Marauders. For the anniversary of the tragic events of 3 October 1993 of the year: eyewitness notes
The day that passed under the sign of the victory of the defenders of the Supreme Council ended in a crushing defeat ...
There was little talk about it at the campfire, they didn’t talk about almost anything at all - they threw boughs into the fire, poured ice-cold vodka for themselves, drank without claping their eyes like at a funeral ... the balls were shaking small glow. Sometimes the flame snatched someone's face from the darkness - and it immediately disappeared, as if picked up by the wind, and again became part of the night, filled with rustling voices, the ringing of bottles, the strumming of guitar strings. “What sad faces, / And how hopelessly pale ...” Which of these people lived till morning?
Nobody argued about anything, did not call anyone for anything. There was nothing to change - it only remained to wait for the morning. The smell of smoke and baked potatoes was mixed with the smell of fallen leaves, damp earth, tree bark and mushrooms, although their time had passed. Somewhere alongside they sang: "And in the taiga in the morning fog ...", and a little further, twisting the motif, Beatles: "Hey, Jude." These voices and smells came as if from previous times, when there were no street battles or riot policemen with shields and batons, and in the fashion were tourist gatherings and author song contests. But there were other voices. “Lord, save Thy people,” they sang softly and beautifully at the other end of the park, but soon the song was blocked by a long, rollicking sigh of an accordion that began to dance. “Eh, eh, eh!” - the shod boots booted into the ground, the invisible dancers whistled with youthful whistles.
- Russian man! .. - someone shouted from the dark. - No, you listen to what I tell you. Russian man! .. What is it? "Fun and drink"! It was created in order to drink and be merry! And he invented a debt and ideas. Who the hell is this? Our Motherland - fun! “Watching until midnight is ready / At the dance with a tramp and whistle / Speaking of drunken peasants.” Here it is - a race, here it is - a Russian man!
Yesterday, for these words, they would give the stranger firmly in the forehead and call him a provocateur (which, perhaps, he was), and now everyone was tired and silent.
So this night of our defeat stretched. We dozed off only in the morning. We woke up because somewhere over our very heads it was booming and often hit KPVT - a heavy machine gun. The air trembled, broke off the branches and spun down the invisible spiral of maple leaves. The trees stood sunlit emptiness. The air smelled of fumes. Chattering our teeth from chills, we rose to our feet. The park has become unrecognizable. Wavy strands of frost, sparkling in the sun, intricate patterns woven into the grass.
Again the machine gun crashed, a female voice screamed heart-rending. From the side of the square, it grunted, clanged: the tracked combat vehicles of the landing force overcame flimsy barricades.
Another minute, and they would cut us off from the House of Soviets. We ducked and ran to his left wing. Bullets crumbled, broke the plaster over our heads, I even sprinkled it.
So this day began. I remember him as delirious, sketchy, dotted. Was after tank shooting at the House of Soviets a moment of desperate hope, when on Novy Arbat, half a kilometer from us, a hot shootout ensued, and someone shouted: “These are ours! Ours fit! ”, And I believed him, so much so that tears came to my eyes. Alas, these were not ours - the Yeltsin special forces thrashed through the windows in which there were supposedly snipers ...
Then, drawn by people running somewhere, the poet and me, Victor Mamonov, now deceased, found themselves under a large front staircase, where there was a pass office. We thought that the people around us were their own, and wanted to enter the building with them, but soon we realized that we were wrong ... Without further ado, they busily and efficiently broke down the door and rushed inside, as usual as in a tram, pushing elbows and shoulders . Sensing something was wrong, we did not follow their example. Soon the burglars began to return - with bags filled with coffee, cookies, juice, compote, canned food, cigarettes ... Some lucky people took possession of portable televisions and radio receivers. Someone carried behind the ear, a large pillow. The other is a telephone set with wires being dragged along the ground. The third - a heap of police caps. Others put them on their heads. Why, their power came ... Someone with a simple face gave out unfilled deputy certificates with red crusts. They came out just as businesslike as they came in - young, well-dressed, in sturdy shoes, walking with booty towards New Arbat, casually bypassing the volunteers who were carrying from the opposite entrance, under the bridge, disfigured and bloody corpses.
“Let's get out of here,” Victor said in a dull voice. I pushed off the wall and walked, as if through the air, not feeling my legs. I did not feel anything at all, only the simplest sensations: we were under the stairs in the shade, and now we were in the sun. It was as if I lost flesh and bones: it seemed to me that if someone in a hurry with the prey wanted to pass through me, I would have done it without difficulty. Somewhere in the depths of consciousness, as in a shallow well, the question splashed: how could all this have happened?
It took only two years of Yeltsinism, so that people in the center of Moscow openly robbed their own parliament ...
And no matter what the corrupt hacks say about the “ambiguity” of the events, their moral side is completely unequivocal: the defenders of the Supreme Council, having freed the city hall from the 3 of October, did not rob it - they took it under protection.
Getting out from under the stairs, we were surprised silence. Apparently, they declared a truce or something like that. Someone spoke on a megaphone from the window of the fifth floor. Judging by the voice, it was Rutskoi. We climbed the main staircase upstairs, where there was already a small crowd. Rutskoy, apparently remembering that he was a pilot, asked other pilots to raise their combat vehicles into the air and protect parliament - why did he decide that there were pilots among the handful of people standing under the windows? We sighed and went down. Towards us, brilliantly lit by the rays of the sun, the colonel climbed out of the tank with a machine gun in his hand. He walked straight at us, tall, strong, blue-eyed, tanned, with a frank selfish reluctance to look into anything at all, peculiar only to senior army and police ranks (even civilian bureaucrats have a different look - more artistic, perhaps). He walked as if from American films, from a meat grinder, where he “just carried out the order,” with camouflage-shaped sleeves rolled up and an open collar, from which a snow-white turn-out looked out. Beautiful, greyish - went to present an ultimatum of legitimate authority. Even after death he will go on forever, under the slanting rays of the setting sun, with a heavy machine gun in his hand, but he will never come anywhere.
At about 4 hours in the afternoon, when the time came for the looters, volunteer rescuers brought a woman out of one entrance of the House of Soviets. She was an employee of the secretariat of the Supreme Council, located in the building from September 21. According to her, for two hours she, along with other women and children, made her way through the underpass from an office building located about 150 meters from the White House, gliding through the blood of the wounded and killed there. At the exit for the cordon, they beat her and marauded off her hair. Victor and I made our way through the crowd to her and managed to lead her out. Emaciated, disheveled, drooping, trembling from days of cold, she stood surrounded by a few sympathizers and spoke with eyes wide with surprise that during the hit of tank shells the huge building was swaying like an earthquake. She also said bitterly: “The Army ... We waited for her all these days ...” And she added with an indescribable feminine contempt in her voice: “Even today, we waited until noon ...”
I realized with horror that in front of me was one of the victims of the Densk newspaper articles. Some analysts of the newspaper, often anonymous or hiding behind the KGB pseudonym, assured readers that Yeltsin was a sick, incapable, drunk man with hooligan manners instead of political will, while others asserted that in military units and at large enterprises he was working against the "invaders" powerful Front national salvation. A little more - both the army and the people will lose patience, and they will move to Moscow in close-in-a-thousand columns. The first issue of the Day after the coup came out with a portrait of Yeltsin upside down - everything, they say, is a skull. And finally, the bribed army approached, shot, set fire to the House of Soviets, by which they carried the corpses of young guys disfigured by cumulative shells beyond recognition ... “Burbulis is not transmitted during a handshake” - a malicious joke of “The Day”.
Then we stood at the iron barriers on the sidewalk. Past still went the marauders, and in the other direction still carried the corpses. The upper floors of the House of Soviets chadno burned. The few preserved windows of the lower floors also burned - in the rays of sunset. In the city hall building there was a roar and a clang, as if there was a tank turning inside. The birds circled over the house again, frightened by cannonade. I looked at them and envied: how easy and simple it is for them to fly up there, look at all this from a height. In the same way, in the morning, silvery fragments of the blinds of the House of Soviets circled in the air, thrown high by the monstrous blast wave of a cumulative tank projectile. I took them at first for pigeons. Light plates flew to the ground for a long time, smoothly, beautifully, like birds. For some reason, I remembered, quite out of place: “Take a look at the birds of the sky: they do not sow, do not reap, do not collect in the barn; and your heavenly Father nourishes them. Are you much better than them? ”
I wanted to smoke, but ran out of cigarettes. Victor asked a cigarette from the man standing next to a Caucasian. He pulled out a bluish tutu, nodded at the parliament: "From there."
By a strange coincidence, cigarettes were also called "Parliament." Noticing my unkind gaze, the Caucasian said: “One guy gave, I did not go there myself. Now Yeltsin is exactly kapets, ”he added. Oh, read already in the "Day" ...
From the New Arbat, a nasty metallic clanging was heard - these were the “burzhuins” —moderes smashing Brilliant's brilliant spiral with terrible hooks with stones, getting souvenirs for themselves. Rattling with shields, a detachment of riot police ran into the square in front of the stairs, lined up in a line and, waving batons and machine guns, began to crowd out the crowd. We trudled, driven by riot police, in the direction of New Arbat ...
Since then, for me, the symbol of the events of October 4 is not even the shot and burning House of Soviets, but looters. In their appearance then, as it seems to me, there are historical the meaning of what happened. In the same way as some looters robbed parliament on October 4, 1993, others, a larger one, robbed the country in the 90s. It seems to me that premonitions do not deceive us when we suspect that our government is somehow too mild towards criminals. She does so. And can not do otherwise. And not because the police, prosecutors, the Investigative Committee are all bad. But because the state is. At the core of his political system is crime. This is not a figure of speech or hyperbole at all, but the verdict of the Constitutional Court of Russia of September 21, 1993 on Yeltsin’s actions, which the court’s chairman V. Zorkin never refused.
The modern political system, enshrined in the Constitution of 1993, was born as a result of a bloody, unconstitutional, marauding coup.
The name “criminal revolution” given by S. Govorukhin has long been behind these events. But we, reflecting on the causes of our troubles, rarely think about this: if a “revolution of marauders” occurred in the country 20 years ago, then what are its legal and legal consequences? But what are: 4 in October 1993, the cynical politicians and gesheftmahery, now called oligarchs, did not just “come to power”: they rebuilt everything “by themselves” - legislation, law, morality, ideology, cultural policy, etc.
And how hard we now have to get rid of this heritage.
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