While Nevzorov was always in the mood for a bloody spectacle – a coup, a revolution, or a full-out war – as a professional television man he could also see the limitations of the material he was dealing with. Anpilov did not look like Che Guevara or Fidel Castro. ‘He looked like a guest from Soviet folklore who prompted immediate questions about whether Soviet people suffer from excessive drinking. The answer was certainly yes,’ said Nevzorov.56
Anpilov bore an uncanny resemblance to the main character from a popular television adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, a phantasmagorical novella in which a stray dog is implanted with the half-dead brain of a petty criminal stabbed to death in a drunken brawl a couple of hours earlier. The ruffian produced as the result of this medical experiment, called Sharikov, talks, walks and acts like a new proletarian man. He terrorizes the professor who created him, forcing him to reverse the experiment.
Nevzorov, who fancied himself as a knight and conquistador, had no wish to speak on behalf of Sharikov and of Makashov, a half-mad remnant of the Soviet Empire. ‘A month earlier I was still hoping that people’s frustration and the humiliation suffered by the army, penniless and disrespected, could have detonated the situation and turned into a vast fire that would have consumed Anpilov and Makashov. But by the end of September I realized that the masses were not catching fire,’ he said. ‘It was too late to call people to come out under communist flags and too early to call them to come out under nationalist ones.’57
The opposite side had a better cast, said Nevzorov. ‘Yeltsin looked the part of a tsar. Tall, with sleek white hair, always dressed in a crisp white shirt – he appeared as a man in power – something that Russians respect,’ Nevzorov recalled.58 But if people did not come out on the side of the rebels, they also did not exactly rush to Yeltsin’s defence either. Most adopted the role of spectators even if the overall sympathy was on the side of Yeltsin. This political apathy was part of people’s self-preservation mechanism. They saw the stand-off between the two sides as a struggle for power and refused to be drawn in.
This made the situation extremely dangerous. As the 1917 Bolshevik coup showed, one did not need vast crowds to grab power if the army and the police were demoralized. Gaidar, whose grandfather had fought in the civil war after the Bolshevik coup, understood the danger better than many. Seeing the blackout of Ostankino, he rushed to the Russia Channel which was broadcast from a different location in the centre of Moscow. Its studio seemed completely improvised with dishevelled reporters reading news from stacked-up sheets of paper. As he walked into the studio, he paused for thought and asked to be left alone for a minute.
The flush of excitement had suddenly drained away, and in its place came a wave of alarm for those I was about to call out of their quiet apartments and onto the streets of Moscow. What a terrible responsibility for their lives I was taking upon myself. But there was no way around it. In reading and rereading documents and memoirs about 1917, I had often caught myself wondering how it was that tens of thousands of cultured, honourable and honest citizens of Petersburg, any number of military officers among them, could have let a relatively small group of extremists seize power so easily. Why did everyone keep waiting for someone else… to save them? And so, without hesitation, with a sense that I was in the right, I made my speech.59
On the night of 3 October, television was the only way to mobilize the public and, most importantly, the army. ‘The Russia Channel, the only one that stayed on the air, saved Moscow and Russia,’ Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs.60
Several thousands of people responded to Gaidar’s ‘call to the barricades’ and turned up in the centre of Moscow, lighting bonfires for the night. These were the same people who had come to defend the White House in August 1991 against the communist putsch, some of whom were now leading a new attack on Ostankino. This display of popular support was addressed first and foremost to the army which, just like in 1991, was reluctant to interfere in a conflict the outcome of which was still unclear, and was waiting to see how events would turn out. Throughout the night, journalists, actors and academics flocked to the improvised studio of the Russia Channel.
Gaidar’s appeal was countered not by nationalists and communists but by those who had most benefited from his reforms. The journalists from Vzglyad told Muscovites to ignore Gaidar’s advice, stay at home, not put themselves in harm’s way, leave the politicians and the police to do their jobs, and follow their example and go to bed. Chudakova, a biographer of Mikhail Bulgakov, rebutted this nonchalance: ‘Don’t believe those who are trying to persuade you to leave it all to the politicians. If you stay at home tonight, you will be ashamed of yourselves – in a few hours, in a few months, in a few years!’61
But it was the emotional words of the popular comical actress Liya Akhedzhakova that made the biggest impact on the audience: ‘Those who today look at these snarling, bestial faces of the mob and share their anger, have learned nothing in the past seventy years… For the third day in a row innocent people are being killed… And for what? For the constitution? What kind of constitution is this – may it rot in hell! It is the same constitution under which people were imprisoned… Where is our army? Why is it not defending us from this cursed constitution?’62
Yeltsin, who watched the Russia Channel in his office, wrote in his memoirs: ‘I will always remember Akhedzhakova – shocked, fragile, but firm and courageous.’63 Yeltsin did not make a television appearance himself that night. At 2.30 a.m., he went to the ministry of defence to ‘shake up his generals who were paralysed by stress and hesitance’. He was accompanied by Alexander Korzhakov, his bodyguard and confidant. Everyone had a drink. Then Yeltsin presented them with a plan worked out by one of Korzhakov’s men. It was a very Russian plan: to bring in the tanks, position them in front of the White House, fire a few shells ‘for psychological effect’ and then send in the commandos to clear the rebels out.
At Gaidar’s request, Yeltsin also flew to meet army commanders outside Moscow to boost their confidence. It was not clear whether an order from Yeltsin alone would be sufficient to get the officers to clear out the rebels from the White House. On the night of 3 October, Russia’s richest businessmen – soon to be known as oligarchs – were called upon by Chernomyrdin, who effectively took charge of the crisis, to help with money. They did not have to be asked twice. Some even went to negotiate with military commanders – cash in hand – although Pavel Grachev, the defence minister, later denied that this money ever played a part.
Finally, at 9 a.m. on 4 October, Yeltsin came on television and addressed the nation. ‘Those who have acted against a peaceful city and unleashed bloody fighting are criminals… I ask you, respected Muscovites, to give your support to the morale of the Russian soldiers and officers… The armed fascist–communist mutiny in Moscow will be crushed within the shortest time limit.’