22 OCTOBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL COVER STORY During a 27-year Foreign Service career (1971-1998), Louis Sell served for many years in the former Soviet Union, Russia, and Yugoslavia. After leaving the Foreign Service, he served as Kosovo director of the International Crisis Group (2000) and as executive director of the American University in Kosovo Foundation (2003-2008), where he helped found the American University in Kosovo. He is the author of From Washington to Moscow: U.S.-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR (Duke University Press, 2016) and Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Duke University Press, 2002). On the 30th anniversary of what Russians call the “October Coup,” a veteran FSO offers an inside view of the fateful standoff between the president and the legislature in Moscow. BY LOUIS D. SELL Sunday, Oct. 3, 1993, was the kind of unusually warm and sunny fall day that Muscovites cherish. Having essentially been on full-time duty as acting number two at the embassy since the crisis began in September, I decided to take my wife, Cathey, my 8-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and one of her friends for a picnic on the outskirts of Moscow. That excursion turned out to be a big mistake, only mitigated by the fact that almost everyone else in Moscow, from Boris Yeltsin on down, was as surprised by what happened as I was. “Got a cigarette?” the young Russian special forces sergeant drawled as he leaned his Kalashnikov casually across our open van widow. A dozen other soldiers walked warily behind two armored vehicles withdrawing slowly down the center of the unnaturally empty Moscow ring road. Weapons at the ready, their eyes searched the nearby buildings with the taut alertness of men who have recently been fired on and expect it could happen again. Trying not to look nervously at my wife and the two little girls in the back, I asked what was happening. “Who knows,” he replied. “Some kind’a ruckus. We’re getting out.” AT THE RUSSIAN WHITE HOUSE 1993
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