Thread by @redguard1971

October 3-4, 1993: Moscow uprising against U.S./Yeltsin counter-revolution

🧵 on a hidden chapter of working class history
#USSR #Russia #socialism

October 3-4 marks the anniversary of the heroic uprising against #BorisYeltsin’s imperialist-backed attack on the Supreme Soviet in #Moscow. The uprising’s defeat represented the final overturn of socialist relations and the restoration of #capitalism in the USSR.

Several years of counter-revolutionary developments within and without had seriously demoralized the #Soviet working class. Generations of non-combative, revisionist leadership left the Soviet people unprepared to fight back to defend socialism.

Yet for several weeks in September 1993, as the crisis deepened, demonstrations had been growing in defense of the Supreme Soviet and for the restoration of the USSR in accord with the referendum of May 17, 1991,

when 70 percent of Soviet voters supported the continuation of the union, which was later illegally dissolved by Yeltsin & co. in December 1991.

On the night of October 3-4, 1993, thousands of communist militants, workers and youths battled Yeltsin’s fascist OMON troops and other counter-revolutionary elements in the streets surrounding the “Russian White House” (seat of the Supreme Soviet).

Hundreds of defenders were mowed down by automatic gunfire and the building was shelled by Yeltsin’s tanks in what has come to be known in Russia as “Black October.”

In scenes reminiscent of the 1973 fascist coup in Chile, an unknown number of defenders were later taken as prisoners to a Moscow stadium and shot.

Afterward the stadium walls were riddled with bullet holes. Estimates of the dead and disappeared are in the thousands, though Yeltsin claimed only 151 people died.

In the aftermath, resistance leaders, including #communist militant Victor Anpilov, elected Supreme Soviet deputies & other Yeltsin opponents were imprisoned. Revolutionary organizations & newspapers were banned, with hardy approval from U.S. President #BillClinton.

We will never forget the heroic martyrs of the October uprising. Presente!

Video: Voices from Russia in Defense of Socialism


“A first-hand account of Yeltsin’s 1993 October massacre”
fuckyeahmarxismleninism.tumblr.com/post/328116918…

“What really happened in Moscow, October 1993” by Bill Dores
fuckyeahmarxismleninism.tumblr.com/post/328041373…

“Victor Anpilov Speaks: The Red Flag Will Fly Again,” based on interviews conducted by Bill Dores, 1996
View or download the pamphlet in PDF format here:
drive.google.com/file/d/0B6_po_…