Moscow, Sunday 3 October 1993

At an Embassy picnic in the Moscow suburbs that afternoon news started to come through that the extended sit-in at the Russian Parliament by President Yeltsin’s opponents had turned violent. We jumped in our cars and returned to our various flats in central Moscow. I went to the Embassy, bravely leaving my wife and small sons at home, much closer to the shooting than I was.

Dramatic events were unfolding: an attempted coup against Yeltsin by armed hard-core Communists and a rag-bag grouping of religious and nationalist ‘Red-Brown’ (ie fascistic) extremists. A crowd of anti-Yeltsin demonstrators had broken through the police lines surrounding the Parliament building by the river to join up with anti-Yeltsin politicians occupying the building, led by Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi. Rutskoi had made a dramatic speech urging the seizure of the lofty Ostankino radio/TV tower on the Moscow outskirts – success here would have helped convince Russia’s far-flung regions to help bring Yeltsin down. Long convoys of anti-Yeltsin people raced out towards the tower, with pro-Yeltsin security forces speeding there too. All rather chaotic and undignified.

At the tower a significant and undoubtedly dramatic gun battle ensued as night fell. Key pro-Yeltsin army units had to be brought to Moscow from (it was said) potato-picking duties to help the defences. Back in central Moscow middle-class pro-reform supporters started to put up barricades.

In the Embassy we were working flat out to get a balanced sense of this drama back to London. In the confusion what was apparent was that this was not a mass phenomenon. Apart from the real enough battles in a few streets around the Ostankino tower and the pro-Yeltsin demonstrations of a few thousand people in the city centre, the whole of Russia was doing an impressive job of either being blissfully unaware of all this or waiting patiently to see who won.

In a quiet moment we watched the BBC live broadcast. The reporter breathlessly proclaimed to the planet, "This is an uprising of the people of Russia against President Yeltsin!" Apart from being utterly and absurdly untrue, this message undermined the pro-reform, pro-European tendency in Russia just when it needed Western encouragement.

The next day there ensued the famous ‘Siege of the White House’. The anti-Yeltsin forces had been defeated at the Ostankino tower and had fallen back to the Russian Parliament building. They were surrounded by pro-Yeltsin military forces who eventually forced them to surrender. The Wikipedia description of all this is alas highly tendentious. For all the media images of high ‘Russia in Crisis’ drama as tanks made a huge noise mainly firing blanks at the building to demoralise the occupants, a few streets away people were shopping normally. We have family video footage of our two small sons playing in the courtyard of our block of flats not far from the White House with the crackle of gunfire in the background. 

I later heard that one well-known UK TV journalist made a total fool of himself by insisting that he be filmed heroically crouching down behind a low wall with gunfire in the background as he described for viewers the dangerous action all around. His team were delighted to film him, as right behind the wall in the camera shot were a young Russian couple nonchalantly smoking and chatting as if nothing special were happening.

In short, this was one vivid occasion when the taxpayer got an excellent service from the Government; the Embassy’s reporting and analysis were faster and far better than anything else on offer, and this enabled the then Major Government’s political reaction to the crisis to be measured and strategic.

When I subsequently took up with a senior BBC personality the BBC’s dismal, dishonest reporting at the height of the crisis he just shrugged, saying that that sort of dramatic reporting boosted ratings and was what people wanted to hear these days.

All of which may well be true. Just don’t compel me to pay for it.