New revelations about Yeltsin's shelling of Russia's parliament are being misinterpreted.
Left, members of the military loyal to Yeltsin sit on a tank in 1993 in Moscow in front of the blackened parliament building Yeltsin ordered shelled; right, Russian President Vladimir Putin with soldiers.Thirty years ago this month, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered tanks to shell the parliament—a wedding cake–style building in downtown Moscow called the White House—and then to arrest its leaders, who had been rebelling against his government.
I well remember strolling through the parliament’s corridors on Saturday, Oct. 2, two days before the shelling, nervously eyeing the hunkered-down rebels—many of them drunk, stomping around in black boots, cradling heavy rifles or submachine guns, which they’d retrieved from the armory in the basement. Some were members of parliament. Some were volunteer militiamen recruited from the ranks of Cossacks or neo-Nazis.
Here is where the line can be drawn between Yeltsin and Putin: It’s not that Yeltsin’s shelling of the parliament marked a “turning point in Russia’s failure to adopt democracy”—it’s that Russia never came to adopt democracy in the first place.Yeltsin made huge strides toward democracy in two areas: First, his economic reforms did spur the start of a consumer economy and a middle class.
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