Yeltsin and Rutskoy's 1993 power struggle

Boris Yeltsin and Alexander Rutskoy’s 1993 power struggle transformed a constitutional confrontation into an armed siege of the Moscow White House. Rutskoy, once Yeltsin’s vice president, was installed by the rebel parliament as president in Yeltsin’s place; Yeltsin answered by surrounding the building and ultimately retaking it by force. The episode’s defining contradiction is that both camps invoked legality, while the outcome was decided not by a settled agreement about democratic legitimacy but by the assault and its casualties.

From former allies to rival claimants

The confrontation grew out of Yeltsin’s conflict with a hostile parliament. Dissolving such a parliament was a familiar political maneuver, but it carried a further risk: if new elections failed to produce a more compliant assembly, would Yeltsin accept the democratic result? The book presents that question as unresolved even while Yeltsin was still speaking publicly. The crisis was therefore not simply a contest between an elected executive and a rebellious legislature; it also tested whether the executive would submit to the political consequences of its own appeal to democracy.

The sides could not be reduced to a clean division between democrats and authoritarians. Among the patriots gathering at the Moscow White House were people the narrator describes as fascists, but they presented themselves as defenders of constitutional order. Their charge—that the democrats might impose dictatorship in the name of defending a democracy that no one wanted—was not, in the account, wholly baseless. The complication was embodied in the leaders of the rebellion: Ruslan Khasbulatov, president of the Duma, and Rutskoy, vice president of the Russian Republic and a former military leader in Afghanistan, had stood beside Yeltsin at the same building two years earlier. Rutskoy had also been part of Yegor Gaidar’s team, even as he attacked Gaidar with a mocking nickname drawn from the prime minister’s golf photograph.

The rival presidencies

On the evening of the confrontation, Rutskoy and Khasbulatov called an extraordinary session of the parliament Yeltsin had dissolved. The assembly declared its own dissolution unconstitutional, deposed Yeltsin, named Rutskoy president, and occupied the Moscow White House. It claimed to represent the people and said it would leave only if forced out at the end of a bayonet. Rebel legislators and a crowd of patriots gathered inside and around the building, turning the rival claims to authority into a physical standoff.

Eduard Limonov joined the occupiers and spent the night moving excitedly from meeting to meeting through cigarette smoke. Those inside talked, shouted, drank, wrote communiqués, and began forming a new government. Limonov found the discussion of dividing up ministries premature: to him, the urgent business was preparing for the siege he believed was coming. The contrast between political organization and impending violence became a feature of the occupation. The rebels were already imagining a government, but had not yet resolved the basic question of whether the army would recognize their president.

At three in the morning, Limonov gained access to Rutskoy’s highest-floor office, despite soldiers guarding the door. Rutskoy, in army fatigues and under pressure, received a visitor he barely knew. Limonov addressed him as president, a form of address that appeared to please the general. Rutskoy had been calling military bases to learn where the army stood. When Limonov asked how matters looked, Rutskoy answered with a word that could mean anything from going well to going badly. The uncertainty was central: even the question of which side represented the law depended on whether Yeltsin or Rutskoy was recognized as the legitimate president.

Persuasion, siege, and missed return

The United States, Britain, Germany, and France had declared support for Yeltsin, and the news seemed to unsettle Rutskoy. Limonov urged him to see Western backing as predictable and argued that the real test would be decided inside the Moscow White House, not in diplomatic statements or military bases elsewhere. He pressed Rutskoy to distribute weapons. When the general said it was premature, Limonov invoked the hesitation of social democrats in 1917 and Vladimir Lenin’s readiness to act, insisting that the moment had come. He challenged Rutskoy to choose whether history would remember him as a great man or a coward.

The appeal overreached. Rutskoy responded by asking who Limonov was and telling him to leave military decisions to specialists. Limonov was appalled to be dismissed as an intellectual; Rutskoy ended the audience. The encounter exposes the distance between the two men even while Limonov was trying to strengthen Rutskoy’s authority. He offered the general a revolutionary interpretation of events and a language of historical destiny, but Rutskoy retained control over military decisions and rejected the pressure.

The next day Limonov left the building to shower and change at friends’ home and to urge Dugin to join the patriots. Dugin preferred to watch events on television. By the time Limonov returned, Yeltsin had ordered electricity and telephone service cut and deployed the Special Purpose Mobile Unit of the Russian Interior Ministry; the siege had begun and the entrances were blocked. Limonov spent the night trying to get through, slipping between military trucks and soldiers carrying machine guns. Loudspeakers called on the insurgents to surrender, while the building’s candlelit windows showed only flickering lights and shadowy figures.

The siege lasted ten days. Limonov bitterly regretted leaving, convinced that the men inside would soon pay dearly and that he should have been among them. From behind police barricades, he watched television coverage that repeatedly presented the insurgents as fascists and madmen and showed demonstrations and a concert in support of Yeltsin. The cameras did not show the inside of the besieged building. The gap between what the audience was shown and what it had to imagine sharpened the conflict over who could define the events: the government had control of the broadcast account, while the fate of those inside remained largely unseen.

Assault and disputed aftermath

At dawn, Limonov and Taras Rabko emerged from a park and reached a subway station, where they learned that tanks surrounded the Moscow White House. The sense that victory had been close gave way to the realization that the rebellion had lost. Rutskoy, who had said he would kill himself like Hitler in a bunker, surrendered that afternoon. The delay, the narrator argues, cost lives: by the time he gave up, there had been 150 casualties. The assault then spread through the building. The Special Purpose Mobile Unit of the Russian Interior Ministry hunted the besieged through corridors, offices, and toilets; some were beaten, and some killed.

The official register recorded hundreds dead and thousands injured, including not only insurgents but passersby, elderly people, and children who had come to watch. Limonov and Rabko feared arrests in nationalist refuges and went into hiding in Tver, where they spent two weeks in Rabko’s mother’s small apartment watching television. Their retreat followed the defeat of Rutskoy’s claim, but the public interpretation of the conflict remained unsettled. Reports that had presented the rebels as fascists gave way to comparisons with the Paris Commune, with the roles of Communards and Versaillais reversed. The distinction between progressive and reactionary, or good and bad, no longer seemed self-evident.

The aftermath thus preserved the contradiction that had shaped the confrontation from the start. Democracy might have been saved, but the word itself had become difficult to use without qualification. Andrei Sinyavsky, a dissident and committed democrat, expressed anger and despair that truth now seemed to belong to people he had always considered his enemies. The power struggle ended with Yeltsin’s forces in control and Rutskoy’s rival presidency defeated; it did not end the struggle over what the defeat meant, or over whether the victorious side’s claim to defend democracy could survive the violence used to secure it.