When tanks appeared in the centre of Moscow, they were greeted with relief rather than resentment and apprehension. As Gaidar wrote, ‘Anyone who did not live through the evening of 3 October and did not see the terrible danger that loomed over the country, who did not have to call people out onto the streets of Moscow, may have difficulty understanding my feelings when the first round of tank fire resounded over the White House.’64
The tanks were operated by selected officers and personally commanded by Grachev. They fired ten duds and two incendiary shells that set the upper floors of the White House on fire. Nobody was actually killed by the tank fire (those who died on 4 October were killed by a gunfire exchange between the two sides). But the damage caused by the symbolism of tanks firing at the parliament was far greater and more lasting.
The tanks provided a captivating television picture. Russian television relayed live footage from CNN which had its cameras fixed on the nearby rooftops. This created a certain degree of detachment and made the spectacle doubly surreal as if the events were happening not in Russia, but in a foreign country. On a cold, crisp October day, people strolling along Kutuzovsky Prospect were able to watch the spectacle live while Barkashov’s snipers on the roof took out people in front of the White House. Theatre critic and historian, Anatoly Smeliansky, called it a ‘Russian matinee’. Certainly, people felt like spectators rather than participants in those events.
Within a few hours, the fighting was over. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov, along with the thousands of people inside the White House, were bundled into police vans and taken to jail (though not for long). After many days without any running water or a change of clothes, they had a nasty smell about them. But many of the fighters, including Barkashov, melted away, using underground tunnels and the sewage system as an escape route out of the White House. The nationalist and communist newspapers were briefly banned. Nevzorov’s 600 Seconds was taken off air for ‘whipping up national, class, social and religious intolerance’. Alexei Simonov, a documentary film-maker who ran a foundation for the freedom of speech, recalled the vindictive triumphalism of some of the ‘democratic’ journalists. This triumphalism was ill-placed.
Parkhomenko, who protested against banning nationalist newspapers, wrote a couple of days later: ‘Nothing is over. Everything is only starting. The deformed White House is an impressive symbol. But it is only a symbol. The large armed gang that terrorized the city for twelve hours is not destroyed but only dispersed…’65 The use of tanks against the White House caused more harm to the liberal idea than it did to the nationalists inside the White House. Instead of projecting the image of putting down an armed mutiny against a democratically elected president, it conveyed an image of heavy-handed disregard for the parliament as an institution. It elevated the fighters in the White House from thugs to political martyrs.
Even if the tanks had helped to smoke out the rebels, they could not defeat the nationalist and imperialist ideas that had led to the bloodshed in Moscow. Unlike the events of August 1991, which at least entered history as a failed coup, October 1993 never gained a definition and ambiguously remained in history as ‘the events of October 1993’. Just like Barkashov’s fighters who escaped through underground tunnels, their ideas and slogans have continued to smoulder under the surface of Russian political life, like a peat fire, occasionally letting off smoke or a nasty smell. The fire was never properly extinguished, but simply covered up in the hope that it would die by itself. Twenty years later it was fanned by Vladimir Putin into the large flames that are consuming not only parts of Ukraine, but also Russia’s own future.
In 1993, nationalist and communist ideas seemed defeated not so much by tanks but by life itself. Nevzorov, who was driven in a police car through the centre of Moscow to be put on a plane to St Petersburg, recalled watching Moscow life carry on as normal. ‘People walked their dogs, strolled with their children, changed money, bought food, posed for pictures with the blackened White House as a background and I suddenly felt that I was on the margins, that nobody really cared about all these politics any more.’66 As Kommersant wrote at the time, ‘The only thing that citizens want from big politics is the possibility of calmly making money and as calmly spending it to their hearts’ content.’
As the late Yuri Levada, Russia’s leading sociologist, wrote at the time, people minded their own business, their small dacha plots, their incomes and vouchers. ‘Perhaps for the first time in the history of our country, daily life scored such a convincing victory over politics.’67 But as Levada warned, this victory had its reverse side. The dominance of domestic life had a very different nature from Europe where democracy was ensured by political institutions and the elites. In the absence of such institutions and elites, the dominance of private life inevitably brought any important public issue to the level of ‘bread and circuses’, to simple consumerism, entertainment, game shows and soap operas.
The shelling of the White House was adopted as a ‘plot’ for an interactive video game. It was featured in a Vzglyad programme which was relaunched by Alexander Lyubimov after a four-year break. To compensate the audience for the ‘missed-out’ years, the well-groomed Lyubimov put together a pastiche of the events that had happened over the previous four years, played in a fast-forward, black-and-white mode accompanied by Scott Joplin’s ‘Ragtime’ tune. It was a new reality, in which ideology no longer mattered and in which Nevzorov and Lyubimov happily coexisted on the same television channel that was soon to be hijacked by Boris Berezovsky, a future oligarch and chief manipulator of Russian politics. Berezovsky immediately reached out to Nevzorov as Russia’s best showman, making him an offer Nevzorov readily accepted. ‘A mercenary is like a tank: its cannon rotate in any direction,’ Nevzorov said.68
As Nevzorov said, ‘Lenya Golubkov’ won over Anpilov and Barkashov and even himself. But this was a poor guarantee against the populism that had manifested in the December 1993 parliamentary elections when millions of Golubkovs voted for Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a charismatic populist and ultra-nationalist. (He too would soon turn into a showman.)
Zhirinovsky’s misnamed Liberal Democratic Party won 23 per cent of the votes. The democratic Russia’s Choice, led by Gaidar who shunned populism, refusing to make any promises that he could not keep, got 15 per cent of the proportional representation votes (although it did much better in the single-member districts). Sociologists, and much of the Russian political establishment, were stunned. On the night of the elections, state television channels, in anticipation of the Democrats’ victory, staged an all-night show, called The Celebration of a New Political Year. It was a New Year’s celebration come early. There was almost no analysis, but plenty of entertainment from pop singers, actors and folk groups. ‘Let us drink to the new constitution,’ the main presenter beamed with a smile. ‘And let’s not talk about politics today.’
Moscow’s great and good were sipping champagne and congratulating each other on the new constitution that placed enormous powers in the hands of the president. The main computer that was supposed to relay the results of the parliamentary elections was said to have been infected with a virus. Instead of reading out results, the presenter of the show read out telegrams from the provinces. In fact, the only person who had reason to be in a good mood was Zhirinovsky. When it became clear that he and the communists had got a strong showing, the camera caught the shocked face of a Russian liberal essayist and Dostoevskian scholar, Yuri Karyakin. ‘Russia, think hard, you have lost your mind!’ he said to the camera.