Writers demand a Yeltsin coup ("Letter of the 42")

Between 21 September and 4 October 1993, a constitutional crisis unfolded in Russia. On one side of the divide was Boris Yeltsin’s administration; on the other was the majority of the Congress of People’s Deputies (S'ezd narodnykh deputatov, then Russia’s parliament) as well as its chairman, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and Yeltsin’s own Vice President, Aleksandr Rutskoi. The source of the crisis was the division of powers between the Congress and the president. Both had been elected democratically, and the Congress was instrumental in enabling Yeltsin’s anti-Gorbachev power plays in 1991. However, as Yeltsin implemented a widely unpopular package of economic reforms in 1992 and 1993 and bolstered his power to carry them out through additional referenda, the Congress increasingly opposed Yeltsin’s moves. In response, in September 1993, Yeltsin ordered the part-legislature, part constitutional-convention-like Congress that had originated in the late perestroika years to disband. In their place, Yeltsin sought to install a newly formed Russian Duma and a reformed Russian Presidency, both legitimated by a new, “presidential” constitution. When Yeltsin issued his order, the Congress voted to impeach him. Subsequently, an armed confrontation unfolded on the streets of Moscow between supporters of Congress and of the President, which came to a head when the military, on the President’s orders, shelled the Congress building (the Russian White House).

Because the congressional leaders who opposed Yeltsin most vehemently were members of the Communist Party, and because the defenders of the White House included an array of far-right figures from avowedly xenophobic groups, Yeltsin’s supporters saw the confrontation as a cut-and-dried battle between liberal democracy and a repressive “red-brown” alliance of “communists” and “fascists.” The “Letter of the 42,” signed by writers and prominent members of the late- and post-Soviet liberal intelligentsia, expresses precisely this kind of zero-sum view of the confrontation. The Congress here is understood as a recalcitrant “Soviet” organ standing in the way of the formation of a new democratic Russia. In retrospect, especially after Yeltsin’s manifestly rigged 1996 elections, some signatories of the letter regretted their support of the once- “democratic” leader. The fact that former Soviet liberals were willing to support Yeltsin’s use of emergency political violence highlights the complicated meaning of “liberalism” in late- and post-Soviet Russia.