ABSTRACT
The white building had grown black, running deputies looked back at the 'chirr' of submachine gun fire behind, militia guards left the building with raised hands. The shots were accompanied by a song by Yuri Shevchuk which has been quoted in the epigraph, a song which matched the emotional impact of the event. The democratic press which had been so eloquent in its propaganda of parliamentarianism in the early years of perestroika has grown very critical towards it. All the major forces present on the Russian political scene at the time had their own good reasons for presenting the conflict between the legislative and the executive in 1992-93 in the classical dualistic manner, that is as a struggle between a "democratic president" and a "communist parliament". In short, the real problems Russian society faced at the time were not properly understood and were but inadequately discussed by the mass media entrapped in the dualistic Weltanschauung.
