October 3-4, 1993: shooting, a lot of people were killed...

Sergey Yakovlev, writer, member of the Russia PEN-club

“3rd - 4th - shooting. The Russian parliament has once again been abolished. Triumphant are my former friends and associates (old, former - Oskotsky, Chernichenko, Karjakin, Nuikin) - ashamed. Many people were killed".

Ashamed. Many people were killed. The Russian parliament has once again been abolished.

Nothing more can be added to the assessment of those events.

My late elder brother Vladimir, a physicist who lived in Vologda, after 1993 voted exclusively for the communists. Although in the Communist Party, for reasons of principle, I have never been in my life.

Once he came to Moscow on business and decided to visit old acquaintances at the physics department of Moscow State University, where he had once defended his dissertation. I undertook to accompany him. It was in the late 90s. At a kiosk near the metro station, Volodya bought Sovetskaya Rossiya, which he read regularly, and out of habit he stuffed it into the side pocket of his jacket, so that almost the entire newspaper with the logo was exposed.

I remember feeling embarrassed for him.

- Hide away, - I advised. - May be mistaken for a demonstrative gesture. They don't read this newspaper there...

He waved it off in annoyance.

We entered the building of the faculty, climbed the stairs to the hall, and the first thing that I saw with amazement on the wall under the glass for all to see were unfolded strips of fresh "Soviet Russia". Her one, no other newspapers were posted.

This almost comical incident served as another reminder for me how inadequate we are in relation to reality and in which different worlds everyone, even people who are very close, exist.

In those years, I also went a lot to the left (mostly, probably, out of disgust for moronic anti-communism), but a strange salad of chauvinism, churchliness and nostalgia for bad times, called the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, had nothing to do with the ideas of social justice in my eyes. And as it seemed to me, not a single decent person should take this newspaper into his hands.

However, my brother and I, of course, had a common attitude towards the 1993 coup and the bloody atrocities in October. And when I accidentally came across, several years later, the spontaneous people's memorial on Krasnaya Presnya, at the first opportunity I proudly showed it to my brother. After all, it only seems that the people bowed their heads and are silent - now, people do not forget those who fell through the fault of shameless power, they try to tell about everyone as they can, they arbitrarily hang portraits, carry flowers, overcoming fear...

From August 1991 to autumn 1993, Russia had a short chance to become a real democracy - a people's parliamentary republic. Almost as short as in 1917 from February to October. And the lesson has already been, a warning. Where does any dictatorship begin? Precisely with the armed dispersal of an elected body. By discrediting the very idea of democracy as a brake on some other, more advanced, you see, "democracy", which should take this "backward" people by the throat. How was it possible, proclaiming anti-communism, to reproduce the logic and tactics of the Bolsheviks with such parodic suicidal accuracy? How could it happen that the obvious from the first minute for Dedkov, for me, for millions of people, a direct evil, which for decades robbed Russia of human prospects, was justified by fully sane educated people with their phantom fears?

"Yura Karjakin, who exclaimed: "Russia, you are crazy!", My old acquaintance (or friend), what do you know about Russia when you last saw it?" - as if a dying man was breathing out Dedkov. He was one of the leaders of the resistance to the totalitarian system. A person who, in very difficult times, managed to save freedom for us and tried to share it with everyone. "Freedom turned out to be a two-faced Janus: it turned its lascivious face towards the majority of my people".

The other day I proposed to recreate the memorial to the victims of 1993. From the text of the petition posted on change.org *:

“In the area of the former House of Soviets (now the Government House) on Konyushkovskaya Street, a national memorial was preserved and maintained for many years. On the walls of buildings, pillars, building fences, paper portraits with the names of the victims and their brief stories were pasted up. The touching faces of teenagers - boys and girls. Students, workers, employees, retirees, the military ... Someone fell under the bullets quite by accident, walking along the streets of their hometown. Someone deliberately came out to protest against a coup d'état, defending the first democratically elected parliament. Someone was sent to disperse those who protested, and received a bullet in the back from unknown persons. (" The investigation carried out by the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation did not establish that any of the victims in the course of the events were killed from weapons at the disposal of the People's Deputies and the Security Department of the Supreme Soviet", - this is again from Wikipedia).

The mournful memorial was replenished with new names and faces, stretched out already on the floor of the street, and went into the alleys. Of course, not all the victims were named here, but it was a memorial to everyone. He restored justice, calmed rebellious souls, gave hope that this would never happen again. Fresh flowers were constantly brought here.

Then the building fences, and with them the homemade leaflets, disappeared. Now at the place of the death of at least many, many dozen people, there is no memorial sign.

Meanwhile, the events of 1993 can not be called insignificant - they had a fatal effect on the entire subsequent development of the country and still remain an oozing wound in the people's memory. To honor the memory of the fallen (all - both “red” and “white”, and those who “did not have anything to do with it”) should be at least for the sake of hundreds of their relatives and friends living now, not to mention the innumerable multitude of those who somehow or otherwise he was involved in the bloody madness of those days.

It has become a tradition in our country to perpetuate the names of those killed in places associated with the massive loss of life as a result of disasters and terrorist attacks. Installed memorials sometimes remind of events that are much more sensitive for the current government, that is, those for which it is directly responsible. All the more surprising is the neglect of memory in the case when it comes to victims of a civil conflict in the past and, it would seem, have long been rethought both by society and by the authorities. Moreover, the tragedy is not local, but one that somehow affected the fate of every inhabitant of the country.

Or has that war still not gone anywhere, and oblivion is revenge on the fallen?..

It is known that a civil conflict can be considered overcome only when honors are given to the victims of all its sides.

We consider it necessary to erect a memorial sign with a list of all the names of the victims known today at the site of the destroyed national memorial to the victims of October 1993. This will be a humane act of justice and evidence that our society and its institutions have outgrown the stage when civil conflicts in the country were resolved with the help of weapons, and do not want to return to them".

It seemed to me that the war was drawing to a close, that blind hatred between the stratified and scattered parts of the population was gradually leaving our squares, being replaced by universally significant meanings and, more or less, mutual understanding and sympathy...

The very first responses showed how badly I was wrong.