’s communists, commanded a small but well-disciplined group of young men and women in black shirts with swastika-like signs who threw their arms up in a Nazi-style salute shouting ‘Hail Russia’. They did not think much of the porous police cordon that surrounded the White House. The cordon was supposed to stop the leakage of weapons in and out of the White House, but journalists like Parkhomenko, who wandered in and out of the place, were miffed by the seeming lack of coordination in its sealing-off.
‘The only logic that can be deduced from the actions of the police and security chiefs is that their goal is to pique, provoke and madden the armed rebels. If so, they’ve done a fine job,’ Parkhomenko wrote.46 Veronika Kutsyllo, a young reporter for Kommersant, who spent two weeks inside parliament, put in a call to Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Sergei Filatov. ‘You said you were not going to let people through, so don’t! You have put guards around the building but people are wandering to and fro! And anyway, how long are you going to wait? This crowd, in front of the White House – can’t you clear it? The crowd is growing bigger by the day – it is not going to dissipate. There are people with weapons in the crowd – and also inside…’47