As he did at Belovezh’e Forest, Yeltsin had sliced through a Gordian knot with a freewheeling decision of debatable legality. The unilateralism and extraconstitutionality of his fiat caused him some grief. As he wrote a year later, “Here I was, the first popularly elected president, violating the law—bad law . . . yet law all the same.”60 But Decree No. 1400 stood. Its main articles laid to rest the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet and ordered the election on December 12 of a bicameral Federal Assembly comprising a State Duma (the name Russia’s first parliament bore from 1905 to 1917), to represent individuals, and a Federation Council as the upper house, to represent the provinces. The first assembly would sit for a two-year term, and its first item of business would be to adopt a new constitution.
Yeltsin and Khasbulatov had baited and blustered since the winter of 1992–93, and both lowballed the danger of the other party following through. Yeltsin had no detailed battle plan, sure that “political methods” and threats would get the parliamentarians to relent; and Khasbulatov said that “until the last minute, I did not believe he [Yeltsin] would take such a step” (the abolition decree).61 When the step was upon them, Khasbulatov and the deputies made a last stand. In a midnight session at the White House, the Supreme Soviet passed a resolution to remove Yeltsin from the presidency, which the congress had not done in March. Minutes later, Rutskoi was sworn in. That same night he began appointing ministers of defense, the interior, and security to a provisional government. The congress met on September 23 and passed a skein of measures against Yeltsin and his government, which Khasbulatov now called a “fascist dictatorship” (Rutskoi dubbed Yeltsin Russia’s Führer). It also approved capital punishment for failure to carry out the orders of the new government and president.
Frenetic attempts by Zor’kin and Patriarch Aleksii to mediate foundered over the next ten days. At the White House, several hundred hard-line deputies dug in with radical nationalists, racists, and diehard communists. On Sunday, October 3, Yeltsin went briefly to the Kremlin, and on the ride in, “for the first time in my life the thought drilled into my head—had I done the right thing, had there been any other option?”62 That day, after he returned to Barvikha-4, skirmishes on the streets spun out of control. Yeltsin decreed martial law in Moscow and rushed to the Kremlin as armed fighters, stirred up by Rutskoi, went at the mayor’s office and the Ostankino television tower with Molotov cocktails, grenades, and Kalashnikovs. National television screens went blank for several hours. In the black of night, Yeltsin, exasperated that army troops had not penetrated mid-Moscow, as the Defense Ministry said they would, drove to the Russian Pentagon on Arbat Square and, with Viktor Chernomyrdin at his elbow, demanded action by first light. The generals skulked and explained that some of their men had been busy with the fall harvest, leading him to conclude that his military “was being pulled into pieces, and everyone was yanking on his part.” A lawful government hung by a thread, “but the army could not defend it: some soldiers were picking potatoes and others did not feel like fighting.” Minister Grachëv, who had been hopeful that police forces could manage the disturbances, said he would comply, on the condition that he be given written orders from the commander-in-chief—the kind of explicit authorization Mikhail Gorbachev never brought himself to give in his hour of need. Yeltsin was galled by the request but went back to the Kremlin, signed the order, and sent it to Grachëv by courier. It made all the difference to the officers, who proceeded to discharge their duty.63
The dénouement was swift and brutal. Thirteen hundred servicemen flooded inside Moscow’s in-city ring road on Monday, October 4. Armored cars scrunched through the barricades in front of the White House at about seven A.M. At 10:00, four T-80 tanks on a bridge over the Moskva broke into a cannonade. “With a thunderous roar that echoed heavily through the nearby streets, the tanks opened fire on the upper floors. . . . Chunks of the marble façade shattered and flew into the air, and the huge clock in the center of the White House froze with its hands at 10:03. Windows were blown out of their frames, and thousands of sheets of paper, flung out of the building, spun slowly in the air like a flock of birds hovering in the sunshine.”64 Yeltsin had warned Khasbulatov to vacate and get to safety before the shooting started. Khasbulatov was not in his tenth-story office when it was one of the first to be slammed by a round. Commandos stormed the structure, emptied it and other occupied buildings, and stamped out the street mayhem.
The footage of tanks lobbing 125-mm. shells over the spot where Yeltsin had peacefully defied the putschists in 1991—upright on a T-72 from the very same Taman Division—and of Khasbulatov and Rutskoi being bused off to Lefortovo prison, was a graphic contrast to happier days. During the victory gathering, Yeltsin was handed Khasbulatov’s tobacco pipe; he examined it and dashed it on the floor.65 The official death toll was 187, none of them elected deputies, and 437 wounded; about three-quarters of the deaths were in and near the White House and about one-quarter at Ostankino.66 Several anti-government organizations were banned, thirteen communist and rabidly nationalist newspapers were closed down, and editors were told to present articles to censors. After repair of the blast and flame damage by a Turkish contractor, the White House was to go to the Russian government for office space.
The pride and joy of the Yeltsin scheme was the long-awaited post-Soviet constitution to tie the state together and encode the norms of representative government, separation of powers, primacy of the president, and federalism. Its inculcation through even partially democratic means ought to be counted as an achievement, as should the normalization of political life it made possible.
The tactic of having the newly elected Federal Assembly rule on the constitution was as much of a gamble as any Yeltsin made as president, for no one could be sure that it would go over as legitimate, that the assembly would adopt a satisfactory constitution, or that it would approve any constitution—if not, he would have lopped off the limb on which they all rested. After the shootout in Moscow, he reconsidered. He decreed on October 15 that the constitution would go to a plebiscite on election day.67 His Constitutional Conference resumed its labors, and on November 8 Yeltsin approved a draft that largely parroted earlier renderings. Putting it before the electorate was another roll of the dice: What would occur if voters turned thumbs down? For stability’s sake, Yeltsin made one more adjustment. On November 6 he rescinded a slapdash pledge he made in September to advance the date of the next presidential election by two years, from the summer of 1996 to the summer of 1994. Even were constitutional ratification and the parliamentary election to come a cropper, he would have a leg to stand on.68