Yeltsin's Attack, America's Tolerance

The National interest ^ | Paul J. Saunders

[cunning_fish]

In the midst of a significant American political crisis, it is easy to forget that twenty years ago this week, Russia’s former president Boris Yeltsin shelled Moscow’s White House—where the country’s parliament met at that time—in a considerably more dramatic and probably more consequential executive-legislative conflict than today’s in Washington. Yet Americans would do well to remember the events that led to the October 1993 crisis.

Unfortunately, few still appear to recall October 3 and 4. Even The Washington Post seems to have forgotten; despite its current editorial-page editor’s service as Moscow bureau chief at that time, the paper’s timeline of “Yeltsin’s Reforms and Economic Turmoil” skips directly from Yeltsin’s September 21 decree disbanding the Supreme Soviet to a December vote on the country’s new constitution without any mention of the minor detail that Russia’s president ordered troops to assault the parliament building and arrest the body’s speaker as well as his own vice president.