The birthday of the regime

Famous German site " DAS Osteuropamagazin ” some time ago began the Russian Quintet project . Quintet is played by Russian journalists Oleg Kashin, Elena Kostyuchenko and Dmitry Olshansky and two German, working in Russia and Russia, Moritz Gatman and Christian Ash. The essence of the project: texts on both sides on the most acute topics of the Russian modernity. In the Russian Quintet there were already speakers about state homophobia and Navalny. The new series is dedicated to the anniversary of the White House execution and the significance of this event for Russia. From today COLTA . RU becomes an official partner of this project and will publish texts that have so far been available to readers only in German. The first is the text of our permanent author Oleg Kashin.

The project is done with the support of the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Foundation.

What happened in Moscow in the fall of 1993? Take your time with the answer to this question, just look at modern Russia. You will see the courts that sentences after a phone call with instructions from the Presidential Administration, the administration itself is not selected by anyone and an unceasant body that actually governed the state. The administrations are controlled by the courts, the parliament, and the power of the regions, and the media, and political parties - all parties, even those that are considered opposition. At the top of this system, President Putin is located - this is a person whose word is enough to elevate or turn into nothing in the country, from a billionaire of Khodorkovsky to the disabled Mikhail Kosenko (he has been in prison for participating in an anti -Putin rally in Bolotnaya Square for more than a year). News from Russia in 2013 call the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez about Latin American dictatorships or “comedians” Graham Green-Putin would probably like to be like the enlightened Russian emperors or, in extreme cases, for some reason, it turns out only the Haitian dad Duvalier. By the way, Putin is often called "dad."

Yeltsin's autocracy was directed against the "bad guys", and therefore it suited "good guys".

Do you want to know how it happened that the democratic Eastern European country, which, undoubtedly, was Russia at the end of 1991, turned into a Latin American autocracy? And now I will ask you to answer the question again - what happened in Russia in the fall of 1993? It is very easy to describe. Boris Yeltsin, who was not satisfied with the mixed, presidential-parliamentary, form of government, which then existed in the country, announced the liquidation of the parliament and the new constitution, which establishes the super-presidential regime. The parliament, trying to resist this coup, was shot from tanks. According to the results of the crisis, the very system that is well known to us was formed - with the courts, parliament, parties, and media controlled by the Kremlin.

While the president was Yeltsin, a man with a reputation as a democrat, this was not so striking - in fact, even smart people could believe that his autocracy saves Russia from a communist revenge, from returning to Soviet times, from Nazism, in the end. Now that instead of Democrat Yeltsin, the KGB Putin veteran is sitting in the Kremlin, these illusions are no longer there, but in Russia very few are still ready to fold two and two and admit to themselves that the Yeltsin regime and Putin's regime are the same regime.

It’s just that the President was Yeltsin, autocracy was directed against “bad guys”, and therefore “good guys” it suited to such an extent that they were ready to forgive Yeltsin and uncontrolled personal power, and dishonest elections, and corruption, and generally everything in the world. Under Putin, the personal list of “bad” and “good” has changed - but nothing more. All the principles of “manual control” and “controlled democracy” were formed precisely under Yeltsin, and if exactly, then the October morning, when the tanks of the Tamanskaya and Kantemirovskaya divisions were shot by Boris Yeltsin from Mikhail Gorbachev from the Novoarbat bridge on the building of the Russian parliament.