The legislators found themselves barricaded inside the parliament building. For the next week, anti-presidential protests grew, until a mass uprising erupted in the city on October 2. The country was on the brink of civil war. At this point the security and military elites threw their support behind the President, besieged the parliament building, and through the use of tank artillery nearly destroyed the building and cleared it of the elected legislature. By October 5, armed resistance to the President had been crushed, and a new Constitution was presented on October 15, to be approved in a referendum.

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All the above really happened, except that it was in Russia, in 1993.

As a rally took place today in Moscow to commemorate the many dead of these events, it's worth pondering these a bit as they hold lessons for today.

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 power struggle is NOT a good thing.

But there are two things to remember here:

• one is the sight of a President ignoring the Constitution of the country and using an alternative power base to impose its policies - policies which included violent economic dislocation and an obscene concentration of wealth (via looting and appropriation of public resources rather than its creation) for favored insiders; the shelling of Parliament by an army which remained loyal to a still popular Commander-in-Chief is the violent outcome of such conflict in the extreme circumstances of Russia in 1993.
• The other was the unflinching support of the West for Yeltsin in that crisis. That support, which gave a sitting President who chose to shoot at its Parliament the label of "democrat" is what killed the Russians' 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. In fact, it was even worse, 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", with the blessing of the West.

What led our leaders (Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand, John Major)  to give their blessing to that shameful episode is simple: they were too scared to see a communist-dominated parliament run the country; they could not imagine that freely elected communists (had they won, which was not a given, as Yeltsin was still quite popular at that time) might be different than the previous kind. Already, back then, we chose a supposedly friendly leader over a legitimate and democratic one.

We're doing the exact 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. We're just showing that we are hypocritical, supporting democracy only when it favors our friends, and thus only interested by our narrowly defined national interest rather than any universal values.

We want other countries weak and submissive, and we wonder why they don't like us. Just like in Russia, we are creating the conditions for the birth of whole generations that hate us, know that we do not follow the values we profess to believe, and will fight us as soon as they are strong enough to do so.

Or you can think about the slightly less gloomy outcome of the confrontation between a President and a Parliament trying to impeach him under the existing Constitution...