Ilya Konstantinov, a former boiler-room worker who was head of the opposition National Salvation Front, recalls:
It was obvious that [the paramilitary groups] were compromising the whole parliament. I don’t even think they were aware they were doing it. But by the time they were in the building, we couldn’t get them out. We couldn’t eject them without a fight, and no one wanted this.
International public opinion, initially wavering and unwilling to tolerate violent repression of parliament by the Yeltsin administration, gradually swung in the president’s favour as Khasbulatov and Rutskoy faltered and erred.
For two weeks, the siege was static, as parliamentarians and protesters milled around the darkened White House, meeting by candlelight, going home every day to take showers and shave. Rebel leaders tried to whip up support in the streets, and gangs of opposition protesters clashed frequently with police. Yeltsin, meanwhile, used the airwaves to coax the population over to his side.
There was little bloodshed until 3 October, when the momentum seemed suddenly to shift in favour of the mutineers. A massive crowd gathered in Moscow’s October Square, under a statue of Lenin, and began marching north along the ring road, towards parliament, in a bold attempt to break the police blockade of the building. They overwhelmed an outnumbered detachment of riot police on the Krymsky Bridge, capturing weapons and ten military trucks; and then, to their utter astonishment, police surrounding parliament gave way after a small scuffle, surrendering to protesters. The crowd then broke through the police lines surrounding parliament, breaking the blockade.
In the euphoria, as they massed in front of the building, the protesters waited to be told what to do next by the very confused leaders of the revolt. From the balcony of the White House, Khasbulatov said to move on the Kremlin; Rutskoy said to go to Ostankino – the needle of a tower from where the city’s radio and television signals are broadcast and which houses the offices of the main national broadcasters. As the crowd decided on Ostankino, the battle appeared to hang in the balance. No loyal military units barred the way of the 700-odd protesters who set out on the ring road towards the television tower, driving in captured military trucks and school buses. Dugin, Limonov and Prokhanov were among them, hanging off the backs of trucks or crammed into buses. ‘The city seemed to be ours’, said Limonov. ‘But it only seemed that way.’
The man leading the protesters to take the TV tower was General Albert Makashov. Riding in a jeep with a few heavily armed bodyguards, he led the motley motorcade around the ring road and towards Ostankino. As they drove, he looked out at the road and saw ten armoured personnel carriers (APCs) roaring alongside. ‘Our guys’, he assured his men. He appeared to believe that the APCs were carrying mutinous forces that had switched sides to join the protesters. But he was wrong. They were, in fact, transporting a unit of 80 commandos from the elite Vityaz battalion of the Interior Ministry’s Dzerzhinsky Division, still under Yeltsin’s control, that had been scrambled to defend the TV centre. Their vehicles drove alongside those of the protesters for most of the way.5 One account of the day, albeit on a pro-rebel website known only as Anathema-2, deserves some attention. It (and numerous witnesses) reported, fairly plausibly, that the Moscow ring road at Mayakovsky Square was blocked by Vityaz APCs, and that, more incredibly, the column of armed demonstrators in vehicles had stopped in front of it, but was allowed to continue.6
The protesters and the Vityaz commandos arrived at Ostankino at roughly the same time. Sergey Lisyuk, the Vityaz commander, says he was given the order via radio to return fire if fired upon. ‘I made them repeat it twice, so those riding next to me also heard it.’7 The soldiers, arrayed in body armour and clinking with weaponry, ran through the same underpass as the protesters and entered the building. Meanwhile the protesters set up outside with megaphones and heavy trucks. Nightfall was drawing near. The protesters were jubilant, toting truncheons and riot shields captured from police. Eighteen of them had assault rifles and one had an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Makashov, the former general who commanded the armed men, ordered the vehicles to turn around and ferry more demonstrators, until the crowd outside the TV centre numbered over a thousand. Journalists arrived in vans and jeeps, dragging tripods and hurriedly unwinding cables. Inside, the Vityaz men, in grey camouflage with black balaclavas, could be seen scurrying around erecting barricades and taking up firing positions.
Night fell. It was around 19:20 when General Makashov, wearing a black leather overcoat and black paratrooper beret, addressed the Vityaz defenders inside Ostankino: ‘You have ten minutes to lay down your arms and surrender, or we will begin storming the building!’ The Vityaz men made no public response, though negotiations between Makashov and Lisyuk were ongoing via radio, according to numerous accounts.
At 19:30 a group of protesters brought in a heavy military truck, captured that day from riot police, to try to break into the television compound. Over and over, it battered against the glass and steel entrance, trying to smash through; but it was unable to get through the concrete building supports. Near the truck squatted the man toting the grenade launcher. Details of this man, including his last name, are scant, though Alexander Barkashov told me his name was ‘Kostya’ and he was a veteran of the Trans-Dniester conflict of 1990. Other witnesses say that he was a civilian, and did not know how to fire the grenade launcher until a policeman who had joined the parliamentary mutiny showed him how. What happened next is still the subject of a great deal of controversy.
To this day, the specific actions that led to the carnage at the TV centre are still debated, but what can be established is that as the truck was smashing its way into the compound, snipers on the upper floors of the building opened fire. Simultaneously, an explosion reverberated on the lower floors of the TV centre, and a Vityaz private named Nikolay Sitnikov was killed. Colonel Lisyuk said he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired from the crowd. He said his men opened fire in self-defence, and only after Private Sitnikov’s death.
Every witness has a slightly different memory. Dugin recalls that a Vityaz soldier fired a shot which hit the leg of the man with the grenade launcher, who accidentally triggered his weapon: ‘The Vityaz men started shooting people, unarmed people. At first some started shooting back, three or four machine-gun rounds, and that was it, later the shooting was only from Vityaz.’ Prokhanov saw the grenade man fall. He ‘suddenly began to sit, to slip along a wall. Nearby the twilight flashed and a small cloud of concrete debris was lifted into the air by a bullet strike.’ That was his description of the scene, taken from Red Brown, his (very) semi-autobiographical novel about the events, published the following year.
Tracers flew out of the TV centre. Bullets cracked overhead and thudded into bodies. ‘A wave of heavy red explosions covered us all’, according to Limonov. He dropped to his belly and crawled away. At one point he looked back to where he had been standing, near the truck, and saw 20 bodies, ‘some of them were groaning, most said nothing’. Tracer bullets rained down on the crowd for over an hour. At least 62 people were killed in the mêlée, mainly bystanders, but also several journalists.