Why People Are Comparing Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin 30 Years Later and Why They’re Wrong

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. Some look back on the incident as (in one historian’s words) a “turning point in Russia’s failure to develop democracy”—drawing a straight line between Yeltsin’s suppression of the legislature in 1993 and Vladimir Putin’s full-bore dictatorship today.

I disagree, and I do so not just as a sometimes-historian but as a journalist who was there from 1992 to 1995, closely watching and chronicling the drama-soaked events of the time as the Boston Globe’s Moscow bureau chief.

It may be possible to draw a ragged line between the reigns of Yeltsin and Putin, the first two (very different) leaders of post-Communist Russia. But the roots of Putinism go much deeper—and Yeltsin’s shelling of the White House was, far from a pivot toward terror, a necessary move of counterterror: a response to a clear and present danger that threatened to erase his nascent reforms and plunge Russia back to its darkest days of Soviet rule.

The notion that the parliament’s rebels, led by Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, were simply democrats protesting Yeltsin’s growing presidential powers and radical economic policies, is absurd. They were a rabble of Communists—many left over from the USSR’s legislative body, the Supreme Soviet, which was still the parliament’s name—and outright fascists, trying to mount a coup. Some of them were explicitly angling to reprise the putsch mounted two years earlier against the reform Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

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 (whips laced through their belt loops) or neo-Nazis.

A few weeks earlier, the Supreme Soviet’s speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, had called a session to vote on Yeltsin’s impeachment. A minority of legislators showed up for the vote, not enough for a quorum, so Khasbulatov formally expelled the no-shows and declared a quorum met. The remaining members approved a resolution to impeach Yeltsin and swore in Rutskoi as president. Rutskoi appointed a defense minister and other putative cabinet members (one of whom had been a leader of the putsch against Gorbachev), all of them now in the White House. Yet, at least for the moment, they had no levers; the rank and file in the ministries, bureaucracies, and armed forces ignored their orders and continued to swear obeisance to Yeltsin.

Still, some of Yeltsin’s men were nervous—for good reason. On Sunday, Oct. 3, militias recruited by Rutskoi and Khasbulatov, some of whom were active-duty soldiers, raided the mayor’s office (next door to the White House) and mounted an attack on Ostankino, the main broadcast center, located a mile north. Poorly guarded at first, defensive positions at Ostankino were soon reinforced by the Russian government’s anti-riot troops; an intense shootout lasted late into the night, when the rebels were finally pushed back. More than 60 people died and more than 100 were injured. (One of the seriously injured, Otto Pohl, was an American freelance photographer who often worked with me.) Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s officials deployed armored vehicles to the defense ministry and the Kremlin. Fears of a coup were intense—and valid.

The National Security Archive, a private research group in Washington, released last week a cache of documents, some recently declassified, related to the anniversary of this crisis. One document, an interview with Yeltsin’s defense minister, Pavel Grachev, is particularly illuminating. He recalls meeting with Yeltsin and others at 3 a.m., just a few hours after the gunfight at Ostankino. The loyalty of the military was up for grabs (Rutskoi was an Afghan war hero). Had the rebel troops taken over Ostankino’s airwaves and appealed to troops to come join them, many might have done so. Yeltsin insisted that Gravchev had to order a tank attack on the White House at daybreak and arrest the rebel leaders. If he hadn’t done so, Grachev said in the interview (conducted several years after the events), civil war would have erupted.

As the tanks rolled toward the White House early Monday morning, rebel snipers were positioned on the roof. Gunfire was exchanged on Moscow’s streets for the next few hours. Some bullets flew above my head—and the heads of dozens of Muscovites who had gathered a few hundred yards away to watch the melee, the likes of which hadn’t been since the 1917 revolution. Finally, Grachev put two senior officers into a tank and ordered them to fire inert rounds into the window of an office where he was sure the rebel leaders were sitting. They hit the target precisely. Troops then stormed the building, exchanging fire as they went. Before long, all the rebel leaders came out with their hands up. They were thrown in prison.

The new documents released by the National Security Archive include the transcript of a phone call to Yeltsin from President Bill Clinton, congratulating the Russian president for his “superb handling” of the crisis. The archive’s historians who compiled the documents criticize Clinton and other U.S. officials for supporting Yeltsin unequivocally. They imply that this support encouraged Yeltsin’s further tack toward authoritarian rule. As long as Yeltsin followed his plan to adopt Western capitalist ways, the historians write, he could get away with anything.

This is misleading. No less unassailable a figure as Yelena Bonner, a leader of Russia’s democratic movement and the widow of Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet era’s most prominent dissident-physicist, defended Yeltsin’s action as “appropriate” and said he should have “suppressed” the “fascist gang” in parliament much sooner.

That said, the Yeltsin-Rutskoi faceoff was hardly a contest of pure good guys vs. bad guys. Context is important. Not quite two years had passed since the Soviet Union had dissolved and Yeltsin had risen to the Kremlin’s helm as president of the new Russian Federation. The economy was in shambles, the army was a wreck, and Yeltsin was meeting resistance from the parliament—still called the Supreme Soviet—on his political and economic reform measures.

In April, Yeltsin called a referendum on his rule and won overwhelming support. Citing the vote as a mandate, he announced that he would soon put forth a new constitution, strengthening the powers of the president; dissolve the parliament; and hold new elections in December. He ignored the existing constitution when it suited his agenda and bypassed the parliament. The parliament’s leaders pushed back, opposing many of the reforms—especially those adopting free-market capitalism—and calling for new presidential elections. The Orthodox Church tried to intervene as a mediator between the two bodies, but neither side was willing to negotiate. Hence came the impeachment resolution and a heightened militancy among Rutskoi’s faction, which saw itself as losing both political power and popular favor.

The problem wasn’t entirely the persistence of Soviet-style thinking in the parliament. It also lay in the failure, by Yeltsin—and, before him, Gorbachev—to erect or facilitate democratic institutions in the months before then.

When I first came to Moscow in June 1992, I asked a Russian democratic activist I knew where I should travel—which cities in Russia had begun to form democratic institutions: elected councils, political parties, trade unions, civil society groups. He nodded and thought … and then thought some more. It was clear: There were no such cities. Yeltsin talked a good game about democracy; I think he really did want to join the Western world. But he had no idea what this entailed. He viewed all reform as top-down, and the smart young aides he’d recruited to help him had no idea what this entailed either.

His free-market economists, led by Yegor Gaidar, were particularly unprepared. They grasped the inefficiencies of large state-run industries, where the value of inputs (the resource going into a machine) exceeded the value of outputs (the product being produced). They realized price controls had to be lifted to loosen the party’s stranglehold and end the era of chronic shortages. But they didn’t seem to grasp how dependent the country was on the system. In the long term, the reforms created a new class of merchants and consumers; they improved the quality of life for many, especially in the large cities. But in the short run, they were disastrous. Close down the inefficient factory, and you impoverish the entire town built around it (the social services, food shops, schools, everything). Lift price controls, and inflation soars, wiping out the (skimpy) savings of the average citizen.

Gaidar and his staff had read American economics textbooks, but they hadn’t studied America’s real economy. I once asked a young aide to Gaidar whether he knew that, in the real United States, many farmers were paid not to grow crops, in order to keep prices high; that property owners were granted low-interest, 30-year mortgages to make their land affordable; that the government kept unemployed people afloat until they found new jobs. The aide didn’t know any of this.

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. However, they didn’t spark the manufacturing of consumer goods inside Russia; factories remained, for the most part, state-owned or moribund or both.

Second, and more vital, he really did allow the creation of a free press. In the three years I was in Moscow, more than a dozen newspapers and magazines, as well as a couple of radio and television networks, ran completely uncensored operations, trained or hired highly talented journalists (who seemed to have been born for this moment), and published carefully reported investigative articles as well as intelligent opinion columns. One TV show, Kukly (meaning “puppets”)—featuring grotesque puppets of leading Russian political figures, including Yeltsin—was more savagely satirical than anything on American airwaves at the time.

However, all of these free news media organizations were owned by very wealthy individuals (“oligarchs,” they were misleadingly tagged), some of whom were financed by certain private banks. Once Putin replaced Yeltsin, and decided not to tolerate criticism or good humor or independent reporting, these media outlets were shut down, their sources of revenue cut off, their owners in some cases arrested or deported. There were no courts or other institutions to let them be sustained on their own.

Putin did not kill off all of the independent media right away; he let some of the smaller outlets, such as Echo of Moscow radio, survive, if just for appearance’s sake. But after his invasion of Ukraine, when he shut down all voices of criticism, arrested all protesters, moved to control the message totally and to stiffen one-man rule to a degree not seen in Russia since the time of the tsars, he had little problem doing so.

This wasn’t because Yeltsin paved the way with his assault against the parliament on Oct. 4, 1993. The way had been paved by decades, even centuries, of Russian history.