'both sides were shooting crazily': canadian journo recalls russia’s 1993 crisis

And the next day is hard to describe. It wasn’t just tanks on the bridge, you know the bridge across the river between what was then called Kalinin Prospect and where the Ukraine hotel is, I

think it was called the Kalinin Bridge in those days. Maybe it’s Novy Arbat. Anyway, there were tanks on the bridge, about four of them, shelling carefully with really good precision

shelling. They didn’t kill a lot of people with that, but they made their point and they terrified the people inside the White House. Inside the White House, I guess, there was panic but as

I say I wasn’t inside. Outside there were bullets flying everywhere. It was really amazing that all around the area you can picture today – the Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya, the Novy Arbat, the

former Eastern European Community building which was the Moscow Mir’s HQ in those days – there were bullets flying everywhere. I’m a Canadian and I was working for Canadian press in those

days so my job was to cover the fate of every single Canadian in Russia at the time; and we had one casualty, a guy who was leaning out of his window on Kutuzovskiy Prospect, almost a

kilometer away watching the events, was hit by a spent bullet in the shoulder. That’s the kind of power that a Kalashnikov rifle has. People on both sides were just shooting crazily in every

direction at the peak of those events on October 4. SPUTNIK: WHAT KIND OF DIRECTION WERE YOU GETTING FROM HQ REGARDING YOUR JOB? FRED WEIR: In those days there were no cell phones, there

was no regular contact with my office. I had to go home to my own office and contact them by email or telephone. So, I wasn’t getting any direction. I was going and doing whatever I could

and that was to observe the events, to talk to people and I did my best. New technologies have made it possible to cover things right on the spot by the second [there’s] instant feedback. In

1993 we didn’t have that. SPUTNIK: WHAT KIND OF AN OUTCOME DID YOU EXPECT DURING THE CRISIS? I’M GUESSING THAT YOU ACTUALLY MENTIONED THAT KNOWING THAT RUTSKOI WAS A MILITARY MAN AND WHEN

HE LED THAT ASSAULT I SUPPOSE YOU HAD THE IMPRESSION THAT THAT’S WHEN THINGS MIGHT GET VIOLENT AND TAKE A DIFFERENT TURN? FRED WEIR: I’m an old-fashioned peacenik myself and I had great

forebodings at that point when I saw Rutskoi mobilizing people out in the courtyard because whole crowds had gathered right there in the  courtyard of the White House. He was lining them up 

and getting them in military ranks; they were being issued weapons. I had tremendous forebodings about that. In my own mind and in my own heart I sort of sided with the parliament and I

wrote that way too, you can look it up. You know, journalists, all our sins are in black and white. I was one of the few who raised a lot of questions about the Yeltsin narrative, about a

communist parliament standing in the way of democracy and reform, but anyway, that is beside the point. I did hope for a peaceful outcome. And for a few hours there on October 3 it looked

like there would be. The Congress of People’s Deputies which was the supreme legislative body of the country would pass some new laws and create a new paradigm of power in Russia, and that

civil war would be averted. Instead, we did have a civil war, it only lasted a day or so but its consequences were felt for a long time thereafter.  What happened there, you did have a

democracy, it was a really messy democracy. The constitutional system was indeed unreformed,  it was a kind of a mélange of a Soviet-era constitution. There was a constitutional reform

project underway in the Supreme Soviet in 1993. Its main architect was a man named Oleg Rumyantsev and he was writing a constitution that was a presidential constitution but with very strong

parliamentary powers. At some point, in March 1993, Yeltsin pulled out of that commission, he published his own version of a constitution which would be a very presidential-centric

constitution, and he had a referendum declared where there were three questions. I can’t remember exactly what they were, but they were basically doing you trust the parliament or do you

trust the president? And he narrowly won it. He used that referendum as his reasons for later in September dissolving the parliament, then besieging it and then shelling it into 

non-existence. Following that, since he won the war, he rewrote the constitution into the one that we pretty much have today where you have a very strong president. I mean, the parliament

isn’t without power but it basically is more decorative than active in terms of shaping policies and addressing the needs of the country. And that had immediate effects. For instance, in 

1994 Yeltsin was able to scrawl his name on a decree and start the first war in Chechnya. That would not have happened if he had to walk it by a parliament, but he didn’t. All the

privatizations, the loans for shares that came after he won the 1996 elections, all of that was done by presidential decree.