On the 25th anniversary of the execution of the Supreme Soviet of Russia
October 3 - 4 marks 25 years (1993) from the day of the tragic events in Moscow - the execution of the Supreme Soviet of Russia and its defenders from tank guns. This was the first time in world history when a constitutionally elected parliament was shot from tank guns.
After August 19-21, 1991 (GKChP), the Yeltsinists were no longer bound by the Union Center. Begins a new stage of bourgeois reformism. The Union bodies were dissolved, the activity of the CPSU was banned, the Soviet Union, contrary to the all-Union referendum of March 17, 1991, was destroyed (the Belovezhsky agreement on December 8, 1991). Since January 1992, the implementation of "shock therapy" began.
Forced capitalization, corporatization of industrial enterprises, formation of banking capital, and accelerated privatization of state property eliminated the economic basis of socialism. The billionaires and the big bourgeoisie were legalized. Under the conditions of capitalization of the economy, a financial oligarchy is formed, which concentrates in its hands the shares of the most profitable enterprises, banks, ownership of tools and means of production, and in essence seizes economic power in the country.
The Supreme Soviet of Russia (until December 21, 1991 - the RSFSR) by October 1993 was no longer an organ of socialist democracy and was a state organ of bourgeois restoration. The Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation R. Khasbulatov and the Vice-President A. Rutskoi owe their ascension to these positions to no one else but Yeltsin. These "opponents" of Yeltsin in August 1991 together with him arrested members of the Emergency Committee, and then destroyed the Soviet Union and buried the socialist achievements of the working people.
“Shock therapy” and theft (“privatization”) of state property provoked resistance in the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, primarily among deputies and factions representing the interests of state industrial and agricultural enterprises, as well as the military-industrial complex. Liberalization of prices and other “reforms” of the government (first Gaidar, and then Chernomyrdin) artificially made most state-owned enterprises unprofitable.
The unbridled inflation, the collapse in production, the impoverishment of the population caused increasing indignation of the country's population.
The Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation increasingly blocked the market initiatives of the Gaidar-Chernomyrdin government, advocating not for the wild, “Gaidar”, but for the “civilized” market.
They often speak of dual power - between President Yeltsin and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin (replacing Gaidar in this post), on the one hand, and Vice President Rutsky and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Khasbulatov, on the other, between the executive (President and Government) and the legislative (Supreme) Soviet of the Russian Federation) by the authorities.
In reality, there was no dual power; the power belonged to one class — the bourgeoisie.
The Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation (RSFSR) has long embarked on the path of bourgeois reforms and rejected the socialist perspective of the country's development.
"... Many communists and patriots initially did not understand that both the presidential and parliamentary factions of the bourgeoisie are fighting only for different ways and methods of restoring capitalism" (N.A. Andreeva. Let's stop demofashism, save Russia! October 30, 1993).
If Rutskoi and Khasbulatov expressed the interests of that part of the national bourgeoisie (middle and small), which, faced with the lawlessness of plundering the country, tried to introduce privatization into a “civilized” channel, then Yeltsin expressed the interests of the emerging big bourgeoisie, the financial oligarchy. Transnational capital also stood behind Yeltsin.
In one of his television interviews from the White House (the building of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation) Khasbulatov had every reason to state the intervention of foreign intelligence services in the Russian conflict on the side of the president. Even before the events of August 1991, foreign intelligence agencies relied on Yeltsin as a ram to destroy the USSR. It is also known that, along with Russian, special forces, trained by the American CIA, and Zionist militant organizations (Beytar members) took part in the storming of the White House.
The Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation expressed the interests of that part of the bourgeoisie, which turned out to be removed from the division — the plundering of public property — more arrogant, more prepared for the conditions of capitalism by the criminal, big bourgeoisie, focused on the United States.
One cannot but agree with R. Khasbulatov that "the accomplished counter-revolutionary coup was aimed at transferring all the enormous state property belonging to society into the hands of those people who are now called oligarchs."
The reasons for the defeat of the October uprising of 1993 and the coming to power of the big bourgeoisie are determined by the reasons for the temporary defeat of socialism and the victory of the bourgeois counterrevolution in the USSR.
The main reason is the rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the socialist essence of the power of the state of the workers and peasants.
Stop the restoration of capitalism and the country's slipping into a catastrophe could only be achieved through the restoration of socialism. Either socialism, or reaction and fascism. The third was not given. Since both the leadership of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation and the uprising itself were in the hands of petty-bourgeois democrats, the outcome in favor of the dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie was inevitable. The power of the petty bourgeoisie can be neither durable nor of any length.
V.I. Lenin repeatedly emphasized: “Either the dictatorship (that is, the iron power) of landowners and capitalists, or the dictatorship of the working class. There is no middle. In the middle dream are vain marshes, intellectuals, masters, who poorly studied from bad books. Nowhere in the world of the middle is there and can not be. Either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (covered with lush Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik phrases about democracy, constitution, freedom, etc.), or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Whoever has not learned this from the history of the whole XIX century, is a hopeless idiot ”(V.I. Lenin. Collected Works, vol. 39, p. 158 rus.).
The working people did not support the defenders of the White House, seeing in the speeches of Khasbulatov and Rutsky another attempt at the top of the coup with obscure consequences for the people. Most of the working people remained deaf to the appeals of the Supreme Soviet to support him with strikes and strikes.
Victor Anpilov, one of the active participants in the October events, leader of the social and political movement Labor Russia, later recalled: “Our calls to go on strike, to come to support the Supreme Soviet of the ZIL workers answered with curses: - Yeltsin, Gaidar, Rutskoi, Khasbulatov - what difference does it make ?! They are fighting for power, and we shed blood for them? ”(Victor Anpilov. Concept of Freedom, 2008, p. 238).
It is often said about the October uprising, but this was not a rebellion, and in itself this event was obviously spontaneous and unorganized.
The main events of October 3-4 were the barricades on Vosstaniya Square and October Square, the breakthrough of the blockade of the White House, the capture of the city hall and, finally, the storming of the Ostankino television tower, which ended with the shooting of unarmed people and gunfire from tanks in the Soviet House.
The leadership of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation represented by Rutskoi and Khasbulatov remained idle while sitting in the besieged White House.
During the October 3-4 events of October 3-4, the leadership of the Supreme Council showed indecision and hesitation in confrontation with Yeltsin: refused to distribute weapons to the people from the weapon rooms of the besieged Supreme Soviet (although it was known that in August 1991 the same Yeltsin distributed weapons to anyone called himself a "democrat"); did not send to the power structures the power ministers appointed by the Supreme Soviet, especially since both the Ministry of Defense and the building of the KGB of the USSR were waiting for the appearance of personal orders from Rutskoi; during the blockade of the House of Soviets, the leadership of the Armed Forces launched meaningless talks with Yeltsin through the mediation of the Russian Orthodox Church in the St. Daniel's Monastery; etc.
The leadership in the person of Khasbulatov and Rutsky and the entire Supreme Soviet of Russia excluded the armed development of the conflict from the very beginning and did not prepare for armed confrontation.
Having neither the right ideological and political positions - the struggle for the restoration of Socialism, nor the support of the WORKING CLASS, nor the firm one - Lenin would say: PROLETARIAN - of leadership, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation was doomed to defeat in the confrontation with big capital.
Unlike Khasbulatov and Rutskoi, Yeltsin carefully prepared for armed violence against his own people.
In addition to the Dzerzhinsky division, the Tula airborne, Kantemirovskaya and Tamansky divisions of the Armed Forces of Russia entered Moscow in full combat gear. The tanks moved along Kutuzovsky Prospect and went into the positions of fire at direct fire on the House of Soviets. The composition of tank crews was hired for big money only from among the volunteer officers.
In the morning of October 3, the storming of the White House began. ON A POLITICAL SCENE IS LARGE CAPITAL.
Unfortunately, the communist movement of the country, deeply affected by opportunism inherited from the Gorbachev Communist Party of the Soviet Union, failed to fulfill the vanguard role. Particularly treacherous role in the October events was played by the Communist Party of the Russian Communist Party led by G. Zyuganov:
- removed the revolutionary situation in the opposition of the people and small Yeltsinites in September-October 1993 in Moscow. The special merit of this is G. Zyuganov, who called everyone on TV “not to take to the streets”, “not to be active”;
- took part in a referendum on the "shooting" of the Constitution and in the parliamentary elections "on blood" in December 1993, thereby legalizing the usurpation of power by Yeltsin. The entire communist opposition, including the AUCPB, boycotted both the referendum and the elections.
The creation, on the orders of Yeltsin, by a former employee of the ideological department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, headed by A.N. Yakovlev, a former member of the Central Committee of the CPSU Gennady Zyuganov of the law-abiding Communist Party of the Russian Federation, sought to divert a significant part of the communists from active work in the communist parties that arose in the territory of the Russian Federation before 1993 and, above all, from activities in the AUCPB, created by the first communist activity on the second day after Yeltsin’s ban ( On November 8, 1991, the Constituent Congress of the AUCPB was held.
The All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (AUCPB) took an active part on the side of the defenders of the House of Soviets. The members of the AUCPB took part in the confrontation with the Yeltsinites. The AUCPB supported the Soviets at all levels in the center and in the provinces, while not idealizing them, given their restorative role during the bourgeois counter-revolution, linking this role with the opportunist degeneration of the CPSU, which became the political headquarters of bourgeois restoration. However, objectively, the Soviets were then an obstacle to the fascization of bourgeois power.
It seems that today the conclusions made by the AUCPB on the heels of the October 1993 events remain relevant:
“The main conclusion from the tragedy in the capital is that the crisis leading Russia to the catastrophe is NECESSARY as part of the restoration of capitalism. This crisis can only be resolved through the restoration of socialism, for only under a socialist system can broad sections of the working people rise together for the revival of the devastated Fatherland. Today, the country has one alternative: either socialism or reaction and fascism. There is no third, no matter how many capitulators from the former CPSU would say about some kind of new civilization designed to rise above capitalism and socialism ”(N.A. Andreeva. Let's stop demofascism - let's save Russia! October 30, 1993).
The experience of a tough confrontation with Yeltsinism in October 1993 showed the Soviet Communists the limited possibilities of boundless, self-sufficient rallyism, the inadmissibility of indecision and hesitation in leading the struggle against the anti-people regime, the futility of petty-bourgeois games to seize power and other so-called “simple solutions” to complex political tasks of defeating the bourgeois counterrevolution.
A.V. Denisyuk
