The events of late 1993 were grist to the mill of conspiracy theorists, reflecting the overwhelming conviction of the parliamentary defenders that they had been the victims of a great deception, designed to lure them into a trap. The Red Brown protesters now believed that Ostankino had been a set-up – that the trucks they had captured from riot police (with keys still in the ignition!) were part of a grand strategy to goad them into the killing fields outside Ostankino, where they could provide their own pretext for getting massacred. They claimed to have been emboldened by specially planted disinformation concerning the supposed defection of army units to their side. They had – in the version described on Anathema – even been allowed through a roadblock on Moscow’s ring road, all for the sole purpose of providing a provocation aimed at giving Yeltsin the excuse to use tanks against parliament.
Prokhanov’s account of the events is encased in his surrealistic fantasy novel Red Brown, which described the fictional ‘Operation Crematorium’: a conspiracy by Yeltsin and his American puppeteers aimed at trapping the patriotic opposition in the kill-zone of Ostankino and the smoking tomb of the White House. But the use of provocateurs by the regime may not simply have been a figment of Prokhanov’s vivid imagination. This became apparent when I interviewed Alexander Barkashov about his role in the 1993 confrontation.
I had to drive for three hours to his dacha outside Moscow, where he keeps fighting dogs and a collection of hunting bows. As the evening wore on, he became more and more conspiratorial, until eventually I asked him why he had taken part on the side of the parliamentary defenders. He dumbfounded me by replying that he had been acting under the orders of his commander in the ‘active reserve’, by which he meant the retired chain of command of the former KGB. He identified his commander as acting Defence Minister Achalov, the same man who had originally issued the call for armed nationalist gangs to come to the aid of the White House defenders: ‘If Achalov had told me to shoot Khasbulatov or Rutskoy, I would have.’ If his claim is true, it would explain a great deal. Barkashov played the role of a provocateur in the parliamentary siege, discrediting the defenders in the eyes of world opinion by publicly aligning them with neo-Nazis. Curiously, Barkashov’s forces from Russian National Unity (RNU) did not take part in the Ostankino siege, and the party lost only two members killed in the fighting.
Achalov, whom I interviewed about Barkashov’s claim, flatly denied the accusations: ‘I’m just a tank soldier, nothing more. I don’t know what Barkashov is talking about.’ If Barkashov, in his own words, was acting not according to the convictions of an ideologue, but on the orders of a state structure, then the goals of that structure must be wondered at. The rise of nationalism in post-communist Russia may have been a far more complicated event than first meets the eye.
Dugin had left the White House in the small hours of the morning, knowing what would come. He went back to his apartment and, his belongings packed, waited to be arrested. ‘I was one of the ideologists, I was sure they would arrest me, but they didn’t. We were all waiting for the repressions, but they never came.’ Instead, there arrived an invitation to appear on Red Square, at the time a popular talk show, where he was asked about his role in the attempted coup.
Clearly, the Kremlin was trying another tack. Instead of suffering repressions, which might have been expected, the rebels were by and large left untouched. Many were encouraged to return to political life. Prokhanov went into hiding in the forest for months, but it turned out that no one was actually looking for him. The Day was closed by the authorities, but Prokhanov was allowed almost immediately to open a successor newspaper, Zavtra (Tomorrow).
The remarkable turn of events showed how Yeltsin changed strategy: after killing a significant number of the opposition, he now moved to co-opt them, holding elections in which he allowed the Communist Party to participate, following which he allowed the rebel plotters to be amnestied. Yeltsin also pushed through a new constitution, creating in effect a super-presidency that emasculated parliament and gave the post-1993 status quo legal form. Following the October 1993 confrontation, the opposition was never again able (or inclined) to challenge Yeltsin on any matter of substance.
The terrible power of the state was reborn once again in the hands of the Kremlin. The old USSR had not been able to lift a finger to save itself in 1991, when Marshal Yazov could not think ‘in whose name’ to give the order to fire on demonstrators. Now that state had revealed itself only too clearly outside Ostankino and the White House. It was every bit the unblinking methodical killer that the old Soviet Union had been. But the conflict of 1993 changed the ruling equation in Russia. The shelling of parliament both strengthened Yeltsin and crippled him at the same time. His approval rating plummeted from 59 per cent to 3 per cent, and the Communists and Liberal Democrats swept the next parliamentary elections to comprise the bulk of the opposition to Yeltsin.
Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats were rewarded for their decision to stay neutral in the uprising, enjoying the Kremlin’s good offices and favourable TV coverage. He and his deputy Alexey Mitrofanov had weathered the crisis in Germany (‘like true Bolshevik revolutionaries’, jokes Mitrofanov), and Zhirinovsky showed up at the White House in the aftermath with bottles of duty-free wine. ‘They are Molotov cocktails!’ he scolded deputies who questioned his commitment to the patriotic cause. Winning a quarter of the votes cast for party lists, the LDPR won so many seats, in comparison to its small membership, that even bodyguards found themselves on the list of deputies; when even that was not enough, they took some Communist Party deputies from Zyuganov’s election list. The new Duma elections were a considerable windfall – ‘a gift from the sky to the moderate-communist nomenklatura opposition’, according to Limonov. ‘In a normal, non-parliamentary context of political struggle, what awaited them were their slippers and disputes over tea.’
That appeared to most observers to be part of some grand bargain by Yeltsin, allowing some nationalist parties to run in the election, in exchange for support in passing the new constitution. The February 1994 amnesty, which freed Rutskoy, Khasbulatov and other kingpins of the 1993 crisis, also seemed to be a political trade; soon afterwards, parliament ended its investigation into the official crisis death toll of 173, principally at Ostankino and as a result of the shelling of the White House.
But the strength of the nationalist message could already be seen in Yeltsin’s eagerness to co-opt it. Yeltsin was forced to embrace his opponents’ ideas in order to stay in power: his team had proved its fitness to rule through its cynicism and ruthlessness, its ideology steadily adapted to the reality of the country. Yeltsin once again stole his opponents’ proposals. He had stolen Gorbachev’s reform agenda, and now he began to co-opt the ideology of his nationalist opponents. He put out a barrage of new initiatives designed to outflank the nationalists from the right. He reinvigorated the Commonwealth of Independent States, and negotiated a Union Treaty with Belarus, whose new president, Alexander Lukashenko, elected in 1994, publicly advocated such a step. He championed nationalist causes, throwing the Kremlin’s weight behind efforts to rebuild the Christ the Saviour cathedral in the centre of Moscow, which had been demolished and turned into a swimming pool by Stalin in 1932. He also allowed the Duma a largely free hand to legislate on nationalist and religious issues, creating a commission in 1996 to come up with a Russian ‘national idea’.