Rally Remembers 1993 Bloodshed

People gathered outside the Ostankino television complex Tuesday to commemorate bloody clashes between government troops and supporters of the parliament that left many dead 13 years ago.

The official death toll from the Oct. 3-4, 1993, events stands at 123.

More than 60 percent of Russians believe that former President Boris Yeltsin's use of military force to subdue the rebellious Supreme Soviet in October 1993 was unjustified, according to a recent poll.

The poll, conducted in late September by the independent Levada Center, revealed that 61 percent of Russians considered the decision to send tanks against the parliament on Oct. 4, 1993, unjustified. Back in 1993, just 30 percent of respondents held this view, Interfax reported.

Thirty-five percent of respondents in the latest Levada poll said the "general collapse" in the country begun by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had led to the so-called October events, while 28 percent attributed the events to the "irresponsible policies of Boris Yeltsin and his entourage."

These events (which I lived through myself in Moscow) are what killed democracy in Russia: a President getting the army to shoot on the Parliament over a political disagreement is not a good omen. But worse, the West's support for Yeltsin in that crisis is what killed the Russian's belief that democracy was any better: this was just a power struggle, and "democracy", as defined by the West was just as violent, hypocritical and unfair as the system they had left - maybe even more, as economic dislocation was biting hard already, and economic chaos, crime and obsene wealth capture became associated with the period, with "democracy" and with "capitalism", again, with the blessing of the West, too scared to imagine that freely elected communists might be different than the previous kind.

We're doing the same mistake with the Arab world today, supporting "democracy" except when it brings Islamists to power. We're just feeding, again, resentment and feeling of betrayal.