with the life span, particularly for men, although already low, taking a precipitous plunge. Solzhenitsyn's jeremiads about the dying out of the Russians and Murray Feshbach's surprising statistical discoveries were gaining general acceptance.
Russian politics could not be separated from Russian economics, the two constantly interacting and usually damaging each other. Yeltsin's greatest collision with his legislature, at the time the Supreme Soviet, occurred in October, 1993. Several factors led to a catastrophe. There was a fundamental hostility between the President and many members of the legislature, who looked back to the Soviet world and opposed reform. Numerous nationalists were particularly incensed by the breakup of the Soviet Union. And in the novel political arrangement, where Yeltsin had great power and was intent on acquiring more of it, legislators were very conscious of their own governing role as well as of their perquisites. The ongoing transformation of the country increased tensions and deepened problems. The legislators, therefore, had some reason to believe that in a showdown with Yeltsin they would be supported by the army and the people. A very mixed group or, perhaps better, combination of groups, their leaders included the Vice President, Alexander Rutskoi, whom Yeltsin had hastily appointed to that position probably because of his military record and impressive appearance, and the leader of the legislature Ruslan Khasbulatov. By the end of 1992, under pressure, Yeltsin had to let Gaidar go, and the more generally acceptable Viktor Chernomyrdin became prime minister. The President survived efforts to impeach him or to limit drastically his powers by law, although on one occasion by a very narrow margin. In April 1993 he succeeded in obtaining from the legislature a popular referendum on several key issues (although not on that of private property). The results were gratifying for Yeltsin: 59 per cent supporting the President, 53 per cent supporting the social and political policies of the government, 49.5 per cent favoring an early election for President, but 67.2 per cent favoring an early election for parliament.
Early in September Yeltsin began to prepare his coup against the parliament. The plan was to disband the legislature on the grounds of its obstructionism and of the popular approval of the President and his policies in the April referendum, and to call for the election of a new legislature in December. The dissolution of the parliament was to come suddenly on the nineteenth of September, a Sunday, when its members would not be in their building, "the White House," and would thus lack the advantages of a central position, unity, and considerable armed security and protection. But, perhaps inevitably, the news leaked out and spread. Instead of abandoning the building, the legislators dug in. For ten days or so large supplies of armaments and a great variety of rebellious individuals and groups flocked into "the White House," where Rutskoi and others tried to organize them into an effective military force. Witnesses remember the standard of the Romanov family flying next to the red flag of communism; the cossacks and even the neo-Nazis were also prominent. Yeltsin's broadcast on the twenty-first
of September made the conflict and the deadlock explicit. Neither side was organized or prepared for what had happened. The inhabitants of "the White House" represented a fantastically mixed and undisciplined lot living from hour to hour on rumors of the impending government attack and wild stories of what else was happening in Moscow, the rest of the country, and the world. But the authorities also did not know what to do, as they disagreed, could not tell what military forces would effectively support them, and wished to avoid a massacre. Mediation under the auspices of the Patriarch failed, because the rebels were in an upbeat mood at that point in time and would not seriously consider a compromise settlement. To be sure, Yeltsin can be blamed for setting off the entire collision by his coup against the legislature and for acting, to put it mildly, in an unconstitutional manner. But it was the legislature that first brought violence into play. Already on the twenty-fourth of September a woman was killed when an extremist military leader in the parliament staged an attack on a military communications office. More important, on the third of October, having gained more followers and some crowd support, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov endorsed attacks on the Ostankino television center and the headquarters of the mayor of the city, i.e., tactics of a classical military rebellion and takeover. It was on the fourth that troops, with tanks, finally arrived to bombard "the White House" rebels into submission and to arrest them. More than a hundred people were killed, many of them bystanders; the building itself presented a picture of utter devastation. Although the capture of "the White House" did not prove to be a difficult military operation, Yeltsin and his assistants might have been lucky to survive as well as they did. Their fortunes depended on such factors as a general telling his friend, Rutskoi, that he was not going to obey his orders, and, of course, on the seriously delayed arrival of military support. On the twenty-ninth of February, 1994, the Duma declared an amnesty for the participants in the events of October, 1993, as well as for those who attempted the coup in August, 1991, and for other prisoners.
The parliamentary catastrophe of 1993 was followed in 1994 by a still greater disaster, the Chechen war. One of the 89 units of the new Russian Federation, the Chechens constituted less than 1 per cent of its population and were located on a far Caucasian periphery, important perhaps only for oil and gas transport. A warlike people, they had fought under Shamil until 1859, when they finally became reluctant subjects of the Russian empire. Stalin considered them disloyal in the Second World War and had them transported, under atrocious conditions, to Central Asia, from which they were allowed to return to their native land only after the supreme dictator's death. There was no love lost between them and the Russians as well as certain other Caucasian peoples. Still, Yeltsin would have been wise to have left them alone in their bitter internal struggle, or at least to have supported cautiously the less anti-Russian elements. Instead he chose a direct and major intervention. No doubt he grossly underestimated the military preparedness and the fighting quality of the Chechens, as did his Minister of