Troops beat demonstrators outside parliament
By Kirill Buketov
MOSCOW — Protesters against the coup d'etat by Boris Yeltsin suffered vicious beatings on the night of September 28, as club-wielding police drove them away from the building where the besieged Congress of People's Deputies was in session.
Streets around the "White House" were sealed off by pro-Yeltsin authorities on the evening of September 27 with heavy trucks and razor wire. Interior Ministry troops and militia did not allow anyone, even press representatives, to pass through the cordon.
The authorities showed an aggressive and contemptuous attitude to the rights of any civilians present. Militia officers began twisting the arms of Izvestia correspondent Valery Yakov as soon as he declared that under the law on the mass media he had the right to collect information. Yakov's press card was then trampled into the mud.
Also denied entrance were deputies who earlier had been rash enough to leave the building.
At 8 p.m. on September 28 police began forcing demonstrators away from the cordons blocking the entrances to the White House. Equipped with steel shields and clubs, massed ranks of Interior Ministry special forces drove the protesters out of the neighbourhood adjacent to the White House. In a number of cases where people tried to resist, they were savagely beaten.
Outraged by the actions of the troops and militia, protesters began building barricades on nearby streets. However, no shops were destroyed and no cars damaged. This in itself is proof that the crowd was not made up of drunks and maniacs, as the mass media tried to imply.
Just as false is the claim that the night's events were provoked by the demonstrators trying to force their way through the militia ranks. No-one who saw the massive barriers strewn with razor wire could doubt that this was impossible.
At 9 p.m. the forces of the state mounted a new attack, and the demonstrators were scattered into nearby laneways. Hardly anyone tried to resist. Before my eyes, the chairman of the Cheremushkinsky Regional Soviet was thrown to the ground and viciously beaten after he had urged the militia through a megaphone not to use violence against the people.
Troops then threw to the ground and began kicking a young woman with a video camera who had caught the incident on tape. This victim of was unable even to pull out her press card. After administering these beatings, the "guardians of democracy" hauled the victims off behind the cordon. [From KAS-KOR Labour Information Centre, Moscow.]