Witness to Yeltsin's coup.

On Sunday, October 3, I was visiting my family at our summer house outside Moscow. When I returned to the city at about 8:00 P.M., shots were being fired around the Ostankino television station. Channels 1 and 4 were off the air, and channel 2 was showing images of flowers. I found the building of the Krasnopresnensky District Soviet, which had been the meeting place for deputies of the Russian Parliament and Moscow City Soviet, virtually deserted.

With Vladimir Kondratov, a Moscow deputy, and Alexander Segal, the press secretary of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, I set out for the Russian Parliament building, the "White House," hoping that we might learn something there about what was going on. Downtown Moscow presented a bizarre sight. A crowd of unarmed people milled around the Parliament building, discussing the latest news. Suddenly, trucks full of agitated people appeared out of nowhere, demanding arms. They told of dozens killed and wounded at Ostankino, and asked for help. Obtaining neither arms nor help, they drove away again.

The White House itself was in incredible disarray. There was no electricity, no light. Elevators were not running. When we climbed the stairs to an upper floor, we encountered General Albert Makashov, who later would be labeled by Boris Yeltsin's official press as one of the chief instigators of the "carefully planned and prepared mutiny." The general was running down a corridor, buttoning his bullet-proof vest and shouting, "I've got no arms! I've got no men! There will be no help! Go and establish Soviet power by yourselves!"

To be fair about it, I should mention that similar confusion prevailed at Yeltsin's headquarters in the Kremlin. Sergey Parkhomenko, a correspondent for the pro-government newspaper Segodnia (Today) who was in the Kremlin that evening, found members of the government in a state of panic. Yeltsin was not at all in control; he kept asking those around him what was happening. As Parkhomenko wrote, it looked like a mad-house. However, after a little while the gray eminences of the Yeltsin regime, Gennady Burbulis and Mikhail Poltoranin, arrived at the Kremlin and took charge. They quickly restored order among the distracted members of the government. It seemed clear that these two were the real authors of the script of the "decisive battle" of October 3 and 4 - the very script that was now being played out in all its glory. It was a script that held a small, unpleasant role for me.

When they elected their new parliament in the spring of 1990, the citizens of Russia believed they were laying the foundation for democratic reforms. And the newly elected deputies, when they chose Yeltsin to be chairman of the Supreme Soviet, regarded him as capable of consolidating the country and securing a smooth and painless transition to a new society. The following three years of hopes, illusions, disappointments, and conflicts resulted in the bloodbath of October 4, when tanks, acting on Yeltsin's orders, fired at the very parliament that had brought him to power.

These events, however tragic, were not unexpected. Yeltsin had never concealed his striving for absolute power and his scorn for the constitution he had sworn to uphold. The economic reforms he had proclaimed in Russia were, from the very beginning, incompatible with democracy. Having borrowed the economic theories of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet and his Argentine and Uruguayan colleagues, Russian reformers were bound to follow their political methods as well.

The new class of Russian nouveau riche, which sprang up like mushrooms after a rain, quickly gained control of all the levers of economic and political power. Former Communist apparatchiks joined forces with corrupted officials, mafia bosses, and young wheeler-dealers. They were interested only in dollars. During two years of "reforms," they made their fortunes from the takeover of state property and its sellout to foreign companies, without investing a single cent in Russian industry.

The drain of capital into developed Western countries turned into a national disaster. Exchange bureaus dealing in dollars, expensive stores, and fashionable restaurants popped up on every corner. At the same time, industry collapsed, modern technological research stopped, publishing houses closed, and university scientific programs were canceled.

Members of the new ruling class had no respect for the people of their own country, seeing in them only material for their machinations. The liberal culture of this lumpen-bourgeoisie consisted of demands for absolute free trade and of belief in the effectiveness of absolute corruption. The conspicuously luxurious lifestyle of the new rich against the background of the catastrophic pauperization of the masses was a sort of challenge: The "plebeians" should know their place. Free trade unions, duly enforced laws, the legal equality of citizens, and legitimate opposition were seen in these circles only as a hindrance to "normal" economic development, as senseless excesses which the West could afford, but we could not.

Having brought Yeltsin and his team to power, the Parliament had done its part and was supposed to leave the stage. Almost every day the pro-government newspapers were filled with demands for a coup. The idea that a military dictatorship is preferable to parliamentary democracy had become a commonplace long before the actual conflict began between Yeltsin and the Parliament. Just a few days before the October massacre, the pro-"reform" newspaper Segodnia wrote that supporters of the opposition would be better off not wasting their time at the ballot box, for regardless of the voting outcome no changes would be allowed. A new definition of a "democrat" was coined: somebody who supports censorship, the banning of opposition parties, the suspension of the constitution, and mass repression.

As the Russian economy got worse and worse, discontent grew more intense. The government tried to conjure up a "Communist conspiracy," but centrists and even some liberals were joining the opposition. The leaders of the anti-Yeltsin resistance in the Parliament had been his closest allies in 1990 and 1991. In 1991, Yeltsin held an absolute majority in the Parliament, but by the fall of 1993 his supporters had dwindled to a mere quarter of the deputies.

Twice Yeltsin had threatened to bring the people's deputies into line; he tried to disband the Parliament in December 1992 and in March 1993, but both times he failed miserably. Last summer, trying to strengthen his reputation with the army, Yeltsin inspected military units. His machine worked day and night to prepare the coup. The expulsion of Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoy - once Yeltsin's ally - from the Kremlin, the propaganda campaign by state television, the refusal to negotiate with trade unions despite growing waves of strikes - all this indicated that the authorities had decided to use force.

On September 21, when Yeltsin declared the Parliament disbanded, the resistance proved unexpectedly strong. For almost two weeks, the deputies who refused to leave remained besieged in the White House - without electricity or fuel, surrounded by barbed wire and troops. Thousands of people rallied at the Parliament building. The police and the troops beat and dispersed them, but they still came back. It seemed that something previously unseen in Russia might come true: the law would prevail over force, and civil disobedience would make the troops retreat. However, this was not to be.

On October 3, government forces opened fire on the demonstrators at the Moscow mayor's office and provoked an armed clash. Hundreds of people were killed and wounded. Tanks fired point-blank at the Parliament building. At the Ostankino television studio, 3,000 unarmed activists and some twenty or thirty armed defenders of the Parliament were met by the special unit Vityaz (Knight), fifteen armored personnel carriers, and several hundred armed policemen and soldiers. As soon as the crowd rushed into the building, the government units took their positions and opened fire. For hundreds of thousands of people in Moscow and all over Russia, this was not only a political drama, but a personal one as well.

While still in the Krasnopresnensky District Soviet on the evening of October 3, Kondratov, Segal, and I learned that forces controlled by Yuri Luzhkov, Yeltsin's appointed mayor of Moscow, had blockaded the Moscow City Soviet. Some deputies had been locked in their offices. Just in case, using the only functioning television channel, Vice Premier Yegor Gaidar called upon supporters of the regime to assemble at the Moscow City Soviet building. Perhaps these "volunteers" were supposed to assist special police units in storming the building. They behaved in an extremely aggressive, bullying manner.

Segal, Kondratov, and I, not having obtained any intelligible information about events, left the White House for the Oktyabrsky District Soviet. We caught a ride in a passing police jeep carrying several activists from the White House. Government troops were approaching the downtown area, and we could see that the Parliament's supporters were mostly unarmed and lacking leadership.

While my colleagues and I sat in the District Soviet, armored personnel carriers rolled along Leninsky Avenue. When we left the building and stood near the jeep that had brought us from the White House, discussing where we would go next, a passenger car stopped. Four men in plainclothes with submachine guns jumped out. They wore bulletproof vests over their jackets, and two of them smelled strongly of liquor.

The men in bulletproof vests were followed out of the car by a man wearing the uniform of a police lieutenant colonel and carrying a large old-model army assault rifle. He ordered us at gunpoint to raise our hands and line up. Threatening to put a bullet in our heads if we moved, these guardians of order - they were not bandits, after all, but representatives of the authorities - searched us and then escorted us in two newly arrived cars to Police Precinct Two on Polyanka Street.

There, we were lined up facing the wall and received a few warning blows on the back and legs before being taken off one at a time for interrogation. The police asked how we happened to be riding in a police car, where we were from, and what our political views were. Our deputy identification cards did not inspire any respect; in fact, just the opposite. While one of the officers politely interrogated me, another would run into the room from time to time and beat me on my back or head with his fist.

Then he would run off on his own business and, on his way back, stop in to hit me again. This was accompanied by yells such as: "So you want democracy, you SOBs! We'll show you democracy!"

After more questions and more beatings, the guardians of law and order from the Second Precinct announced that no charges would be filed against us, but that they could not allow us to go because a curfew was in effect and it was already after midnight. They promised to free us in the morning. Meanwhile, they took away our valuables, address books, and deputy ID cards, promising to return everything in the morning. We went to our cells.

The next morning, however, we were loaded into a police car with our hands tied behind our backs and transported to Precinct Seventy-seven, where I was informed that the Moscow City Soviet had been disbanded by Yeltsin, that deputy immunity had been canceled, and that we were being charged - with stealing a police car.

As later became clear, the jeep that took us from the White House had been abandoned by the police at Ostankino. It was used to transport the injured, and it stopped at several places, each time changing drivers. Leonid Ilyushenko, who happened to be the last driver, had received the car at the White House from a commander of the spontaneously formed citizens' militia. He had no clear idea of where the car had come from; however, in the course of interrogation he received proper explanations from the police. Almost unconscious from police beatings, he signed a "confession" that he had stolen the car on the orders of Moscow Soviet Deputies Kondratov and Kagarlitsky. These "villain deputies" had produced their ID cards and compelled him to hijack the police jeep, he said. Then they drove around the city, accompanied by men bearing machine guns, and issued instructions to the armed rebels.

It so happens that at the very time we were allegedly traveling around the capital, a dozen or so witnesses saw us elsewhere: I was not in town at all, and Kondratov was working at the Krasnopresnensky District Soviet many kilometers from Ostankino.

But these were unimportant details. Of course, we were not the point at all; compromising material against the Moscow City Soviet was needed so that Yeltsin's regime could explain to the public why the Soviet had to be disbanded and the deputies stripped of their immunity. Very little remained to be done; they merely needed to secure our sincere admissions of guilt.

The police acted in a simple and habitual manner. They handcuffed Kondratov and Segal and beat them with nightsticks on their legs and backs. Then they beat Kondratov's head against a bulletproof vest. I also got my share: they beat my head against a grill and the walls, and then started hitting me on the shoulders with their rifle butts. After the second blow, I nearly collapsed to the floor. This could have ended badly if one of the police officers had not torn me from the hands of his colleagues. Another man wearing an army-issue bulletproof vest pulled me from the room where the beatings had taken place and pushed me into a cell with the others.

All the passengers of the ill-fated jeep were held in the same cell, along with other people who had been detained elsewhere, sometimes by mere chance. To avoid having to file separate cases, the police listed all as passengers of the police car. Soon the number of these alleged "passengers" reached fourteen; the jeep could have made it into The Guinness Book of World Records.

Thus we sat behind bars. Yells and the sound of blows and curses constantly reached us from the corridor, mixed with news over the police radio that told of hundreds killed in the city and of the assault on the White House. One police officer brought two combat grenades into the precinct. The tired and sometimes drunk guardians of order almost succeeded in blowing themselves up along with the rest of us.

The Moscow City Soviet building had been captured late in the evening of October 3, an hour after our arrest. The security guards obeyed the mayor's order and behaved decently; the "volunteers," on the other hand, ran riot. Some rooms were devastated and looted. One guard who tried to stop the rampage was severely beaten.

Among those arrested were Viktor Bulgakov, a human-rights activist who had served his first prison term under Stalin; Elena Klimenko and Yuri Khramov, who had been slated to receive decorations for the previous defeat of the attacks on the Parliament; Viktor Kuzin, a former dissident, and Alexander Tsopov, a former KGB officer. The vice chairman of the Moscow Soviet, Yuri Sedykh-Bondarenko, was one of the last to leave the building; he was blocked in his own office, then interrogated and sent to prison. Alexander Popov, the head of the Moscow Soviet's press center, was luckier; the security guards led him out of the surrounded bunding. He sent the last Moscow City Soviet press release from a pay phone on the street. The office of the press center, with all its equipment, was immediately handed over to the press service of the mayor, which pulled all the papers out of the file cabinets and overturned everything. For some reason, they also set the fax machine on fire.

The assault on the White House began early in the morning of October 4, when armored personnel carriers opened fire on the crowd assembled at the Parliament. The shelling, from cannons and large-caliber machine guns, continued for several hours. While hundreds of unarmed people hid from fire in the Parliament basement, more and more reinforcements kept arriving. Blazes started on the upper floors. The library, archive, and computer center were burning. How many people perished there will never be known.

Despite the intensive shelling, several thousand people tried to break through into the White House. They were held back by machine-gun fire. At the same time, a crowd of onlookers observed the burning Parliament building from behind the government troops. And since prices in grocery stores near the combat zone dropped sharply, many people, risking their lives, crawled under bullets to purchase butter or sausage at half price. Soon, soldiers began plundering all the stores around the White House. Government forces constantly shot at nearby residential buildings. One apartment house caught fire, but the troops did not allow firefighters in until half of it had burned down.

According to official data, 142 people perished in Moscow during the two-day conflict. In fact, the figure is at least three times as high, and nobody even tried to count the number of wounded. Thousands were arrested and detained.

At half past six on October 4, the Parliament leaders surrendered. They were escorted out of the building along with deputies and activists. Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, Aleksandr Rutskoy, and some others were taken to the Lefortovo prison. There they fell into the hands of the investigation department of the Security Ministry, the former KGB. The head of that department is Sergey Balashov, the same Balashov who ten years previously had interrogated me in the same Lefortovo prison on accusations of "anti-Soviet activity." Now he was entrusted with eradicating the "Communist plague."

Thousands of people were detained. Following the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet, the Moscow City Soviet and district Soviets were disbanded. Many deputies were arrested. The detainees were beaten. Censorship was introduced. A state of emergency was declared in Moscow. All the opposition daily newspapers were closed or confiscated. Television programs that did not reflect government opinions were canceled. Most of the opposition parties were banned. Trade-union rights were restricted. The constitutional court was disbanded on the President's decree.

So long as nobody knew where my friends and I were being held, the police could do anything to us, but by the evening of October 4 we managed to smuggle out the news that we were in Precinct Seventy-seven. My wife got in touch with several friends and trade-union leaders. Within minutes, all the information about us was in international computer networks. Half an hour later, the precinct started receiving calls from Tokyo, London, New York, from foreign newspapers and human-rights organizations. Some time later, Sergey Karaganov, a member of the Presidential Council, arrived in a luxurious BMW and told the police bosses that the deputies were to be set free. This independent action later caused Karaganov serious difficulty; he had not been made a member of the Presidential Council to defend the rights of the opposition. Soon, in response to continuing calls, the hassled duty officer merely repeated: "They have already been freed." "This is untrue!" we shouted from behind bars.

Eventually, we were all released except for the driver of the jeep, from whom the police hoped to beat a new statement. We reached home on the night of October 4. By then, the White House had been taken by storm.

Several days later, the new policies were relaxed. Some of the arrested were set free and the censorship was eased. Every day, the authorities reiterated promises to hold elections, constantly changing electoral procedures. At the same time, the country's leadership and its loyal press made it clear that there would be no opposition participation in the new Federal Assembly. The Assembly's upper chamber, the Council of the Federation, which refused to follow Yeltsin's orders blindly, was disbanded without ever having met. According to the new government scenario, the upper chamber will be elected, but the elections are subject to so many formalities that in many districts they may not take place at all.

The epoch of democratic experiments in Russia is over. The Parliament deserved its fate - not because it opposed Yeltsin, but because it initially created the mechanism for Yeltsin's dictatorship. It was the Parliament that granted Yeltsin emergency powers, facilitated the creation of unaccountable administrative bodies, replaced elected officials with appointees, undermined the rights of local Soviets, and created the office of the president of Russia with unlimited authority. It was the Parliament, along with Vice President Rutskoy, that supported the disintegration of the Soviet Union, knowing that a majority of the population voted to retain the Union in the referendum of March 17, 1991. It was the Parliament that brought Yegor Gaidar into the government and approved his extremist economic "reforms."

However, despite all the mistakes and sins of the Russian Parliament, nothing excuses Western politicians who applauded the demise of democracy in Russia. And if Russia suffers now from political and economic catastrophe, the moral catastrophe in the West is of no lesser proportion. For the first time in contemporary history, Western statesmen publicly and solemnly abdicated the principles of constitutional rule, a law-based state, freedom, and human rights. It is not the first time that Western governments have supported antidemocratic coups; suffice it to recall Latin America, South Africa, and South Korea. However, it is the first time that this has been done publicly.

And let nobody claim later to have been uninformed and unsuspecting. The shelling of the Parliament took place some twenty meters from the American embassy. It was here, also, that deputies were beaten and prisoners brutalized. Journalists who told the Western public about an alleged Communist conspiracy in Russia, about a Parliament which had allegedly "not been freely elected" and had hindered "progressive reforms," deliberately misinformed their audience, acting in cahoots with the Kremlin propaganda departments.

Until recently, Russia believed the West. Today, even liberal circles speak of its hypocrisy and perfidy. Russian public opinion received irrefutable proof that the West does not want democracy in the East and consistently does everything it can to turn us, as Moscow City Soviet Deputy Alexander Kalinin said, into "a banana republic where no bananas grow." This will determine Russia's attitude toward the West for several generations to come. We will not forget, and we will not forgive, what the West did during these terrible days.

And the world leaders who supported the regime which openly mocked citizens' rights and the law will soon discover the results of their decision. Yeltsin's regime is a Russian dictatorship softened by corruption, incompetency, and inefficiency. It has no popular support and no chances for economic success. Such regimes do not last long.