#8 - JRL 7353
From: "Jeffrey Barrie" <jbarrie@nccom.ru>
Subject: October 1993
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2003
David, these are my memories of October 3rd and 4th, 1993:
As October began the Russian Duma was at war with President Yeltsin, barricaded inside of its headquarters near the US Embassy, called the White House. After work on Friday, October 1st, I set out for an evening time drive to a small town in Ivanovo Region some 300 miles east of Moscow to visit friends. The highway is lined with police check points and I was stopped fifteen times at nearly every one of them. There was definitely some sort of alert in effect, for this was the most diligence I had ever encountered in thirteen years traveling outside of Moscow.
The stops made the normally five hour trip last seven hours, and I arrived at my destination after midnight, ready for the night of socializing Russian style I had looked forward to. Moscow is a very cosmopolitan city, but life in towns outside the capital seems to be in a time warp that I love most about the country. I spent the weekend crowded around the kitchen table, talking about everything under the sun, eating and drinking. The television was on constantly, and Saturday afternoon began showing alarming pictures from Moscow's Smolensk Square. We watched crowds of mostly grandmothers and grandfathers getting more and more disorderly, and finally burst into violence, setting fire to barricades. The table conversation immediately turned to the question of how good an idea it was to return to Moscow the following day. Our friends always tried to delay our departures, but this time they seemed to have better reason.
The party continued through Saturday night and we looked for fresh news Sunday morning. Nothing much seemed out of the ordinary and around 3:00 pm I loaded up the car for the return trip, tuned the radio to a news station and headed towards Moscow.
Two hours into that trip we began hearing reports of violence around the White House and the neighboring office building that had been the COMECON headquarters. A bit later we heard reports that that building had been seized by Duma supporters. I thought about turning back, but at that point my curiosity was strong enough to keep the car pointed west.
It was getting dark, and I expected even more scrutiny at the police check points than I had on the eastbound trip. And so as I passed each in succession without getting stopped, I became more and more puzzled and intrigued. I was glued to the radio and now hearing that the crowds had begun to move from the White House and COMECON building in the direction of the Ostankino TV Tower. And I knew that the biggest potential obstacle to getting back to Moscow still lay ahead.
During my days as an analyst with DIA, and during my assignment to the Moscow Embassy, I knew that the Dzerzhinsky Motorized Infantry Division, which belonged to the Ministry of Interior, was the first line of defense against the kind of problem that seemed to be developing in Moscow. It lay directly ahead, on the outskirts of Moscow, and I imagined the highway jammed with truckloads of soldiers and scores of armored vehicles. I was literally shocked when I finally reached it to find no activity at all, and the entire facility calm and quiet.
By them I was only a few miles from Moscow's city limits where the most serious highway check points controlled every entrance into the city. Again, I braced for traffic jams and the possibility of being turned back. And again I was shocked to find no unusual activity at all when we reached the control point. I was beginning to think I was hallucinating.
I stopped at friend's apartment just inside the city limits for a reality check. The TV was on, and we began watching the building action at the TV Tower when her husband burst into the apartment, began rummaging in a closet where he found two pistols, gave one to his wife and ran out of the apartment telling us he was heading to the Moscow City Hall to defend it against the Communists. This was my first indication since entering the city that anyone was upset about what was happening.
With a renewed sense of urgency I headed towards the city center. I stopped at Red Square to see what was happening there and saw the usual throng of tourists gathered around Lenin's Tomb waiting for the changing of the guard at 9:00 pm. Kids were skateboarding on the periphery of the Kremlin. During the entire half hour drive into the center I never once saw a policeman or soldier. I kept pinching myself and decided to take my normal route home, past the White House. The first sign of anything abnormal was when I hit the high point of New Arbat Street (then Kalinin), just down the street from the US Embassy, and saw that a barricade had been built blocking the road across the bridge near the White House. There were whiffs of smoke in the air, but no people to be seen anywhere. I figured they must have all gone to the Ostankino TV Tower.
I detoured through Smolensk Square, by now devoid of any sign of Saturday's violence and was home in another 10 minutes, staying up most of the night watching the action from the TV Tower. The next morning around 8:00am I was back in my car headed for the White House to see what was happening.
I parked my car a mile away and began walking along the Moscow River toward the gunfire that took me back to my Vietnam days. A steady staccato of machine gun fire filled the air and as I got closer to the White House I saw people on the embankment roadway kneeling down stay out of possible range of the fire. I very cautiously walked up the incline toward the bridge that had been blocked the night before, keeping low and approached an overturned truck on the corner. Pulling myself up on it, I looked over into one of the more bizarre scenes imaginable.
The first people I saw were two girls walking a cocker spaniel dog, dressed smartly in tight jeans and jackets and strutting their stuff. They were part of a crowd of what looked to be a thousand people who seemed to be involved in some crazy Easter Parade stroll while watching the spectacle that was unfolding in front of them. To the left was the Stalin-gothic Ukraine Hotel with ten tanks lined up on the river bank, guns pointed at the White House. On the right bank of the river was another line of ten armored personnel carriers, with their guns in the same direction. Machine gun fire was pouring from the tanks and APC's towards the White House, and from the White House back. Craziest of all, the spectators were actually struggling to get closer to the edge of the bridge railing to get better looks.
I climbed up on the overturned truck, joining another spectator already up there. We exchanged puzzled looks and watched the show. Hundreds of other spectators were gathered on our side of the White House lawn, sawing pieces of barbed wire off as souvenirs. Another group was crowded around the back entrance of the White House. After an hour watching the action, which included a few casualties being carried from the area of the White House in jury rigged stretchers, but seeing no-one injured with my own eyes, I figured it must be safe and set off to do my own mingling. I joined the crowd at the back of the White House and worked my way to the front. Attention was focused on women workers who were leaving the building. The crowd was packed tightly together and was like a living thing. I realized how dangerous it was being caught in the middle of it, and quickly escaped back to my perch on the truck. I was actually getting bored, when about 10 am the tanks opened up with their first shots, which began repeating every ten minutes or so. About half an hour later, when each tank had registered its gun, they all fired in salvo at windows on the same floor, exploding a cloud of paper into the air, and bringing cheers from the watching crowd. A fire started on that floor, quickly turning the upper floors black with soot and giving the building its temporary new name - the Black House.
During this entire process I did not see a single policeman or soldier anywhere near the area (the crews of the tanks and APCs were buttoned up inside of their vehicles and invisible). I thought that my viewpoint might be giving me a warped idea of what was happening, and I went back down to the river and under the bridge to see what was happening there. I found ambulances set up under the bridge and saw a pile of dozens of bodies lying near them. Most looked to be young men, and while I was standing there several more wounded were brought down. From my vantage I could see other young men running toward the White House, but got the feeling they were more likely thrill seekers doing the Moscow version of running with the bulls at Pamplona or catching coup then being politically involved in the events. In fact, I never had any sense during this entire time of any feelings for one side or the other. It all simply was being taken in as a spectacle.
It was a work day and I wasn't sure whether anyone had come in to the office so I headed there to check. Later I found out that everyone had tried to come in, but the metro line across the river to Kiev Station had been closed to protect against injuries from stray bullets. As soon as I walked in the door the phone rang. It was CFRB in Toronto, Canada, the radio station where my brother works, hoping for an interview. When I explained what I had just seen, there was a startled silence. My report did not track with what they were watching on CNN's coverage.
CNN had cameras set up on the roof of their office building, half a mile away from the action. The telephoto lens allowed them to show much more dramatic and much less frivolous views of what was going on. After the call was over I headed back to the action, and found a totally different situation when I returned around 1:00 pm. The police were now out in force and Russian Special Forces soldiers were positioning themselves for an assault on the building. The carnival atmosphere had been dialed down a notch, and the situation had become more "defined.
Back in my car, I drove around the city to see what effect this world shaking event was having on the general level of life. The answer was what I expected -- none at all. Schools remained in session, shoppers crowded the streets and Moscow's traffic was as crazy as ever. It was as if the White House affair was some sort of local theater that (outside of the areas around Ostankino and the Moscow City Hall) had no noticeable effect on the rest of the city.
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