Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #39, Winter '94.
THE SAD TRUTH
-includes "Yeltsin's coup" by Mikhail Tsovma, "Bloody Monday" by
Laure Akai.

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                               Yeltsin's coup:=20
                   Obviously a provocation by the government
                               By Mikhail Tsovma

 Two days after the storming of the parliament in Moscow gunshots
are still heard around Moscow and this ``obvious fact'' of the
existence of Communist fighters and ``snipers'' pushes people to
embrace the martial law, the curfew and police and military
troops loyal to president Yeltsin as the saviors of peace and
calmness of Muscovites. This situation, of course, is exactly
what Yeltsin was looking for when he started his coup d'etat on
September 21st and there are clear signs that he=FEor at least
somebody from his team=FE was the person who worked hard to reach
this result.

 The media reports that Communist fighters and ``snipers''
somehow leaked through the lines of police and troops surrounding
the White House on the day the parliament was stormed and caused
many deaths among the government troops and civilians. Gunfire is
heard in various districts of Moscow, but it is quite likely
that, like in Moscow's northern suburb of Otradnoye (in the
evening of October 5), policemen are just firing machine guns
into the air. What is it if not an outright provocation designed
to make people believe they need more law and order.

 Even the Moscow-based English-language periodical, Moscow
Tribune, which seems to undoubtedly believe in the stories about
Communist snipers, published several pieces revealing how the
forces of law and order were too reluctant when dealing with the
rioters on Sunday, October 3, during the clashes on Oktyabrskaya
and Smolenskaya Square. ``We've got other goals. We have other
orders,'' a police officer is reported to have said when asked
why the police, at least 120 strong, had acted slowly and done so
little to stop 40 rioters when the clashes were just beginning.
(John Helmer, ``Moscow Crisis: The First Spark,'' Moscow Tribune,
Oct.5.)

 Sometime later, when the riot was gathering its strength,
Muscovites witnessed demonstrators forcing police to retreat,
attacking them with their own equipment and fighting their way
over the Moscow river and across the Ring Road to parliament.
(Reuters, Oct.3) The police troops that were blocking the bridge
across the Moscow River were rather poorly equipped (helmets,
shields and rubber batons only) and stood in the line only
one-man deep. It's worth mentioning that during less dramatic
oppositional demonstra- tions in Moscow, police forces were much
more heavily present and were acting much less fearfully,
managing to stop the demonstrators where and when needed. An hour
and a half after the beginning of this demonstration (time that
is usually more than enough for the police to predict the
movement of the demonstrators and block the streets where needed)
police troops once again were defeated on Smolenskaya Square not
far from the White House.

 These victories inspired the opposition to storm the TV center
later in the evening, which somehow appeared to be unprotected.
Soon after the beginning of this attack Yeltsin declared a state
of emergency in Moscow, the government declared that it has been
forced to use force ``to end the actions of political
adventurists an is doing everything possible to avert mass
bloodshed.'' (Reuters, Oct.3) At 7:56 P.M. Moscow mayor Yuri
Luzhkov blamed ``bandits'' for the deaths of two policemen and
two interior minis- try soldiers and the media reported that
troops loyal to president were brought to Moscow.

WHO WERE THE SNIPERS?

 One of the keystones of the media campaign on October 4 were
``the snipers,'' that is armed putschists who spread all over the
city and whose numbers it was impossible to guess. One of the
doctors who was evacuating the injured from the parliament was
interviewed by Russian TV and said that there were a consider-
able number of people shot near the White House in the morning
and during the day right in their hearts, necks and heads. This
was presented by the media as the evidence of the crimes of the
putschists. In fact it is, but it appears more grounded to say
that these were the people killed by the KGB and special police
troops loyal to the government. Though there were quite a lot of
arms in the White House, there were hardly any ``snipers'', that
is people specially trained in shooting, among its defenders. It
is more probable that those who were shot were shot by the
snipers of KGB. (During the August 1991 coup there was much worry
about whether these special KGB troops would take the side of
Yeltsin or not.) Since none of these special troops declared
their loyalty to the parliament, it's hardly likely that the
``snipers'' who killed people in dozens around the parliament
were Communists.

 Witnesses that were among the spectators of the storming of the
White House on Oct. 4, report that there were government snipers
who were shooting ``in all directions'' (Moscow Tribune, Oct. 5)
and particularly at civilians. The October 6 issue of Izvestiya,
Russia's biggest newspaper, featured a story ``Troops Near The
White House Shot Everything That Moves,'' describing how the
soldiers started shooting at the windows and roofs of buildings
around the parliament if they saw anybody moving there. This went
on for about two days and none of the specially trained
anti-terrorist detachments of KGB were involved in the fight
against the mythical snipers.


 During the ``sniper incident'' on Novy Arbat (the only one
described in the media as far as I know) soldiers from APCs shot
in various directions, including the house on the embankment of
the Moscow River near the parliament where dozens of people and
TV crews gathered to see the fight. After the people on Novy
Arbat tried to escape into one of the courtyards they were met by
gunshots from the neighboring streets and the windows of the
houses that composed the courtyard=FEthe area was totally in
control of the police troops and there were no ``Communist
fighters'' there.

 It is also interesting to learn how it happened that
considerable numbers of armed people leaked from the White House
and spread around the city. The parliament was blocked from all
sides and since its defenders didn't have tanks it was almost
impossible for them to get out...until they were let out by the
government. The story about ``unprofessional actions of the
police and the military'' is an old one and it is usually used by
the authorities to justify more repression and the use of more
troops. This is what happened during the clash between communists
and the police on the 1st of May this year. This is what happened
on October 3 when the authorities let the opposition ``defeat''
special police troops on the streets of Moscow. This is probably
how they provoked more violence during the storming of the White
House.

 Currently the media reports dozens of cases of journalists being
arrested by the forces of law and order, severely beaten up, held
in Lefortovo KGB prison (together with the leaders of parliament
and dozens of civilians, including chil- dren), their films
exposed. (Izvestiya, October 6) I doubt that any of the policemen
or military will be punished for these actions=FEthey feel that
this is their time and that they can do whatever they want
without being punished or anything like that. This is what they
were doing for years, but what's going on now is just outrageous.=20
And it's not just the police and the military since every other
high-ranking ``democrat'' is trying to take revenge on his
opponents. Yeltsin had his fun destroying the parliament,
Moscow's mayor Luzhkov gladly witnessed (and sanc- tioned, I'm
sure) arrests and beatings of Moscow City Soviet deputies that
had bothered him a lot concerning the legal grounds of his
multiple political and business activities. Heads of local
administrations are disbanding troublesome Soviets in their
regions. In the situation where there are virtually no political
organizations that really represent the interests of different
social groups, the Soviets were almost the only opposition to the
governmental course, but with their disbanding, oppositional
organizations and papers closed, and martial law and censorship
introduced, the road for Yeltsin's triumphant elections is clean.
Long live the real freedom of choice, the choice between the Big
Brother and yourself!

POSTSCRIPT

 Vecherniya Moskva, the Moscow evening paper, on October 6
reported that none of the president's decrees implemented
censorship and that the censorship that existed was dictated by
the needs of the moment, and that they won't work anymore.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta, one of the pro-democratic, pro-Yeltsin
papers appeared on that day with about half a page of blank space
plus some published information lacking beginning sentences. The
editor-in-chief of the hysterically pro-governmental Moskovsky
Komsomolets said on TV that blank spaces in some of the papers is
the fault of the editors. He also went as far as to declare that
there will be no blank spaces in his paper because they publish
the truth and nothing else but the truth, and the truth can't be
censored!

 This article is being distributed by the Labour Information
Centre KAS-KOR, Moscow.

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                                Bloody Monday:=20
                        Yeltsin's excuse for repression
                                 By Laure Akai

 Many people, including the mainstream English press in Moscow,
wonder why the Omon (special police) didn't take more precautions
at the Ostankino television center, and why they did such a bad
job at simple crowd control. It was known for four days that the
opposition was planning to take Ostankino and when they finally
arrived, they rallied for over an hour before the storming began.
Troops arrived at the scene much later. Others, including many
pro-Yeltsinites, asked how Yegor Gaidar could go on TV and urge
people to fight back. The answers are not clear. Of course people
were somewhat afraid of the well-armed White House defendants.
But there is more and more speculation that part of the events
were provoked by pro-Yeltsin troops to rally public resentment
against the opposition.

 Myself and several reliable people I know were witnesses to some
rather odd events that we think was part of a provocation. For
example, some time around 6 or 7PM, before the tanks all started
to converge on the White House, I and two friends were standing
outside the Mayor's building across the street from the White
House. We were completely surrounded on all sides by Yeltsin's
troops. (Only after some while, as the tanks began to roll did
they try to disperse us.) Every once and a while gunfire was
breaking out, sometimes in the direction of the White House,
sometimes in our direction. We witnessed a woman near us take out
a pistol from her pocket and begin shooting in the air. It seemed
entirely strange to us and we weren't sure who she was or what
she was shooting at.

 There was so much going on that surely few people noticed this.
Then she slowly walked to the blown out 1st floor windows of the
Mayor's building. We watched very intently because we thought she
might be a communist or a nation- alist of sorts (although she
was too well dressed) and we thought she might try to shoot one
of the soldiers. She instead started to talk to one of them and
entered the building from the side.

 At this time the tanks started rolling so we went up Novy Arbat
St. to the Garden Ring Road to try to find a telephone. Before we
got to the Garden Ring Road, soldiers were trying to get us to
run and create some hysteria amongst the few people who were
there. On the Garden Ring Road there were a few hundred
spectators. While one of us went to find a phone, I and a friend
watched. Suddenly guns started firing down the road. We ran
through an archway into a courtyard. We couldn't go further
because there was gunfire into the courtyard where the corner
house ended, and where there was an alley between that corner
house and the next building on Novy Arbat St. This fire from the
alley way could have only come from the troops that we had passed
and who were trying to creating a panic less than 5 minutes
earlier. They were the only people there.

 Dozens of people tried to run into the courtyard, only to find
that there was lots of gunfire there, so they were trapped in a
small space where the corner building curved around from Garden
Ring onto Novy Arbat St. The gunfire was apparently approaching.
We noticed that there were people shooting from out of windows
into the courtyard. I was wondering wheat the hell they were
shooting at. We finally made a run for it through the courtyard,
dodging bullets. I looked behind and saw something fall from the
sky into the courtyard behind me. We ran further and turned back
onto the Garden Ring Road.

 There we witnessed general panic. There were lots of guns being
fired at the top floors of buildings and also into the crowd. I
was fairly upset and wondering why Yeltsin's troops were firing
into the crowd. One person said that they are trying to disperse
people. I thought this is a stupid way to do it, but I accepted
that explanation for a while. Then it occurred to me that the
only people who could be firing into the courtyard at ground
level were Yeltsin's troops. The local English language paper
reported the incident. The TV reported sniper fire in several
areas of the city and claimed that this was done by opposition
rebels on the loose. They are using this fear to justify things
like martial law. But after hearing more and more people report
unusual incidents, and incidents similar to mine, I'm beginning
to wonder.

 Sure there were armed rebels on the loose. Many White House
supporters went home on the night of the 3rd and were not able to
return. When the White House was besieged by Yeltsin's troops,
there were apparently several attempts made by groups of people
to get into the territory of the White House. (In the morning
this was virtually impossible, unless you were a journalist.) I
had assumed that the people firing from the windows into the
courtyards were the opposition. I was aggravated by the fact that
they were firing into the courtyard. I wondered how they got into
the buildings, if any of them actually resided in that swank
neighborhood or if they broke into apartments.

 At this point however I think that it was not the opposition
which was doing the firing into that courtyard. They were not
running around the streets firing at innocent people, and as far
as I know, there were many instances of them trying to get people
out of the line of fire. They generally operated by selecting
their targets and going directly for them. Why would they fire
into the courtyard and not in the other direction, into Yeltsin's
troops? And what happened to these people up there in the
building? They weren't killed or arrested; the media would have
shown them and labeled them murderers. That particular house was
not even fired upon or stormed. Yeltsin's troops, which were
stationed right outside this house on Novy Arbat St. decided not
to fire up at the windows from which gunfire was coming, but
rather into the courtyard into which people, including
bystanders, were fleeing.

 Another weird incident: two different journalists reported
seeing 10 militia men shooting into the air in the Otradnoye
section, just north of Moscow. Why were they there and why were
they firing into the air? They suggested that perhaps they were
trying to create a panic. There are already dozens of reports of
such irregularities. Of course little has made it into the
mainstream media, except in the English language press, which
isn't sold on the streets, which almost no Russians read, and
which hasn't been subjected to censorship. In the Moscow Tribune
on Oct. 5 there was a very vivid description of the beginning of
the action on Sunday Oct. 3. (Neither English language paper
appears on Monday.) Apparently the violence was started by about
10 people who ran into the street from out of a crowd of 40
demonstrators. 120 Omonovtsy (special police) stood without
reacting. They weren't even wearing helmets. When a reporter from
the Tribune asked why they were doing nothing, he was told
``We've got other goals. We have other orders.'' Only after 45
minutes, when the crowd had grown substantially in size, did they
act, and only then half-heartedly.

 It is obvious to anybody who has seen these troops in action
that they deliberately let the crowd gather and storm the Mayor's
building and the White House. Just a few days earlier, when they
arrived at the White House, they had an almost airtight seal on
the place, and did a much better job of kicking ass and
preventing a much larger and better armed crowd from going
anywhere near the White House. As a matter of fact, in this case
they ran away from the demonstrators. At Ostankino, tanks that
were headed to the area turned back just before the storming.
Why? It has even conservatives and moderates like the Moscow
Tribune asking, ``Could this have been a trap to encourage the
violent elements on parliament's side to provide the
justification the government needed to respond with the force it
had sworn not to initiate?'' [John Helmer, ``Moscow Crisis:The
First Spark,'' Moscow Tribune, Oct. 5, 1993].

 You bet this was a trap. What better way to justify the violence
and the censorship, political repression and so on that followed?
Also, by allowing these people to storm buildings, they had a
concrete target to bombard. Of course lots of innocent bystanders
also got hurt in the events. This too was part of the
provocation. How did I and my friends get right to the seen of
the action during crossfire? The soldiers pointed out the route
for us. How come pedestrians were allowed to come so near to
fighting? Was it that the soldiers couldn't control the crowd?
They usually do a pretty good job completely blocking traffic
when they want to. How come on Oct. 5, troops were shooting at
``snipers'' on Novy Arbat street, but put up absolutely no
obstacle to pedestrian traffic? As far as the last question is
concerned, the answer is simple: for all the bullets that
Yeltsin's troops were firing up at rooftops, no bullets were
being fired back down.

 One man who witnessed this yesterday asked, ``How can it be that
they've been firing two days already and haven't caught the
snipers? It doesn't seem like anyone's there. And how could they
let people walk the streets like that?'' Izvestia reports that it
is the city police and the regular army who are the only ones
being used to shoot at the snipers. They are not specially
trained at this. There are however many, many special troops that
are. Where are they? Izvestia got past the censors with an
article entitled ``Troops Near the White House Shot At Everything
That Moved.'' This is in fact what they did, but also what they
shouldn't have done.

 Now people are trying to justify this, saying that undoubtedly
there were armed insurgents in the crowd, and that the people
there were looking for trouble. But this was not the case. Now
they keep making up stories about ``snipers on the loose'' and
how communists were firing indiscriminantly into crowds of
innocent people. They cannot hide the fact that they shot into
the crowd so they have to make up justifications for their
actions and they blame the whole situation on the inhuman
insurgents who put the civilian population in jeopardy.

 In fact it was Yeltsin and Grachev who put the crowd in danger,
whose forces shot onlookers. More and more witnesses are coming
forward to say that many of these ``snipers'' were in fact KGB or
some similar Yeltsinite force. For example, the snipers at the
Mezdunarodnaya Hotel were let in past security. Would the
security guards at this swank hotel which houses many shops and
is adjacent to the Trade Center, housing many multi-national
offices, have let opposition ``snipers'' through? If the hotel
was stormed, how come there isn't a single report of it in the
media? How come the media then describes the ``snipers'' at the
hotels as part of the insurgents? More than likely, the snipers
who were on the heavily guarded Hotel Mir across from the White
House were also from the government. Also, residents of the
buildings from which snipers were shooting have also come forward
to say that these were government snipers, but none of this has
been reported in the media.

 Yeltsin has a lot of blood on his hands, especially the blood of
the people killed in anyone of the ``sniper incidents'' that were
manufactured to create public outrage and fear and to provide him
with reasons to justify his actions and political repression.