1993. Tank shooting to the White House of Parlament by president Boris Eltcin

What we know about this event?

Yeltsin got his way

people got a taste of ''free market'' and decided it dosent work, yeltsin had a army so he said it does work

Also, 25 year rule mate

>autism

Close enough

Once the USSR "ceased to exist", Russia went into a sort of coma. People at the time widely described it in surrealist terms. Some people, looking back, imagine as if the Soviet institutions immediately began plotting their revenge against the Liberals and Reformers, but it wasn't so much the case.

The two groups who were really active were the true believing Communists and the nationalists. They formed an ideological coalition, but the market reforms effectively cut them off from power.

Parliament/Deputies was controlled by the Soviet owner class, neither hardcore nationalists nor hardcore Leninists. But they didn't like Yeltsin or the Liberals, who had promptly removed them from ownership and privatized their companies.

Parliament didn't have much power but could put a spanner in the gears of Yeltsin's government and they did. Parliament also didn't have much influence on the people, so the unspoken alliance formed between the Red-Browns and the White House to disrupt Yeltsin's government and get Communists back into power, and eventually restoring some of the Empire.

That disruption starts with the attempted take over of Ostankino in the summer of 1992.

After a week, the Red-Brown seige ended. Yegor V. Yakovlev, the glasnost director for media, had repeatedly tried to compromise with the militants. Yakovlev was interested in developing a mainstream media, not controlled by the state but still imperial in its reach. He was old school glasnost, not Liberal reformer like Yeltsin's new power base.

So Yeltsin fired him. Yeltsin knew he needed a Pravda, and he put the media in the control of a loyalist. This made him appear defensive and on the retreat.

The Red-Browns wanted total control, but the Parliament saw a chance to start taking out Yeltsin men like Prime Minister Gaidar.

Their back and forth grinding down of Yeltsin's emergency powers continued for through the winter. The aim was to blame food shortages on the Yeltsin Reformers, but Yeltsin was a tough man and was going to fight back. He organized a major vote and threatened marshal law, and began rallying people, who were still squarely on his side. He wasn't the bloated man we think of him now, but a charming and strong, even attractive, man.

Eventually, Parliament believed they had the momentum and declared Yeltsin's powers "unconstitutional". Of course, there was no constitution to violate, but it sounded good. And then they tried to impeach him.

So Yeltsin and Parliament spent 1993 going back and forth, declaring each other invalid or impeached or unconstitutional, all with little to no actual effect. All this was so comical and became so ordinary that Yeltsin went on vacation.

Come September, Yeltsin rallied his in Red Square, and somehow, Yeltsin convinced Moscow that the impeachment failed. In reality, it didn't matter what Parliament said or if they elected a new President. Yeltsin continued to try to remove the Parliament, eventually resorting to a barricade and cutting off the White House's water and electricity supply.

In a reverse of the Ostankino seige, Parliament was deflated by their loss as they continued to meet in the dark building. But the Red-Browns were inspired to up the ante.

At the end of September, in the hours after Yeltsin had cut off Parliament from the rest of Russia, a nasty group of vanguard Communists and Neo-Nazi fascists began gathering at the White House. Many members of Parliament and many journalists have said that no one was in control of this group, but that these armed militias and random KGB and military members began to gather and wander the halls.

And like the Ostankino seige, Yeltsin's security response was terrible. There were armed police everywhere, but men were carrying rifles and heavy weapons from their homes and through the streets.

So no one is in control and both sides want a massacre to justify taking over the other. Clashes and skirmishes break out, but unless you were in Red Square or the White House, you probably wouldn't have known.

Rutskoy, the new president who no one beyond a hundred meters away actually knew was the new president, and his new military staff, encouraged this group to begin the fight.

Again, the aim of the fight by the Red-Browns was control of media. They took some broadcast stations in the immediate area over and of course, they went back for Ostankino. That is where they were met by internal security and that is where the major gun battle broke out.

Yeltsin was losing the street fights, but his control of the media won the day. He shut down television broadcasts, something that had never happened. Russia went from being totally unaware about a near civil war in Moscow to immediately knowing something had gone wrong. When shows came back on the air, pictures and descriptions of the Red-Browns were shown. They were a nasty bunch, and Yeltsin made that clear. He went on air and began to warn they were carrying out a revolution.

The key point in all of this is how control of information controlled the outcome more than guns and numbers. We now know the entire, ridiculous political fight that went on. But people at the time were unaware of all the court decisions and election results, etc.

For the average person, one day there were poor and they had television. The next they were poor and the television went static. The day after that, they were poor and Yeltsin was saying the fascists were trying to take over.

The people's support or opposition to the actual policies of the Liberals ceased to matter. Once Yeltsin had the people worried about a revolution, the tanks could begin to roll the streets and people could watch the Parliament get shelled and there wouldn't be backlash.