Washington D.C., October 4, 2023 – Thirty years ago in Moscow, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered tanks and airborne troops to shell and storm the “White House,” the Russian Parliament (Supreme Soviet) building, to suppress the opposition trying to impeach and remove him – a landmark turning point in Russia’s failure to develop democracy. Declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive detail the complete American support for Yeltsin’s actions, including the transcript of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s phone call to Yeltsin the next day to praise him, and the memcon in which U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher subsequently told Yeltsin this was “superb handling.” Also published in today’s briefing book are State Department cables from the U.S. Embassy Moscow that paint a more complex and less personalized portrait of the causes and consequences of the October events, the Supreme Soviet’s resistance to Yeltsin’s rule by decree, popular discontent with radical economic change, Yeltsin’s decision for military force, and the Russian electoral landscape. The electronic briefing book publishes for the first time a prescient memo written by the former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, for the new Clinton officials in January 1993, comparing the Yeltsin/parliament struggle to the English parliament’s historic efforts to rein in royal power, only after which could political parties emerge. Braithwaite’s memo also criticizes the Yeltsin reformers for their failure to address Russia’s “rustbowl” industries, backbone of the opposition to Western-oriented economic “reform,” while acknowledging that no one in the West had much of an answer either. The Web posting features two oral history accounts, one from then-Russian Defense Minister General Pavel Grachev about his specific role, including his orders to fire the tank cannon that set off a “beautiful fire” that blackened the White House, and the other from then-U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering who believed the U.S. had “no choice” but to support Yeltsin. Already discussing the 30th anniversary, Russian media such as the leading independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the news website Meduza.ru (now based in Europe rather than in Moscow because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) are publishing multiple articles, historic photos and video footage of the events. The Novaya Gazeta headline – “How Russia’s autocracy started” – argues that October 1993 was the crucial turning point towards Putin’s repressive centralized system today. |
