1993 Russian constitutional crisis

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 4th of October 1993, Russian army tanks opened fire on the country's own parliament building in Moscow. The target was the House of Soviets, known as the White House, where hundreds of lawmakers had been barricaded for nearly two weeks. By the time the shooting stopped, at least 147 people were dead. Russia called it the "Black October."

  The man who ordered the shelling was Boris Yeltsin, the country's elected president. The people inside the building included Russia's acting president, its Supreme Soviet chairman, and dozens of legislators who had voted to impeach Yeltsin just days earlier. How did a democratic Russia, barely two years old, arrive at this moment? What was really at stake in those thirteen days, and whose version of Russia survived?

• 2. A Constitution Under Strain

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  The Soviet Union formally dissolved on the 26th of December 1991, and Russia inherited an awkward problem: a 1978 constitution written for a communist state. That document had been patched with amendments in April 1991 to allow for an independent presidency, but it still placed the Congress of People's Deputies above all other institutions in Russian law. Yeltsin had been elected president in July 1991, and from the start, his authority rested on a legal foundation that his own legislature could rewrite at will.

  Yeltsin's economic program took effect on the 2nd of January 1992. Prices immediately skyrocketed, government spending was cut, and heavy new taxes arrived almost simultaneously. The GDP fell 14.5 percent in 1992 alone, then another 8.7 percent the year after. Vice President Alexander Rutskoy, Yeltsin's own running mate in 1991, publicly called the reform agenda "economic genocide."

  By late 1992, the speaker of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, had also moved into open opposition. Parliament refused to confirm Yegor Gaidar, the architect of the shock therapy program, as prime minister during its December session. Yeltsin responded at the podium on the 10th of December with a direct challenge: he called for a referendum asking Russians to choose between his course and the Congress's course. The two sides agreed on a compromise on the 12th of December, including a national referendum to be held in April 1993, but the ceasefire was fragile.

• 3. The Referendum Gamble

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  On the 20th of March 1993, Yeltsin went on national television and announced something extraordinary. He had signed a decree placing himself under a "special regime," assuming extraordinary executive power until a referendum could be held. Valery Zorkin, chairman of the Constitutional Court, immediately condemned the move as unconstitutional, as did Rutskoy and the Prosecutor-General.

  The ninth Congress of People's Deputies opened on the 26th of March and moved directly to an impeachment vote. Yeltsin narrowly survived; the vote fell 72 short of the 689 required for a two-thirds majority. Parliament then tried a different approach: it set new, more restrictive rules for the referendum, requiring Yeltsin to win support from 50 percent of the entire electorate, not just those who voted. The Constitutional Court stepped in and overruled that requirement on the two core questions.

  On the 25th of April, a majority of voters expressed confidence in Yeltsin and called for new legislative elections. Yeltsin declared it a mandate. But he lacked any constitutional mechanism to act on it. The parliament simply refused to dissolve itself, and the standoff deepened through the summer. In July, the Supreme Soviet passed resolutions asserting Russian federal status over Sevastopol, prompting Ukraine to file a complaint with the UN Security Council. A commentator in the newspaper Izvestiya captured the situation in August: "The President issues decrees as if there were no Supreme Soviet, and the Supreme Soviet suspends decrees as if there were no President."

• 4. Dissolution and Defiance

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  On the 1st of September, Yeltsin moved to suspend Vice President Rutskoy, citing corruption accusations. Three days later the Supreme Soviet rejected the suspension. On the 18th of September, Yeltsin appointed Gaidar, the man parliament had already forced out of office in 1992, as a deputy prime minister. The Supreme Soviet found this unacceptable.

  Then on the 21st of September, Yeltsin dissolved both the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet by decree. Article 121.6 of the 1978 constitution stated plainly that presidential powers could not be used to dissolve elected organs of state power, and that using them for such a purpose would cause those powers to cease immediately. Parliament held an all-night session. The Constitutional Court ruled that Yeltsin had violated the constitution. Khasbulatov chaired the session that declared the dissolution null and void, proclaimed Rutskoy acting president, and formally impeached Yeltsin.

  Rutskoy dismissed three key ministers: Pavel Grachev at defense, Nikolay Golushko at security, and Viktor Yerin at interior. Russia now had two men claiming the presidency and two parallel sets of ministers. On the 24th of September, Yeltsin cut off electricity, telephone service, and hot water to the parliament building. By the 28th of September, the Interior Ministry had sealed it off with barricades and wire. The Interior Ministry estimated that by the 1st of October, 600 armed men with a large weapons cache had joined Yeltsin's opponents inside.

• 5. The Battle for Ostankino

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  Negotiations continued until the 2nd of October, with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II serving as mediator. The talks collapsed the following afternoon. On the 3rd of October, pro-parliament demonstrators broke through police cordons around the White House. Rutskoy appeared on the balcony and urged the crowd to form battalions, seize the mayor's offices, and march on Ostankino, the national television center.

  Khasbulatov called from the same balcony for the storming of the Kremlin and the imprisonment of Yeltsin in Matrosskaya Tishina prison. At 16:00, Yeltsin signed a decree declaring a state of emergency in Moscow. By evening, General Albert Makashov led pro-parliament forces toward Ostankino. Interior Ministry and OMON units were waiting. A pitched battle followed. Part of the television complex was heavily damaged. Forty-six people were killed in the fighting at Ostankino, according to official figures, including Terry Michael Duncan, an American lawyer who had come to Moscow to establish a law firm and was killed while trying to help the wounded.

  Russian state television went off the air during the fighting. When broadcasting resumed late that evening, deputy prime minister Yegor Gaidar appeared on screen and called on supporters of democracy to rally in defense of Yeltsin "so that the country would not be turned yet again into a huge concentration camp." Public figures including Grigory Yavlinsky and Yury Luzhkov answered the call. Several hundred of Yeltsin's supporters spent that night in front of the Moscow City Hall, not yet knowing that the army, which had remained neutral throughout the crisis, was about to decide the outcome.

• 6. Tanks at the White House

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  The plan to assault the White House came from Captain Gennady Zakharov. Ten tanks would fire at the upper floors, creating panic while minimizing casualties. Five were positioned at Novy Arbat bridge, the other five at Pavlik Morozov playground behind the building. Special forces from the Vympel and Alpha units would then storm the building. Rutskoy, as a former general, personally appealed to some of his ex-colleagues, but the parliament's supporters made a tactical error: they attempted to recruit only high-ranking officers with existing parliamentary ties, never reaching out to lower-ranking soldiers or junior officers.

  At 8:00 am on the 4th of October, tanks began shelling the White House, punching visible holes in its facade. Yeltsin's press service simultaneously broadcast a declaration from the president calling the resistance "a pre-planned armed rebellion" organized by "Communist revanchists" and "Fascist leaders." By noon, troops were moving through the building floor by floor. Rutskoy's plea to Air Force pilots to bomb the Kremlin, broadcast by the Echo of Moscow radio station, received no response.

  By mid-afternoon, street resistance was suppressed. The official death toll, presented on the 27th of July 1994 by the Prosecutor General's investigation team, recorded 147 dead: 45 civilians and 1 serviceman at Ostankino, and 77 civilians plus 24 military personnel in the White House area. Official Russian statistics added 437 wounded. The events became the deadliest street fighting in Moscow since the October Revolution of 1917.

• 7. Power Consolidated

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  The day after the assault, Izvestia published an open letter signed by 42 prominent Russian writers calling on Yeltsin to ban communist and nationalist organizations, shut down several named newspapers including Den and Sovetskaya Rossiya and Pravda, and strip legitimacy from the Constitutional Court itself. Yeltsin moved quickly. On the 5th of October he banned leftist and nationalist organizations and suspended those specific publications, though they would eventually resume publishing. Zorkin resigned from the Constitutional Court chairmanship. On the 15th of October, Yeltsin ordered a December referendum on a new constitution.

  On the 23rd of February 1994, the newly elected State Duma granted amnesty to all individuals involved in the September-October events, including Rutskoy and Khasbulatov, who had been charged with organizing mass disorders and imprisoned on the 15th of October. Criminal proceedings were eventually placed into the archives in early 1995.

  A VCIOM poll taken in the immediate aftermath of October 1993 found that 70 percent of respondents thought Yeltsin's use of military force was justified. When VCIOM-A repeated the same question in 2010, only 41 percent agreed, with 59 percent opposed. The miner unions that had backed Yeltsin during the crisis later admitted, by the time of the 1998 labour strikes, that they had not properly understood what was at stake in 1993.

• 8. The Constitution That Survived

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  On the 12th of December 1993, Russians voted on Yeltsin's new constitution and simultaneously elected a new parliament. The constitution passed, ending the legal order defined by the 1978 Russian SFSR document. But the parliament elected that same day delivered a stark repudiation of Yeltsin's economic program. Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party captured 23 percent of the vote. Gaidar's Russia's Choice received 15.5 percent. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation received 12.4 percent.

  The new constitution concentrated power in the presidency in ways that observers at the time found difficult to imagine surviving Yeltsin personally. The president could appoint a prime minister even over parliamentary objection, could dismiss the government and dissolve parliament under specified conditions, and could not be impeached for violating the constitution. The bicameral legislature's initial term was restricted to two years.

  General Pavel Grachev, who had demonstrated loyalty during the crisis by commanding the tank assault, became a key political figure despite corruption charges that followed him for years. Grachev's trajectory pointed toward something the 1993 crisis had made plain: the instruments of coercion had decided the contest, and they would hold a claim on Yeltsin's future.