How I Got The Photo – Phil Hossack

January 29, 2019

Babushka and riot shield, Moscow, October 4, 1993. (Photo – Phil Hossack)

Twenty-five years ago in September 1993, I felt I needed a break from the day-to-day journalism in Manitoba. So I took a month’s leave of absence from the Winnipeg Free Press and went to Moscow to visit the communist superpower’s capital. I was looking forward to focusing my lenses on street photography.

I’d been fascinated with Russia as a child, reading and listening to Peter and The Wolf, and then as an adult, reading Tolstoy and Chekov. Also, the Berlin Wall had fallen four years earlier in 1989 and the Soviet Union had recently collapsed in 1991.

I managed to secure a travel visa via a Winnipeg-based construction company that had a branch office in Moscow. Even better, a former Free Press colleague then living in Moscow had made the mistake of inviting me to come for a visit.

My first day in Moscow, I walked past some protestors at the Russian White House, their parliament building. These protestors were mostly seniors who were finding life difficult under the new Russian government. Their government pensions didn’t cover the cost of living in the newly embraced western economy.

Old Soviet apartments were being privatized and sold from under the pensioners. Housing and food were becoming more and more difficult to obtain for older Russians. (Photo – Phil Hossack)

The protests, though visually interesting, seemed minor. I took only a few photos. (Photo – Phil Hossack)

As my knowledge of Moscow’s inner city increased over the next few days, I started returning to the White House and saw the protest grow. A barricade of scrap steel, barbed wire and anything else people could find, now circled the parliament building and more people were joining the occupation daily. (Photo – Phil Hossack)

I began my daily walks at the occupation site. Even though we didn’t speak a common language, I gradually got to know a few of the protestors who welcomed me and my cameras. (Photos – Phil Hossack)

Over time, the protest became more and more radicalized and eventually included groups from all political stripes. They were calling for the end of Boris Yeltsin’s new Russian government and a hard left turn back to the old Soviet way of life. (Photo – Phil Hossack)

With the presence of political hardliners including communists, nazis, fascists and more, the stance of the protestors, now rebels, got harder. I was offered a Kalashnikov by a protestor wearing a Bolshevik uniform but I didn’t accept.

About three weeks into my visit, near the end of September, after hardline protestors became holed up inside the White House, riot police were called to clear the compound. But the very organized protestors beat back the police. The resistance had the support of a military unit inside the White House as well as some anti-Yeltsin politicians.

Army units were called in over the next few days to quell the protests to no avail as political confusion filled the capital. (Photo – Phil Hossack)

Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the army to shell and storm the legislature and to retake other occupied buildings. On the morning of October 4th, helicopter and tank assaults began against the armed rebels in the parliament building. Elite airborne commandos then dropped onto the White House roof and began an assault inside the building.

People watch the Russian legislature building burn in Moscow, October 4, 1993, after being shelled by Russian tanks. The Russian army was trying to retake the building after it was occupied by armed, anti-government rebels. (Photo – Phil Hossack)

There were people, spectators, everywhere just gawking. There were kids running in and out of the gunfire, right across the White House lawn between the opposing sides.

In front of the White House, there were three or four heavy tanks with heavy machine-guns and they were literally surrounded by 2,000 spectators, standing right beside the tanks, so close that if they’d started firing, they’d be dead.

It wasn’t just the tanks and rebels shooting at each other at the White House. Police and soldiers exchanged gunfire with nearby rooftop snipers who were loyal to rebel Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi. There were people running all over the place and bullets flying. Yet across the river, spectators lined the streets and were enjoying the sunny day like it was a holiday.

On a bright Monday afternoon, people watch the Russian White House burn across the river in Moscow, October 4, 1993. (Photo – Phil Hossack)

I stayed on the perimeter of the main fighting but witnessed the aftermath of several peripheral battles, one of which led me to this older woman, a babushka.

She was furious at the situation and as she and I walked a backstreet toward the White House, she picked up an army officer’s hat and riot shield. Moments earlier, I had watched riot police run past us in retreat from gunfire and drop their gear in panic. Yet I decided to follow this woman toward the sound of battle.

It was now the afternoon of October 4, the parliament building was ablaze from tank fire and the resistance leaders, driven from the building, had surrendered. But other rebel lawmakers and their supporters were still inside the White House.

During my one-month “vacation” in Moscow, I had watched a simple seniors’ economic plea for help grow into a violent, political coup attempt against the Boris Yeltsin government. I saw and photographed bystanders killed by stray bullets as the street were lined with spectators trying to watch the battle. More than one bullet ricocheted past my own head. (Photo – Phil Hossack)

According to news reports, in this one-day war, 32 people were killed and 369 injured. But other reports said the entire 13-day rebellion saw 200 people killed and 500 injured; non-governmental groups claimed over 1,000 were killed. This “constitutional crisis” was the worst violence in Moscow since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution which was a two-day war in October of that year.