Eruption of Violence Points Up Disarray at the Kremlin

Last Friday, two days before an armed uprising against President Boris N. Yeltsin, his Defense Ministry mobilized thousands of soldiers from the elite army units that surround and protect Moscow.

But their mission had nothing to do with the impending crisis. They were sent to state farms to help harvest potatoes, beets and cabbage.

Yeltsin himself, faced with an armed Communist opposition entrenched inside the White House Parliament building, went to his country dacha for the weekend, leaving a skeleton staff behind at the Kremlin.

The battle for Russia that exploded with a massive insurgent push through police barricades Sunday afternoon and ended in flames on Monday in the White House now seems, in hindsight, the chronicle of a firestorm foretold.

But a retelling of those hellish hours by witnesses and reports in the Russian press reveal a government totally off guard, rescued by an army cajoled belatedly into a fray it had sworn to avoid.

“The rebellion,” wrote Russian journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, “has left a clear realization that at the critical moment--a moment that was . . . almost totally predictable, or, in any event, predicted on numerous occasions--those in charge fell into a state of confusion that bordered on panic.”

Accounts by Parkhomenko and others inside the Kremlin and the White House on Sunday night tell of self-delusion and miscalculation in both camps as they blundered into a two-day battle that cost nearly 200 lives--Russia’s bloodiest civil strife since the Bolshevik Revolution.

The rebel leaders, including former Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi and Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, are now in prison and will have to answer in court for their actions after Sept. 21, when they rebelled against Yeltsin’s decree to shut down the anti-reform Parliament.

The president and his men, under no such obligation, have said little about the reasons for their own disarray, leaving many here questioning their ability to steer Russia clear of new crises while keeping the military loyal. But Yeltsin did admit Wednesday that the Kremlin had been confused.

“There is a lot of talk that the authorities dragged their feet, were hesitant, did not know what to do,” he said in a nationally televised address. “I must tell you straight--not everyone had enough self-control, not everyone had enough strength and nerve to cope with the gigantic pressure at the most critical moment.”

Among those whose behavior was called into question is Yeltsin himself. Why he left town on the very weekend his foes had promised “decisive action” is still unclear. The 62-year-old president returned to the Kremlin by helicopter at 6:15 p.m. Sunday, hours after the violence had begun, and closeted himself in his office.

By that time, more than 10,000 anti-Yeltsin demonstrators had overrun police lines around the White House. Rutskoi, sensing victory, ordered his warriors at the White House to seize the mayor’s office and the state-run Ostankino television center.

Sergei Stepashin, the deputy security minister, admitted Thursday that police were unprepared for the assaults on those targets. “I didn’t believe until the last moment,” he said in a television interview, “that they . . . would resort to such bloody measures” while both sides were negotiating at a monastery outside town.

Parkhomenko, a reporter for the Moscow newspaper Sevodnya, was trapped in the Kremlin when guards closed the gates to protect the seat of government from attack. It took hours, he wrote, for Yeltsin’s aides to assemble there.

Then they wasted precious time arguing among themselves “over who had been the most naive,” he reported. One aide shouted into a telephone: “So what are you going to do now, you peacenik you?”

It was only late that night, long after Yeltsin had arrived, that two of his longtime associates, Gennady E. Burbulis and Mikhail Poltoranin, showed up and the Kremlin staff began to work “in a dynamic and concentrated manner,” Parkhomenko wrote.

Yeltsin issued an appeal to the nation but had a journalist read it on Russia’s second TV channel instead of going on the air himself. The president’s absence from public view made it appear that his government was losing ground.

That impression fed the euphoria of the anti-Yeltsin forces, who calculated that prolonged conflict in Moscow would discourage the army from intervening on Yeltsin’s side.

In the White House, Khasbulatov talked of ruling Russia.

“He looked like a very self-confident state leader,” said Vyacheslav Terekhov of the newspaper Izvestia. The imperious Parliament chairman told the reporter that the new leadership “will not be guided by a feeling of revenge against the supporters of the already toppled Yeltsin regime.”

Rebels with automatic weapons gathered outside the Defense Ministry in downtown Moscow and built campfires, apparently waiting to move in and take over.

That moment never came. Inside the building, the armed forces’ general staff started deliberating at 7:30 p.m. Yeltsin joined it at 2 the next morning, according to Sevodnya. By 3:30 a.m., when he had left, the storming of the White House had been planned in detail, set to start after dawn.

By most accounts, that decision was achieved with great difficulty.

The history of Russia’s murderous civil war of 1918-20, as well as the disgrace of officers who supported the failed August, 1991, coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, had taught the army’s leaders the taboo of taking sides in a political conflict.

But two decisions by the rebel forces apparently eroded the army’s neutrality. Rutskoi, himself an air force general decorated in the Afghan War, had named his own “defense minister,” a hard-line paratroop commander named Gen. Vladislav Achalov.

Military analysts in Moscow said the army’s generals viewed that appointment as a violation of another taboo--trying to divide their loyalty. The second rebel decision--the vicious early evening attack on the Ostankino television center, which was to last past midnight--made it easier for the generals to back Yeltsin in the name of public order.

Yeltsin pleaded with Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev several times by telephone Sunday evening but got “elusive” answers until after the fighting at Ostankino was well under way, Izvestia reported. During this time, a Yeltsin aide went to the Taman tank division headquarters outside Moscow to appeal for help but was turned away at the gate.

Pavel Felgengauer, a leading Russian military analyst, reported in Sevodnya that it took the general staff until 10 p.m., after a telephone poll of regional commanders across Russia, to throw its support behind Yeltsin.

After that it took several hours to cobble together a force from four Moscow-area tank and paratroop divisions, including the Taman unit--each short of manpower because of the mobilization of soldiers for the harvest.

By Monday morning, 1,300 soldiers were surrounding the White House, shelling it from tanks. Their commanders ran the operation from an office in the nearby Ukraine Hotel, aided by live television images of the battle on CNN.

Inside the White House, Rutskoi’s hopes of taking power began fading after the attack on Ostankino was beaten back. As the building trembled under the impact of each tank shell, the Afghan veteran sounded as if he could not believe what destruction he had wrought.

Clad in baggy camouflage and white sneakers, the mustachioed general telephoned Valery D. Zorkin, the chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court. A reporter recorded his appeal: “Valera, they are shooting straight at the building. They are murderers! Valera, please bring the judges here, let them look for themselves.”

Khasbulatov was in a different state--sprawled on an easy chair, pale and exhausted, smoking a pipe. Terekhov, the Izvestia reporter who had seen him so triumphant on Sunday, hardly recognized the chairman as someone nearby looked out a window describing the last hours of the siege.

“I could see that Khasbulatov was not listening to him,” Terekhov wrote. “His wide-open eyes seemed to be peering into himself. It appeared to me that he was simply waiting for the end.”