THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2023 27 A few hours later, lying on the floor of my townhouse living room, I watched while a column of armored vehicles crashed through the barricades between the embassy and the White House. Defenders hurled flaming Molotov cocktails. In a few seconds “Freedom Square” was dotted with small pools of blazing gasoline. Crumpled beside them, often, were the bodies of the throwers. Later in the morning, six tanks appeared on the opposite, front side of the White House. They fired a few shots, which ignited massive fires in the upper floors of the building. While this was occurring, special police filtered into the back side of the building and fought a floor-by-floor battle with its defenders. Late in the afternoon, Rutskoy and Khasbulatov emerged with their hands up, and together with several hundred supporters, they were driven away in buses. Throughout the conflict the embassy suffered only one casualty, a Marine Security Guard who was wounded while maintaining watch from one of the upper windows of the unfinished new embassy. Because of the continued sniping around the embassy, Ambassador Pickering decided that embassy personnel should not return to their apartments on the compound. People spent a second night in the gym. I slept for about an hour on the carpeted floor in the DCM’s office just across the hall from the ambassador’s office who, as far as I knew, did about the same thing. I woke at about 5 a.m. on Oct. 5 to a brilliant sunlit morning. To my surprise, I saw that the fires seemed to have extinguished themselves. It was another unusually warm and sunny autumn day. While hardline supporters mourned over the bodies of the Russian T-80 battle tanks made a show of strength outside the Russian White House in central Moscow on Oct. 3, 1993. CHUCK NACKE/ALAMY Since the White House was only 200 yards behind the U.S. embassy, we had found ourselves participants in the drama from its beginning.
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