26 OCTOBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL inspiring but also worrying. When the screen suddenly and without any explanation went blank and stayed that way for hours, it was a dark moment for everyone. If the crowd had managed to take control of Ostankino and Vice President Rutskoy had been the next to appear on television screens across Russia, it might have been the end for Yeltsin. As surprised as everyone else by developments that day, Yeltsin arrived at the Kremlin via helicopter early in the evening. There he spent much time in an eventually successful effort to persuade reluctant senior military and police officials to move against the White House. He never spoke to the Russian people that evening, and senior officials hinted to me—and confirmed later in published accounts—that he was in no condition to do so. b By the early hours of the morning of Oct. 4, the streets of Moscow were quiet, but what would happen when day broke was still unclear. Around this time, a lone figure appeared at the embassy’s chained main gate. Iona Andronov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s foreign affairs committee and its supposed “Foreign Minister,” was asking to see me. I had gotten acquainted with Andronov in the mid-1980s when he was a Soviet journalist in the United States, distinguished by the seeming pleasure he brought to his vitriolic accounts of American life. Like many others, Andronov made a seamless transition from convinced communist to rabid Russian nationalist. Andronov asked if I would contact Yeltsin’s people and urge a pause for negotiation between the two sides. I replied that if the parliament was really interested in avoiding bloodshed, it should put its guns down, leave the White House, and continue their struggle through political means. After thinking it over for a minute, I added, however, that if Andronov would return to the embassy in one hour, I would see what could be done. After checking with the ambassador, I called the Russian Foreign Ministry, which, in turn, put me in touch with the government’s command post at Prime Minister Chernomyrdin’s office. I described the situation to Deputy Foreign Minister Vitaliy Churkin, a rising star of the Russian diplomatic service, who then had responsibility for Russia’s relations with Yugoslavia and later was Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations. After checking with Chernomyrdin, Churkin agreed to speak to Andronov on the phone. After exchanging a preliminary round of insults, the two got down to business. Andronov proposed that Yeltsin rescind his Sept. 21 decree dissolving the Supreme Soviet and end the police siege of the White House. Provided they received guarantees of safe treatment, the deputies would leave the building. Churkin, for his part, demanded an immediate evacuation of the White House and would say nothing about the fate of its inhabitants except that those not guilty of crimes would be allowed to go free. Eventually, both more or less hung up on each other. Armed civil conflict in Moscow—the first since the Russian revolution— was now inevitable. Demonstrators hold up a sign of President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, October 1993. NIKOLAI IGNATIEV/ALAMY
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