By Bruce Clark, 10/3/23

Bruce Clark is a Former London Times correspondent in Moscow

Exactly 30 years ago (on 3 October 1993), the world of hazardous news-gathering lost one of its finest practitioners. After many hours of gunfire around Moscow’s broadcasting centre known as Ostankino, bodies were strewn across the blood-stained concrete. Among them was the unmistakable figure of Rory Peck, whose cheeky grin and big bald pate framed by brown curls were familiar to every reporter roaming the post-communist war zones. Aged nearly 37, a supremely skilled cameraman of lofty and eccentric Anglo-Irish origin, with a feline ability to negotiate danger, had finally – so it seemed run out of luck. At least two other Westerners also perished: a Frenchman, Yvan Skopan, filming for his country’s first TV channel, and a brave young American lawyer, Mike Duncan, who had hauled several people to safety.

Yet so momentous was the wider drama then unfolding in Moscow that the world had little time to ponder the Ostankino massacre. Boris Yeltsin told the world that his young democracy had come under devastating attack from a fiendish mix of Stalinists and fascists, with whom his political adversaries in the legislature had cynically allied. Against such threats, he implied, only draconian force would work. He then drove his foes out of the White House – the Russian parliament – by lobbing shells at the upper floors until its pale front was streaked with black. Morally and militarily he seemed to have triumphed in the deep political deadlock which had become critical after he suspended parliament on September 21. The way was clear for him to push through a more presidentially-oriented constitution and to organize elections with his own authority unchallenged.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of Moscow’s micro-civil war, and regardless of the foreign casualties, Western leaders fully accepted Yeltsin’s story. Bill Clinton insisted the Russian leader had “bent over backwards” to avoid violence. John Major said Yeltsin “deserves the support of all democrats inside and outside Russia.” Any casualties had been entirely the fault of “ugly attacks” by Yeltsin’s foes. But this was, to put it very mildly, an over-simplification. On both sides of Russia’s political crisis, there had been dark forces bent on drawing blood, as well as idealists who believed that they enjoyed constitutional legitimacy. The Yeltsin people were simply cleverer. 

As chaos subsided, Rory’s colleagues including myself were left trying to make sense of a great reporter’s life and death, and to honour his memory. On the latter front, extraordinary things have happened. The Rory Peck Trust, a London-based charity, has raised millions of pounds and assisted nearly 3,000 news-gatherers in practical ways. It showcases the work of freelancers with a star-studded annual awards ceremony. It has become of the world’s leading advocates for independent journalism.

In quieter ways, those of us who knew Rory well are still searching for the meaning – if there is one – of his passing. Was it the inevitable consequence of a reckless life? Having mulled that question, I find

my friend innocent. Not only did Rory add to the annals of history during his short, brilliant career – for example, by filming the besieged enclaves of Bosnia, and capturing the scenes in Moscow’s corridors of power in the August 1991 putsch. He also, in death, bore witness to a grave moral truth that the Western world chose to ignore. The Muscovite crisis of October 1993 was not, contrary to many claims, a very close-run thing. And the battle for Ostankino, in which Rory and other unarmed people died, was more like a turkey-shoot by the president’s forces than an almost-revolution. True, the anti-Yeltsin mob, led by dim-witted General Albert Makashov, which raced from the White House to Ostankino on October 3 imagined they might win. In fact they were in a trap.

An investigation for Russia’s chief prosecutor (suppressed in 1994 but leaked a few years later) found that Makashov’s ragtag followers amounted to no more than 20 lightly armed men, while about 900 police and soldiers loyal to Yeltsin, including special forces, were progressively deployed to defend the TV buildings and make a massive counter-attack. David Satter, an American writer who has watched Russia closely since Soviet times, argues that by bringing the constitutional crisis to a violent head, Yeltsin committed the “original sin” of the post-Soviet order. It was the first step, Satter says, in building a new authoritarian state which would carpet-bomb Chechnya, harass critics and ultimately invade Ukraine.

That argument is difficult to prove – but the sight of brave reporters’ bodies, along with at least 40 other unarmed folk, lying outside the Ostankino building, makes it impossible to dismiss. In death as well as life, Rory told a story to the world.

Perhaps the fundamental mistake of Western leaders back then was their certainty that by unconditionally “picking winners” in Russia’s internal fights, they could gain moral leverage over those winners and influence Russia’s future. In fact, by unconditionally accepting Yeltsin’s claim that all blame for the October 1993 crisis lay with the opposition, the West diminished itself in the eyes of many Russian citizens.  As they progressively turned against Yeltsin and blamed him for the bloodbath, as well as for much else, they concluded that the West had collaborated with a near-treacherous president to

harm their nation. The anti-Western sentiment which Vladimir Putin so relentlessly cultivates today had started to build up.   

There were no perfect options for Western leaders faced with a chaotically re-emerging Russia. But turning a blind eye to the shootout that claimed the lives of Rory, of Yvan Skopan, of Mike Duncan, and other decent people wasn’t among the better ones. Rory’s death pointed to a story, one which Western leaders would not hear. They paid a price for that, and perhaps we are still paying a price.