MOSCOW: Key players in the events of October 1993, when the then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, led tanks against his opponents barricaded inside the Russian parliament, have come forward on the 10th anniversary to expose how the Kremlin engineered a violent confrontation to justify repressing its rivals.

Officials and participants today paint a different picture of the clashes that began with rioting on October 2 and led to tanks rolling up to the parliament building on October 4. The Kremlin and western governments portrayed the unrest as a liberal regime suppressing angry Communist hardliners and rightwingers. Yet 10 years after the bloodshed, in which at least 123 people were killed, Russia is exploding the myth that the crackdown was anything other than a putsch against Mr Yeltsin’s political opponents.

The unrest was sparked by his decision in late September to dissolve a parliament increasingly opposed to his economic reforms. He also scrapped the constitution, replacing it with another that gave him near-monarchic executive powers. Rebel members of parliament (MPs), comprising Communists, liberals and fascists, responded by barricading themselves into the parliament.

The self-appointed leader of the rebels, the vice-president, Alexander Rutskoi, appealed to Muscovites to come out on to the streets to protest; few did, and it was clear the parliamentary rebels had overestimated their support.

After 10 days of siege, during which water and electricity were cut to the Russian White House, a crowd of protesters attacked police lines around the building. Mr Rutskoi then urged them — together with General Albert Makashov, who led the rebels’ armed contingent — to go on to the TV centre at Ostankino, on October 3. It was protected by a group of elite soldiers loyal to Mr Yeltsin. The TV centre was significantly damaged, and stopped broadcasting.

Next morning Mr Yeltsin felt he had enough bloodshed and chaos on the streets of Moscow to justify him sending tanks to crush the rebellious parliament. Even so, most commanders refused to let their units be used in what they saw as a political fight. After hours of shooting, troops entered the building at 5pm, arresting Mr Rutskoi and other leaders.

At the time the west was keen to emphasize how its favoured reformer, Mr Yeltsin, had fought off a coup by crazed Communist hardliners (having previously led resistance to the Stalinist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 that ended the Soviet Union). Yet many questions went unanswered, and over 10 years suspicions have grown that much of the violence was inspired by Mr Yeltsin’s troops and aides, in an attempt to justify suppression of parliament. This permitted the president to change the constitution and enforce his economic programme, which essentially sold off state industrial assets to an elite who kept him in power.

There is now considerable evidence that Mr Yeltsin’s men fomented the violence. Leonid Proshkin, chief investigator for high-profile cases at the prosecutor’s office who led an investigation into the events of October 1993, told the London- based Guardian newspaper in an exclusive interview that a column of pro-Yeltsin security men, backed up by six armoured vehicles, had accompanied Gen Makashov’s group of armed protesters all the way from the besieged White House to Ostankino, clearly “allowing them to reach the TV centre”.

The investigation showed TV broadcasts had been turned off before the siege of Ostankino, not by Gen Makashov as suggested by the Kremlin. The idea of an assault, Mr Proshkin said, was “impossible” because the parliamentary protesters were heavily outnumbered. “When the so-called assault began there were 450 heavily armed policemen inside the station, including their elite units and six armoured vehicles, while the attackers had 20 Kalashnikovs and one grenade launcher,” he said.

Mr Proshkin said the investigation had been obstructed by the Kremlin: “We were not permitted to investigate events on days other than October 3 and 4. We were not allowed to interrogate the heads of the (pro-Yeltsin) Moscow police or the Moscow security ministry.”

His team had also not been able to examine the guns of the pro-Yeltsin forces to see if they matched bullets found in the bodies of the dead.

Alexei Kazannik, prosecutor general at the time told Moskovski Novosti newspaper this week: “From the third day of my work (investigating the clashes) the president was permanently calling me, groaning down the phone, ‘Why is this man, or that man, still free?’”

The events sparked off a chain of political and economic changes that many blame for Russia’s current state of mild-chaos and political authoritarianism. A poll of Russians conducted last Saturday showed 27 per cent said parliament had been right, 14 per cent backed Mr Yeltsin, and 20 per cent believed that everyone was wrong.

Many see the events as a turning point after which Mr Yeltsin abandoned democracy in order to save his skin.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.