The topic of "bloody October 1993" is still sealed today. Nobody knows exactly how many citizens died in those troubled days. However, the figures given by independent sources are terrifying.
Appointed at 7:00
In the fall of 1993, the confrontation between the two branches of power - the president and the government, on the one hand, and the people's deputies and the Supreme Soviet, on the other, reached a dead end. The constitution, which the opposition so zealously defended, bound Boris Yeltsin hand and foot. There was only one way out: to change the law, if necessary - by force.
The conflict entered a phase of extreme aggravation on September 21, after the famous decree No. 1400, in which Yeltsin temporarily suspended the powers of the Congress and the Supreme Soviet. Communications, water and electricity were cut off in the parliament building. However, the lawmakers blocked there were not going to give up. They were helped by volunteers who defended the White House.
On the night of October 4, the president decides to storm the Supreme Soviet using armored vehicles, and government troops are drawn up to the building. The operation is scheduled for 7 am. As soon as the countdown of the eighth hour began, the first victim appeared - a police captain died from a bullet, filming what was happening from the balcony of the hotel "Ukraine".
Victims of the White House
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Already at 10 in the morning, information began to arrive about the death of a large number of defenders of the Supreme Soviet residence as a result of tank fire. By 11:30, 158 people needed medical attention, 19 of them later died in the hospital. At 13:00, People's Deputy Vyacheslav Kotelnikov reported about large casualties among those who were in the White House. At about 2:50 pm, unknown snipers begin to shoot people crowded outside the parliament.
Closer to 16:00, the resistance of the defenders was suppressed. A government commission assembled in hot pursuit quickly calculates the victims of the tragedy - 124 killed, 348 wounded. Moreover, the list does not include those killed in the building of the White House itself.
The head of the investigative group of the Prosecutor General's Office, Leonid Proshkin, who was involved in the seizure of the Moscow mayor's office and the television center, notes that all the victims are the result of attacks by government forces, since it was proved that "not a single person was killed from the weapons of the defenders of the White House." According to the Prosecutor General's Office, to which deputy Viktor Ilyukhin referred, 148 people were killed during the storming of parliament, with 101 people near the building.
And then, in various comments on these events, the numbers only grew. On October 4, CNN, citing its sources, said that about 500 people had died. The newspaper "Argumenty i Fakty", referring to the soldiers of the internal troops, wrote that they had collected the remains of almost 800 defenders, including "charred and torn apart by tank shells," choking in the flooded basements of the White House. Former deputy of the Supreme Soviet from the Chelyabinsk region, Anatoly Baronenko, spoke about 900 dead.
An article appeared in Nezavisimaya Gazeta from an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs who did not want to introduce himself, who said: “In total, about 1,500 corpses were found in the White House, among them women and children. All of them were secretly taken out from there through an underground tunnel leading from the White House to the Krasnopresnenskaya metro station, and further out of the city, where they were burned."
There is unconfirmed information that a note was seen on the table of the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Viktor Chernomyrdin stating that 1,575 corpses were taken out of the White House in just three days. But most of all, "Literaturnaya Rossiya" was surprised, claiming 5,000 dead.
Difficulties in counting
The representative of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Tatyana Astrakhankina, who headed the commission to investigate the events of October 1993, established that soon after the shooting of parliament, all the materials on this case were classified, "some medical records of the wounded and dead" were rewritten, and "the dates of admission to morgues and hospitals" … This, of course, created an almost insurmountable obstacle to accurately calculating the number of victims of the assault on the White House.
Determining the number of those killed, at least in the White House itself, is possible only indirectly. According to the assessment of Obshchaya Gazeta, about 2,000 besieged people left the White House building without filtration. Considering that initially there were about 2.5 thousand people, it can be concluded that the number of victims did not exactly exceed 500.
The number of deaths on the streets is more difficult to count. It is known that many nonresidents came to defend the parliament, who were not registered anywhere, and those who died were hardly included in the official list of victims.
It should also not be forgotten that the first victims of the confrontation between the supporters of the President and the Parliament appeared long before the White House attack. So, on September 23, two people died on the Leningradskoye highway, and since September 27, according to some, the victims have become almost daily.
According to the statements of Alexander Rutskoy and Ruslan Khasbulatov, by the middle of the day on October 3, the number of those killed had reached 20 people. In the afternoon of the same day, a clash between the opposition and the Interior Ministry forces on the Crimean Bridge claimed the lives of 26 civilians and two policemen.
Even if we raise the lists of all those who died in hospitals and disappeared in those days, it will be extremely difficult to determine which of them fell victim to political confrontation.
Ostankino massacre
On the eve of the storming of the White House on the evening of October 3, responding to Rutskoi's call, General Albert Makashov, at the head of an armed detachment of 20 people and several hundred volunteers, tried to seize the building of the television center. However, by the time the operation began, Ostankino was already guarded by 24 armored personnel carriers and about 900 military personnel loyal to the president.
After the trucks of the Supreme Soviet supporters rammed the ASK-3 building, there was an explosion (its source was never identified), resulting in the first victims. This was a signal for a heavy fire, which began to lead the internal troops and police officers from the building of the television complex.
They fired bursts and single shots, including from sniper rifles, just into the crowd, without making out the journalists, onlookers or trying to pull out the wounded. Later, the indiscriminate shooting was explained by the great overcrowding of the people and the onset of dusk.
But the worst thing started later. Most of the people tried to hide in the Oak Grove next to ASK-3. One of the oppositionists recalled how the crowd was squeezed in a grove from two sides, and then they began to shoot from an armored personnel carrier and four machine gun nests from the roof of the television center.
According to official figures, the fighting for Ostankino claimed the lives of 46 people, including two inside the building. However, witnesses claim that there were many more victims.
Count the numbers
Writer Alexander Ostrovsky in his book The Shooting of the White House. Black October 1993 "tried to calculate the total number of victims of those tragic events, relying on verified data:" Until October 2 - 4 people, in the afternoon on October 3 at the White House - 3, in Ostankino - 46, during the assault on the White House - at least 165, October 3 and 4 in other places of the city - 30, on the night of October 4 to 5 - 95, plus those who died after October 5, in total - about 350 people."
However, many admit that the official statistics are several times underestimated. How much is anyone's guess, given eyewitness accounts.
Moscow State University teacher Sergei Surnin, who watched the events near the White House, recalled how, after the shooting began, he and another 40 people fell to the ground: “Armored personnel carriers passed by us and from a distance of 12-15 meters they shot the lying people - one third of those lying nearby were killed or injured. And in the immediate vicinity of me - three killed, two wounded: next to me, to my right, killed, still killed after me, in front, at least one killed”.
Artist Anatoly Nabatov saw from the White House window how in the evening after the end of the assault a group of about 200 people was brought to the Krasnaya Presnya stadium. They were undressed, and then at the wall adjacent to Druzhinnikovskaya Street, they began to shoot in parties until late at night on October 5. Eyewitnesses said that they were previously beaten. According to deputy Baronenko, at least 300 people were shot at and around the stadium.
A well-known public figure who in 1993 led the People's Action movement, Georgy Gusev, testified that riot policemen beat the detainees in the courtyards and entrances, and then killed unknown persons "in a strange manner."
One of the drivers who took the corpses out of the parliament building and from the stadium admitted that he had to make two trips in his truck in the suburbs. In the forest, corpses were thrown into pits, covered with earth, and the burial site was bulldozed.
Human rights activist Yevgeny Yurchenko, one of the founders of the Memorial society, who was involved in the secret destruction of corpses in Moscow crematoria, managed to learn from the workers of the Nikolo-Arkhangelsk cemetery about the burning of 300-400 corpses. Yurchenko also drew attention to the fact that if in "ordinary months", according to the statistics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, up to 200 unclaimed corpses were burned in crematoria, then in October 1993 this figure increased several times - up to 1500.
According to Yurchenko, the list of those killed during the events of September-October 1993, including those whose disappearance was proven or witnesses whose death were found, is 829 people. But, obviously, this list is incomplete.
