BLOODY MONDAY: YELTSIN PROVOKES VIOLENCE TO JUSTIFY HIS POLITICAL
REPRESSION
LAURE AKAI

Many people, including the mainstream English press here wonder why
the OMON didn't take more precautions at the Ostankino television
center, and why they did such a bad job at simple crowd control. It
was known for four days that the opposition were planning to take
Ostankino and when they finally arrived, they rallied for over an
hour before the storm began. Troops arrived at the scene much later.
Others, including many pro-Yeltsinites, asked how Yegor Gaidar could
go on TV and urge people to fight back.
The answers are not clear. Of course people were somewhat afraid of
the well-armed White House defendants. But there is more and more
speculation going on here that part of the events were provoked by
pro-Yeltsin troops to rally public resentment against the opposition.
Myself and several reliable people that I know were witnesses to some
rather odd events that we think was part of a provocation.
For example, some time around 6 or 7PM, before the tanks all started
to converge on the White House, I and two friends were standing
outside the Mayor's building across the street from the White House.
We were completely surrounded on all sides by Yeltsin's troops. (Only
after some while, as the tanks began to roll did they try to disperse
us.) Every once and a while fire was breaking out, sometimes in the
direction of the White House, sometimes in our direction. We
witnessed a woman near us take out a pistol from her pocket and begin
shooting in the air. It seemed entirely strange to us and we weren't
sure who she was or what she was shooting at. There was so much going
on that surely few people noticed this. Then she slowly walked to the
blown out 1st floor windows of the Mayor's building. We watched very
intently because we thought she might be a communist or a nationalist
or sorts (although she was too well dressed) and we thought she might
try to shoot one of the soldiers. She instead started to talk to one
of them and entered the building from the side.
At this time the tanks started rolling so we went up Novy Arbat St.
to the Garden Ring Road to try to find a telephone. Before we got to
the Garden Ring Rd., soldiers were trying to get us to run and create
some hysteria amongst the few people who were there. On the Garden
Ring Rd. there were a few hundred spectators. While one of us went to
find a phone, I and a friend watched on. Suddenly guns started firing
down the Garden Ring Rd. We ran through an archway into a courtyard.
We couldn't go further because there was fire into the courtyard
where the corner house ended and where there was an alley between
that corner house and the next building on Novy Arbat St. This fire
from the alley way could have only come from the troops that we had
passed and who were trying to creating a panic less than 5 minutes
earlier. They were the only people there. Dozens of people tried to
run into the courtyard, only to find that there was lots of gunfire
there and so they were trapped in a small space where the corner
building curved around from Garden Ring onto Novy Arbat St. The fire
was apparently approaching. We noticed that there were people
shooting from out of windows into the courtyard. I was wondering
where the hell they were shooting at. We finally made a run for it
through the courtyard, dodging bullets. I looked behind and saw
something fall from the sky into the courtyard behind me.
We ran further and turned back onto the Garden Ring Rd. There we
witnessed general panic. There was lots of guns being fired at the
top floors of buildings and also into the crowd. I was fairly upset
and wondering why Yeltsin's troops were firing into the crowd. One
person said that they are trying to disperse people. I thought this
is a stupid way to do it, but I accepted that explaination for a
while. Then it occured to me that the only people who could be firing
into the courtyard at ground level were Yeltsin's troops.
The local English language paper reported the incident. The TV
reported sniper fire in several areas of the city and claimed that
this was done by opposition rebels on the loose. They are using this
fear to justify things like martial law. But after hearing more and
more people report unusual incidents, and incidents similiar to mine,
I'm beginning to wonder.
Sure there are armed rebels on the loose. Many White House supporters
went home on the night of the 3rd and were not able to return. When
the White House was beseiged by Yeltsin's troops, there were
apparently several attempts made by groups of people to get on the
territory of the White House. (In the morning this was virtually
impossible, unless you were a journalist.) I had assumed that the
people firing from the windows into the courtyards were the
opposition. I was aggravated by the fact that they were firing into
the courtyard. I wondered how they got into the buildings, if any of
them actually resided in that swank neighbourhood or if they broke
into apartments. At this point however I think that it was not the
opposition who was doing the firing into that courtyard. They were
not running around the streets firing at innocent people, and as far
as I know, there were many instances of them trying to get people out
of the line of fire. They generally operated by selecting their
targets and going directly for them. Why would they fire into the
courtyard and not in the other direction, into Yeltsin's troops? And
what happened to these people up there in the building? They weren't
killed or arrested; the media would have shown them and labeled them
murderers. That particular house was not even fired upon or stormed.
Yeltsin's troops, which were stationed right outside this house on
Novy Arbat St. decided not to fire up at the windows from which
gunfire was coming, but rather into the courtyard into which people,
including bystanders, were fleeing.
Another wierd incident. Two different journalists reported seeing 10
militia men shooting into the air in the Otradnoye section, just
north of Moscow. Why were they there and why were they firing into
the air? They suggested that perhaps they were trying to create a
panic.
There are already dozens of reports of such irregularities. Of course
little has made it into the mainstream media, except in the English
language press, which isn't sold on the streets, which almost no
Russians read, and which hasn't been subjected to censorship.
In the Moscow Tribune on Oct.5 there was a very vivid description of
the beginning of the action on Sunday Oct.3. (Neither English
language paper appears on Monday.) Apparently the violence was
started by about 10 people who ran into the street from out of a
crowd of 40 demonstrators. 120 Omonovtsy (special police) stood
without reacting. They weren't even wearing helmets. When a reporter
from the Tribune asked why they were doing nothing, he was told
"We've got other goals. We have other orders." Only after 45 minutes,
when the crowd had grown substantially in size, did they act, and
only then half-heartedly.
It is obvious to anybody who has seen these troops in action that
they deliberately let the crowd gather and storm the Mayor's building
and the White House. Just a few days earlier, when they arrived at
the White House, they had an almost airtight seal on the place, and
did a much better job of kicking ass and preventing a much larger and
better armed crowd from going anywhere near the White House. As a
matter of fact, they ran away from the demonstrators. At Ostankino,
tanks that were headed to the area turned back just before the strom.
Why? It has even conservatives and moderates like the Moscow Tribune
asking "Could this have been a trap to encourage the violent elements
on parliament's side to provide the justification the government
needed to respond with the force it had sworn not to initiate?" [John
Helmer, "Moscow Crisis:The First Spark", Moscow Tribune, Oct.5,
1993].
You bet this was a trap. What better way to justify the violence and
the censorship, political repression and so on that followed? Also,
by allowing these people to storm buildings, they had a concrete
target to bombard. Of course lots of innocent bystanders also got
hurt in the events. This too was part of the provocation.
How did I and my friends get right to the seen of the action during
crossfire? The soldiers pointed out the route for us. How come
pedestrians were allowed to come so near to fighting? Was it that the
soldiers couldn't control the crowd? They usually do a pretty good
job completely blocking traffic when they want to. How come on Oct.5,
troops were shooting at "snipers" on Novy Arbat street, but put up
absolutely no obstacle to pedestrian traffic?
As far as the last question is concerned, the answer is simple: for
all the bullets that Yeltsin's troops were firing up at rooftops, no
bullets were being fired back down.
One man who witnessed this yesterday asked, "How can it be that
they've been firing two days already and haven't caught the snipers?
It doesn't seem like anyone's there. And how could they let people
walk the streets like that?"
Izvestia reports that it is the city police and the regular army who
are the only ones being used to shoot at the snipers. They are not
specially trained at this. There are however many, many special
troops that are. Where are they? Izvestia got past the censors with
an article entitled "Troops Near the White House Shot At Everything
That Moved". This is in fact what they did, but that they shouldn't
have done. Now people are trying to justify this, saying that
unmdoubtedly there were armed insurgents in the crowd, and that the
people there were looking for trouble. But this was not the case. Now
they keep making up stories about "snipers on the loose" and how
communists were firing indiscriminantly into crowds of innocent
people. They cannot hide the fact that they shot into the crowd so
they have to make up all kinds of justifications for their actions
and they blame the whole situation on the inhuman insurgents who put
the civilian population in jeopardy. In fact it was Yeltsin and
Grachev who put the crowd in danger, who shot onlookers.
More and more witnesses are coming foward to say that many of these
"snipers" were in fact KGB or some similiar Yeltsinite force. For
example, the snipers at the Mezdunarodnaya Hotel were let in past
security. Would the security guards at this swank hotel which houses
many shops and is adjacent to the Trade Center, housing many multi-
national offices, have let opposition "snipers" through? If the hotel
was stormed, how come there isn't a single report of it in the media?
How come the media then describes the "snipers" at the hotels as part
of the insurgents? More than likely, the snipers which were on the
heavily guarded Hotel Mir across from the White House were also from
the government.
Also, residents of the buildings from which snipers were shooting
have also come foward to say that these were government snipers, but
none of this has been reported in the media.
Yeltsin has a lot of blood on his hands, especially the blood of the
people killed in anyone of the "sniper incidents" that were
manufactured to create public outrage and fear and to provide him
with reasons to justify his actions and political repressions.




