THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2023 23 From there, I drove a few hundred yards through a milling crowd to the American embassy. Recognizing me, Marine guards arrayed unusually in helmets and flak jackets opened the gate just wide enough for us to enter. Once inside the compound, while my wife and the children dashed for our residence, I hustled into the command post that the embassy had been maintaining near my office in the political section for the past two weeks—since Russian President Boris Yeltsin had dissolved the country’s hardline parliament. When the delegates refused to disband, Yeltsin surrounded them in the “White House” where only two years previously he, with parliamentary chief Ruslan Khasbulatov at his side, had led resistance to the August 1991 coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Yeltsin’s action was clearly outside the law, but for the past two years the parliament had been sabotaging his reform program with a vehemence that, in recent months, had blocked all normal functions of government. Since the White House was only 200 yards behind the U.S. embassy, we had found ourselves participants in the drama from its beginning. Despite the annoyance, inconvenience, and eventually danger of being at the epicenter of what turned out to be an armed conflict, embassy personnel and their families pulled together to meet the challenge. b In the command post, my deputy, Judy Mandel, an experienced Soviet hand who spoke fluent Russian, and the embassy security officer briefed me on what we knew and didn’t know— mainly the latter at that point. Mid-afternoon, a crowd of several thousand had unexpectedly come marching down the ring road and attacked police barricades from behind. Simultaneously, armed men, led by Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoy, had swarmed out of the White House. After a brief firefight, most of the police had fled, but some had been killed and others had surrendered. While this was going on, embassy personnel had quietly brought inside the uniformed Soviet guards outside the main gate and let them out via a back entrance, thereby probably saving their lives. Flushed with the enthusiasm of unexpected victory, the crowd was a motley collection of old-style communists, Russian nationalist extremists, swastika-toting Nazis, and leather-jacketed skinheads looking for a fight and not very particular against whom. About the only thing that united them was their hatred for Boris Yeltsin—and the United States. At the point where it faces the White House, the embassy compound is protected by a brick wall about seven feet high. It was regularly climbed by drunks or thrill-seekers; on one occasion a confused but otherwise seemingly harmless Russian intruder was found taking a shower in the basement of the embassy townhouse belonging to the deputy chief of mission (DCM). After milling about and making their views on America abundantly clear through shouts and gestures, the crowd moved away. On the open line to the State Department’s Operations Center, I briefed Strobe Talbott, ambassador-at-large and special adviser to Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the Newly Independent States. It took only a few words for Talbott to understand the gravity of the situation. He asked what we needed, and I urged him to remind the Russian authorities of their obligation to provide protection for the embassy. My next task was to inform Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering who, like most of the rest of Moscow, was enjoying a quiet Sunday at his Spaso House residence. When he heard what was happening, Pickering said he would walk over immediately. There were still plenty of angry people milling about, and I advised him to at least wait until we could get a couple of security officers over to accompany him. But the ambassador brought the conversation to a quick close by saying, “I’ll be over in 15 minutes,” and hung up. Having successfully sorted out the ambassador, my next call was to the USA section of the Russian Foreign Ministry. When I told the young duty officer what had happened, he put me through to the home of Deputy Foreign Minister Georgiy Interior Ministry troops assemble near the Russian White House during the 1993 constitutional crisis. COURTESY OF LOUIS SELL
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