From: bhayes@CS.Stanford.EDU
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1993 15:24:17 -0400
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Subject: [Glenn Trewitt: Sorry I'm late to work, I stopped to watch the war...]
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FYI ..
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To: Barry Hayes <bhayes@cs.stanford.edu>, Kim Rachmeler <kim@wpd.sgi.com>,
        Julie King <julie_king@qm.sri.com>, Warren Cory <warren@cadence.com>,
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        Lucy Berlin <Lucy_Berlin@taligent.com>
Subject: Sorry I'm late to work, I stopped to watch the war...
Organization: DEC Network Systems Laboratory (Palo Alto, CA / WRL-1)
Phones: H:408-773-9239, W:415-688-1324, DTN:543-1324, Fax:415-324-2797
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 93 11:07:50 -0700
From: Glenn Trewitt <trewitt@pa.dec.com>
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In case you didn't know, SUN has a branch office in Moscow.
	- Glenn

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From: John (Most modern computers would break if you stood on them) Mackin <john@civil.su.oz.au>
Date: 	Thu, 7 Oct 1993 03:44:54 +1000
To: hackers@vix.com
Subject: Feeling bored? Why not work for Sun's Moscow office!
Message-Id: <199310070344.852.hackers.balus@civil.su.oz.au>
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[Forwards deleted]

From: mpiech@angkorwat.Russia.Sun.COM
Subject: Another Day in Moscow
Date: Tue, 05 Oct 93 11:42:31 +0300

			Another Day in Moscow

Last night (Sunday) around 6:00pm Yevgeny, one of our Russian SE's,
called and said I shouldn't leave my apartment because there was a
civil war going on in the streets of Moscow.  During the day I had
walked from my apartment, just east of the Kremlin, through the center
over to the Irish House to do some shopping, and everything seemed
pretty normal (for Moscow).  Anyway, Yevgeny said that a crowd was
heading for the Ostankina TV building.

So I layed around for a while on my couch, watching some very slow
movie about peasant romance, and then Winnie the Pooh (in Russian),
and then this really outstanding animation done with Legos (what an
obvious and killer idea! maybe old hat for animation buffs, but it was
the first time I had seen it) when the screen cuts out and this
editor-kinda guy comes on with

"cevodnya...bil ochen...tizholi dyen.  ...Tyzholi, potomu
shto...--trudna guvarit--"
"today...was a very...difficult day.  ...Difficult, because...--it is
hard to speak--"

and then the screen went blank.  So I switched to the only channel of
the eight that was working (no cable, no CNN at my place), and a news
report came on and said the TV building had been stormed.  Then this
station (broadcast from somewhere else in Moscow) played that stupid
airplane hijacking Love-Boat movie with Mike Brady as the captain (I
never did catch the name, but that it was in Russian didn't seem to
reduce the content I could get from it) interrupted every so often
with little news blurbs, including a pitch from Yuri Gaidar.  I could
understand maybe half of all this Russian news and speeches, but the
few clips of fighting in the TV building were pretty clear.  I finally
bailed on the whole scene around 11, after hearing what the BBC had to
say about it on the shortwave.

I woke up around 6:30 with that strange feeling like the first time as
a kid when you find a beehive in your back yard: at first you were
really afraid to go near it, but you went a few steps closer, nothing
happened, and now you just want to walk up and see what the hell's in
the damn thing.

I left my apartment around 7:30, and when I got to the street it
seemed like just another day in Moscow.  Business as usual.  I got to
the corner and thought, I can just go the the metro and go to work,
or--if I just walk down to the Kremlin and see what's going on at Red
Square, it'll only add twenty minutes to my commute.  Hell, I had
taken my backpack instead of the briefcase, and had two cameras in it,
might as well have a look.

About halfway there I heard a few explosive noises, but they could
very well have been a dump truck going over metal plates in the
street...

I got to Red Square and it was basically quiet.  At the north end were
some bogus token barricades I'd heard about on the news.  As I walked
toward them I heard the unmistakable sound of machine-gun fire.  Damn,
must be just around the corner.  The only other time in my life I'd
ever heard machine-gun fire was at ROTC boot camp.  I got to the other
side of the history museum, but again, basically nothing was going on.
I could hear all this bloody racket--there *was* a war going on
somewhere--but couldn't see anything.

I thought about getting on the metro and going to work, but then I
thought I'd have a peek at Tverskaya St. (the main street in
downtown).  It was blocked off,  and as I started to walk toward the
Pushkin monument I could see the four huge barriers made of old
crates, park benches, playground monkey-bar sets, etc.  Lots of people
were standing around little bonfires, drinking and smoking--kind of
like a vigil at Berkeley except for the vodka.  There was an armored
personnel carrier (APC) in front of Pizza Hut (I hope the picture
turns out...).

I got up past the City Council building where there was a large crowd
of Yeltsin supporters waving tri-colors, but basically nothing was
going on (relatively).  Still lots of war noises.

At this point I figured the war must all be around the White House.  I
wasn't sure what to do, but somehow I slid into this flow heading
toward the noise and wandered through unfamiliar streets of Moscow to
the soundtrack from Apocalypse Now.

When I got to the American Embassy, I joined a crowd of a few hundred
people and watched occaisonal sniper flashes from the back corner of
the White House, which I could see in the distance.  Riot police
occasionally pushed us back.  After about twenty minutes, I figured
I'd seen as much as I'd be able to, and started to head toward the
metro to go to work.

I got to Noviy Arbat, and there was a huge line of APCs waiting
patiently for action.  And then the tanks came.  About a dozen T-80s,
from where I'd just walked.  Ok, I'll get to work a little late.

After I'd shot a half a roll of film--tanks in a line, tanks turning
the corner, tank boys playing with the guns (what a spooky scene, tanks
in the street!)--I started to walk south again on the Garden Ring to
go to the metro.  

But then at the next cross street, which leads to the next bridge down
from the White House, I decided I just had to go down to the river and
see what everything looked like from there.  I got down there and
could see the front of the White House, and at this point the sounds
of gunfire were rolling down the river and echoing off buildings in a
violent cacophony of death-noise.  Mesmerised, I slid again into the
flow of people heading through the parked cars toward the cauldron,
assuming we'd soon reach the police barricade.  I felt like I was
going to an AC-DC concert.  A few minutes later there was a huge
explosion, which I later learned was the sound of a T-80 firing its
148mm shell, and several hundred car alarms went off simultaneously.

The police barricade wasn't there.  Before I knew it, I'd passed the
burning hulks of two bombed out busses and was standing in a huge
crowd at the base of the bridge in front of the White House, watching
thousands of bullets fly between the building and the half-dozen or so
APCs in front of it.  I couldn't believe I was there: how could people
be aloud this close to a bloody war?

I kept going.  I pushed through the crowd, and worked my way up *onto
the bridge*, several hundred yards in front of the now famous but no
longer white House.  Yes, war as a spectator sport.  Why the hell was
I here?  Why did I *want* to be here?  Who let us here?  The range of
a Kalashnikov automatic rifle is 2km, and I'm standing on a bridge
500m in front a building filled with hardline terrorists armed with
these things.  It didn't seem to bother the hundreds of other people
standing around me, so I pulled out a Canon EOS and started my own
shooting.

There were already two very large chunks of stone knocked out of the
House, and next to the smoking remnant of the Meria building and with
the burning busses on the embankment road, the whole picture was kind
of grisly.  The gunfire stopped for short periods, but mostly just
kept going.

About fifteen minutes later several bullets ricocheted somewhere
within a few tens of yards of us; we all ducked down behind some
concrete and then ran towards the middle of the bridge.  It felt a
*little* safer, anyway, behind one of the metal stanchions of the
bridge railing.  I ended up this time standing next to couple of
British guys, and exchanged a few war-watching pleasantries ("I wonder
if the pub's open" "Where's the hot-dog stand?" "You'd think if
they're going to have a war, they could at least put out some
porta-potties" etc.)  

There were four T-80s on the bridge, and six directly accross the
river from the White House (to the left of our priviledged position;
the House was on the right).  Through all the noise, I'd assumed the
tanks were firing too; it was difficult to tell what was doing what
with the sound bouncing everywhere.  But then, there was an explosive
noise like I've never experienced in my life: the bridge shook, my
heart skipped a few beats.  All the nonsense murmuring in the crowd
died in a nanosecond.  Under a huge cloud of smoke, *all* of the
remaining glass on the upper part of the House started falling, as if
in slow motion.  One of the T-80s had fired.  

I was scared.  "Man, these boys aren't playing," one of the Brits
mumbled as we crouched meekly behind our railing.  After about five
minutes my hands stopped shaking just enough to get my camera aimed at
the House to get ready for the second T-80 blast.  Somehow this was a
little different from taking photos of canons firing blanks at Civil
War reenactments I went to as a kid.

I stayed around for another half hour or hour (time is kind of
irrelevant in this situation...) for a third T-80 blast, an ammo truck
hit (the thing blew off like a brick of fire crackers for 15 minutes
straight), another gunfight in the distance (which I later read was at
the Itar-TASS building), and another spray of shots into the crowd
where I was standing.  This one was more serious--louder and more
shots, and the crowd went a little crazier and started running off the
bridge.  They eventually regained confidence and retook their former
positions (I ended up a little farther from the House again).

Finally I figured I'd taken enough pictures, wouldn't get much more
out of the last few tank shots, and probably wouldn't be able to see
much of the surrender when it finally happened; so I walked off the
bridge a bit, jumped in a taxi, and went to work.  Business as usual.

- - --Mike Piech

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