The Will Of The People

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  The first reports were broadcast by the American news channels, and it was a good forty minutes before Russian TV started to show live pictures from Yakutsk, the capital of Russia’s Sakha Republic. The camera image was of Government House, its windows smashed, smoke blackening the upper floors; scores of armed insurgents celebrated in the street outside, the Russian Tricolour in flames at their feet. The voice-over condemned the mob violence and unrest that had led to the storming of the building, blaming terrorist elements linked to August 14. Western TV news offered a different perspective, the protests seen more as a popular uprising against the Government in Moscow.

  Hundreds of ethnic Yakuts had already joined the insurrection, although the fighting was now generally confined to west of the city centre and further north around the airport. Troops from the Eastern Military District were thought to be in transit, but for the time being the city was in the hands of the nationalists.

  Rebane watched with a smile of satisfaction, gaze moving from one TV picture to another to see which news channel would be first with the next of August 14’s targets. In fact it was a close call between CNN and Sky, both showing the same video clip, purporting to be of Ulan-Ude, a thousand miles south-west of Yakutsk and near to the Mongolian border. A dozen bodies lay in an unnamed square, the camera pulling back across bullet-ridden vehicles to show riot police firing live rounds at some unknown enemy hidden in the buildings opposite.

  It was as much as Rebane could presently hope for: Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Republic of Buryatia, was probably a lost cause, the ethnic Buryats forming barely a third of the population. With Yakutsk the mix was more even, and despite the forced immigration of the Soviet era, less than half its people were ethnic Russians. And this was just the beginning; over the next twenty-four hours more of Russia’s republics would follow the Asian lead. Bashkortostan, Chechnya, Chuvashia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkar, North Ossetia and Tatarstan – in all of these, ethnic Russians were the minority. All had secessionist movements of differing influence, but with August 14’s leadership there was now a real opportunity for change, for true freedom from the Russian yoke. Only then, could Eastern Europe relax, the fear which had pervaded millions of lives for countless generations finally put to rest.

  Even many native Russians were fed up with the authority of Moscow, and several regions including Kaliningrad, Karelia and Siberia actively sought some form of sovereignty. Not that the Government in Moscow took such wishes particularly seriously. Of more concern to Moscow was the fact that a large number of Russians considered themselves Siberian rather than Russian – something China and now August 14 was keen to encourage.

  By 8 p.m. Moscow Time, the capital’s central squares were swarming with protestors, upwards of a hundred thousand according to some estimates. The placards again told of conflicting loyalties, the numbers evenly split between those supporting the Government and those demanding an end to the State of Emergency with its authoritarian suppression of human rights.

  The security forces were vastly out-numbered. Their options seemed limited to the extremes of massacring the innocent with the guilty, or reverting once more to the feeble strategy of watch and wait. When two opposing groups of protestors clashed, the police intervened with tear gas and batons instead of firearms, and for the time being the two sides settled down to an uneasy and unspoken truce. By some process of diffusion, the majority of Government supporters made their base Red Square, while a confused mix of nationalists, immigrants and liberals set up camp a kilometre to the east in Arbat Square.

  As the evening progressed, reports trickled in from across Russia, telling of the unrest spreading inexorably from one republic to another, it primarily affecting the larger cities. In some areas, the numbers were relatively small and the protests petered out or were quickly broken up by the police, but in the Caucasus, the security forces came under armed attack, with several government buildings fire-bombed or ransacked. The latter success spurred those in Arbat Square to burst forth and march towards the Kremlin. The police worked hard to stop them, but organised elements moved through the side streets, running battles drawing in more or more protestors from both sides.

  By midnight, sporadic gun battles raged across the city centre – it was far from something as dramatic as civil war, but such an outcome appeared to be getting ever closer.