While Nevzorov took the side of the opposition, the liberal journalists obviously took the side of the Kremlin. Those who were inside the White House, like Kutsyllo and Parkhomenko, acted almost like undercover agents on enemy territory. ‘There was no distance or etiquette between the Kremlin and the liberal journalists at the time. We got too close to each other,’ Sergei Parkhomenko recalled a decade later.48 At some point Parkhomenko got so close to the Kremlin that he was able to impersonate its chief of staff.
As Parkhomenko walked into the Kremlin, he was struck by the atmosphere of utter confusion that reigned there. ‘Kremlin officials seemed to have lost control over the situation in the country: aides were arguing with one another but nobody had any information or idea of what to do next,’ he recalled. Parkhomenko asked one of the aides about the strength of the Kremlin’s defences. The aide had no idea and irritatingly told him to find out for himself. Parkhomenko walked into Filatov’s empty office and called the Kremlin’s chief of security, asking him how many people were guarding the Kremlin in case of an attack by the rebels. ‘Where are you calling from?’ the security chief asked. ‘Filatov’s office,’ Parkhomenko replied. ‘Two battalions… do you think I should ask for reinforcements?’ ‘Go ahead,’ Parkhomenko replied.49
‘I don’t know and may never know what played a greater part in the events of 3–4 October: confusion of the authorities or cynical calculations,’ Kutsyllo wrote in the introduction to her published diary. ‘Both sides needed blood: the parliament side – because it hoped that after the blood of at least some peaceful civilians, the people and part of the army would come to the defence of the constitution; the president – because only the blood of the same peaceful citizens could justify the storming of the White House.’50
Few people in Moscow during those days cared about the lawfulness of Yeltsin’s decision to disband the parliament. (In fact, most events that occurred at the time of the Soviet collapse were dictated by the logic of a revolution rather than legal procedure.) As Maxim Sokolov wrote in Kommersant, what mattered to the ordinary man was which side posed the biggest threat to his own safety and the security of his family. In October 1993, the threat of chaos and violence clearly emanated from the White House. And if there was one thing that Yeltsin was blamed for, it was his slow response in dealing with those who terrorized the city during the next few days.
On 2 October an anti-Yeltsin crowd led by Anpilov clashed with the police in the centre of Moscow, throwing Molotov cocktails and wielding metal rods at them. The following morning Anpilov’s mob, numbering some 4,000 people, gathered in October Square, which was dominated by a vast statue of Lenin. The mob easily broke a police chain and marched towards the White House, carrying red flags and portraits of Stalin. Kutsyllo watched in astonishment as the swelling crowd approached the parliament building: ‘Nobody tried stopping them.’51
The riot police around the White House retreated. ‘Either I don’t understand something, or they are fleeing,’ Kutsyllo wrote. This caused jubilation among the rebels in the White House. Rutskoi emerged from the White House and addressed the crowd: ‘We have won! Thank you, dear Muscovites! Men, form fighting detachments! Keep the momentum, forward, to the mayor’s office!’ Minutes later, two trucks barged through the windows of the mayor’s office next to the White House.
The main target of the rebels, however, was not the government buildings, but the television centre. ‘We need [television] air waves,’ Rutskoi declared. The fighters climbed onto the trucks left by the police and drove at high speed along the empty Moscow streets to Ostankino. As Gaidar wrote, ‘The opposition had made an apt choice for its first strike. Its leaders had rightly assessed the potential of television, in this case the most powerful medium for influencing the situation. For as long as Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and their allies were off air, they were rebels and outlaws shouting their slogans in a megaphone whom no military would support. But as soon as they were on air, they were the power in the country.’52 ‘To “take” the Kremlin you must “take” television,’ Alexander Yakovlev said a year later.53
The attack on Ostankino was led by Anpilov and Makashov, a virulent military commander who intended to clear it of ‘Yids’ and give the air waves to the ‘legitimate president’ Rutskoi. The television centre was defended from the inside by thirty or forty soldiers from the Vityaz unit, part of the Dzerzhinsky Division, usually deployed for putting down prison mutinies. Anpilov tried to talk them into laying down their arms, and even succeeded partly, but after the rebels rammed the glass building with trucks and fired a grenade launcher decapitating one of the soldiers inside, the Vityaz soldiers opened fire. Soon a fierce fight raged around Ostankino; tracer bullets cut through the night sky, people ducked and scrambled for the bushes. Within seconds several dozen people, including journalists and onlookers who were caught in the crossfire, were dead.
Just before 7.30 p.m., in the middle of a football match, Channel One, as well as all other channels broadcasting from the Ostankino television centre, went off the air. Television screens had never gone blank in the Soviet Union – not even during the August 1991 coup. One of television’s key functions was to show that life just carried on. A sudden blackout on television was a sign of catastrophe and chaos, the collapse of the state.
In fact, there was no reason to stop broadcasting. A plan had been worked out in advance to ensure that the rebels could not transmit from the studio even if they broke into the television centre. Moreover, the actual broadcasting was carried out from a building across the road, which was not under fire. News could have been broadcast from a reserve studio, even if the main ones were damaged. As one of the strategic objects in the Soviet Union, television had several reserve broadcasting facilities, including one that could withstand a nuclear explosion. The idea to switch off the signal belonged to Bragin, the head of Ostankino, who erroneously claimed that rebels were inside, working their way towards the television studios. In fact, Bragin himself was in a different building.
Bruce Clark, the author of An Empire’s New Clothes,54 a perceptive and detailed book about those events, argues that the bloodshed in Ostankino as well as the clashes before the White House were not so much, or at least not only, the result of confusion but part of Yeltsin’s plan to draw the rebels deeper into the fight and give them a false sense of victory so that they could be dealt with once and for all. Whether or not this was the intention, the television blackout certainly had that effect. Inside the White House parliamentarians started to celebrate victory. Khasbulatov spoke calmly: ‘I think that today we must take the Kremlin… Ostankino has been captured. City Hall has been captured. We need to develop a strategy – to complete the victory.’
One reason the attack on Ostankino failed, Nevzorov reflected later, was that it was led by Anpilov and Makashov who were ‘as “red” in their views as a flame in hell’. ‘They carried statuettes of Lenin in their hearts and spoke in party slogans, which nobody wanted to hear,’ he said. Nevzorov himself was not at Ostankino. ‘A few hours earlier I was stopped on the approach to Moscow as I led a few dozen armed men who had fought in Vilnius in 1991 to the defence of the White House.’ His ‘detention’ was most probably staged. As Nevzorov recalled twenty years later, ‘There was a good reason why I did not go to Ostankino that night, even though I knew about the plan to storm it well in advance.’55